From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Loading, selecting, aligning, and distributing layers - Photoshop Tutorial

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Loading, selecting, aligning, and distributing layers

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- [Instructor] As you get more comfortable working with layers, there are a few tools and techniques that will help you to be more efficient. So I want to add some additional images to this document, so I'm going to return to Bridge and I'm going to select the peppers, the pumpkins, the strawberries, and the tomatoes. Now, instead of opening these all into their own separate documents, I'll use the tools menu, choose Photoshop, and then load files into Photoshop layers. That tells Bridge to hand off all four of those images into a single document. And we can see here's our new untitled document, and it's got the peppers, pumpkins, strawberries, and tomatoes. And you'll notice that they're all named, and that's because that was the name of the file, and because we use that option from Bridge, it automatically named the layers the name of our file. So let's go ahead and select all of these. The peppers is selected. I'm going to hold down the shift key and choose the tomatoes. Then I'm going to tile the windows. Again, that's under window, arrange, and then tile, but you can also use that keyboard shortcut to tile those. So with all four of the layers targeted in the layers panel, I'm going to drag and drop, again, holding down the shift key to drop these four photos into the Harvest.psd. All right, then we no longer need the untitled document open, so let's go ahead and close that, and we don't need to save it. Because the pears layer was targeted, these four images all came in on top of the targeted layer in the layer stacking order, but I want to change the stacking order of these small layers. I want these strawberries to be at the bottom, so I will target it and then just drag down to reposition it, and on top of that, I want the pumpkins and then the peppers, and then the tomatoes on top. We can see they're all stacked right on top of one another, so let's learn some different ways to select layers. So we can use the layers panel, obviously, to select different layers, but we can also use the move tool. So I'll tap the V key, that selects the move tool, and by default, it's set to autoselect. So even though the strawberries layer is targeted in the layers panel now, if I click over the pear area, it will become the targeted layer. If I click on the tomatoes, they'll become the targeted layer, and then I can click and drag in order to reposition them. I'll just move the peppers and then the pumpkins as well. Now, the only thing with autoselect layers is it can be a little bit more difficult with a complex document that have overlapping layers, so we can turn off the autoselect option and then just temporarily invoke it using the command key on Mac or the control key on Windows. So once I've got the move tool and I hold command, I can now click on the tomatoes or on the strawberries, or if I need to select more than one layer, I can hold down the shift key and then add to my selection in the layers panel. All right, if I ever want to deselect all of my layers, I can go to the select menu and choose to deselect the layers. Another way to select layers would be to use the context sensitive menus, and this is very convenient when you have layers that are overlapping. So if I hold down the control key on Mac, or right click, say, over the peppers here, not only will I have the option to select the peppers, but also the pumpkins, because the pumpkin has layer content below where I clicked. All right, as I drag the layers around, you'll see those magenta highlights. Those are smart guides, and they can be very useful when you're trying to align and distribute content. But if you think they're distracting, you can always disable them under the view menu, under show, and then disable the smart guides. But for now, I'm going to leave them on. I actually want to create some guides in this image, but first, I want to change the units of measurements to pixels, and because I have the rulers showing, we can just right click and choose pixels. This is going to help me when I go to view and then guides and then new guide layout, because as I enter the values in the margin area, it'll already be set to pixels, so I won't have to enter in PX each time. But if you come into this dialog at any time and you want to create a new guide layout and the units of measurement are wrong, you can just type in the units of measurement you want, like IN for inches or CM for centimeters. For now, I don't need any columns or any rows, but I do want 300 pixels on the left as well as the right. I don't need any guides on the top, so I'll tap in zero, as well as the bottom, and we don't need this guide in the center anymore, so I can choose to clear existing guides and then apply that. All right, let's turn on autoselect for a moment, and I'm going to move the strawberries here over to the left, and I want to move the tomatoes over to the right. Because I have the smart guides showing, it's easy for me to reposition these so that they are all aligned as far as the top of the photos go. We could also use this to distribute them, but I want to show you a different way. So with the move tool selected, I'm going to select the tomatoes, hold down the shift key, and select the strawberries using the layers panel, and then I can either use the options in the options bar or in the properties panel to align and distribute these. I'll use the more icon here to get the distribute options, and at this point, I could distribute them based on their centers, because they're all the same size. But if they were different sized objects, I'd want to use the distribute spacing option so that I got equal spacing between each object if they were a different size. You'll also notice that when I distributed those layers, they were distributed not by their stacking order, but instead by their placement on the canvas. All right, at this point, I'm going to use view and then show, and let's hide our guides. We need a little bit more space here, so since all of the layers are already targeted, I'll hold down the shift key and just drag down to reposition them. At this point, I'll do a file and then save as. I'll append it with an underscore 01, saving it to the same 07 layers folder as a layered Photoshop document. When we return to Bridge, we can see our new Harvest_01 PSD file.

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