From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Merging and flattening layers - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Merging and flattening layers

- [Instructor] As your documents begin to contain more and more layers, sometimes those file sizes will grow to be quite large. So people are always looking for a way to reduce the file size. But unfortunately, the different ways that Photoshop has to merge layers or flatten images also removes some of the flexibility. But let's take a look at them so that you can decide for yourself. In the lower left in the status bar, I'm going to click on the caret and switch to show my document sizes. So the document size on the left hand side is the flattened version, and to the right is the layered version. So you can see there's quite a bit of difference. So the first way that we can decrease the file size is by cropping extra data to keep the file size down. So when we first started working on this, we have the pears layer, but we also have this greens layer underneath it. And I repositioned the greens layer so that there's content that extends beyond the canvas area. If I know that I don't want that extra information, we could always crop it. To do this, I do a quick select all and then image, and then crop, and we can see that the file size decreases a little bit. Now one thing to point out, I did the same with the pears document. So the pears also extend beyond the canvas area, but because we've used a frame to hide the area outside of the frame, it's not actually going to get cropped with the crop command. All right, I'll use the contextual task bar to just deselect. So another way that we can decrease the size of this file would be to delete any unused layer. So at this point, if I've decided that I like the pears more than I like the greens, I can go ahead and just drag the greens down to the trash to delete it. And again, the file size has decreased. Now we can also merge layers together, but as far as merging layers, you can merge those layers that don't overlap. But if layers overlap, then it would be making a permanent change. So for example, if I were to merge the logo with the pears, then that would flatten that area almost like it's paint, and I wouldn't be able to do something like change the text or move the logo to the left side. But these four small photos, I could merge those. I could select them all and then use the layer menu and choose to merge these layers. But when I do this, you'll notice that not only are they all on their own layers now, but because they had those frames, it removed the frames. So if I wanted to go back to the square image, I couldn't because that information has been deleted. It also makes it more difficult if I wanted to switch, for example, the position of the pumpkins with the peppers because I'd need to make additional selections and put them on layers and then reposition them. So I'm going to use command + Z in order to undo that because it takes away too much flexibility in my opinion. The other thing that we can do, we can actually flatten the entire document, and I'll show you how to do that. It's under layer and then flatten image. But flattening your image is doing just that. You'll notice on the layers panel, I have no more layers, so I really don't want to do this because it's going to remove all of the flexibility of editing this document. So I'll use command + Z in order to undo that, and at this point I'll just close the file without saving changes. And there you have it. To make your document smaller, you can often crop information that's beyond the canvas area and delete unwanted layers. But to maintain the most flexible workflow, I would recommend that you don't merge or flatten your layers just in case you want to make changes to your document in the future.

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