From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

Exploring layer basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

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Exploring layer basics

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- [Instructor] Photoshop's ability to work with layers is definitely one of my favorite features, so let's take a look at how we can master the Layers panel in order to easily work with multiple images in a single document. I'll start by creating a new file. I want it to be 2600 by 1625 pixels, 300 pixels per inch, RGB color, eight bit, and in the Adobe RGB color profile. I'll click Create in order to create that. And then, I'll return to Bridge in order to open up the grapes and the greens image. Now we can see the tabs for all of the different open documents. I can use Control Tab to move through them. And in order to tile them, I can use the Window menu and then Arrange, and then Tile. Now, I think the easiest way to combine images is to drag and drop from the Layers panel into the untitled document. So here, I have the greens layer selected and in the Layers panel, I will drag and drop the background, holding down the Shift key in order to drop it right into the center of the untitled document. Now I no longer need the greens open, so I will close that. Then I'll click on the grapes file and in the Layers panel, drag and drop, again, holding down the Shift key into the untitled document. I no longer need the grapes open, so let's close that as well. Now, in order to keep track of my layers, I'm going to rename them. So on the Layers panel, I will double click on the layer two and just name that Grapes. And then, I will double click on layer one and call that Greens. If I want to hide and show a layer, I can toggle the visibility by clicking on the eye icon next to the layer. If I want to target a layer, I need to actually click on the layer itself. I can hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows and click on an eye icon to toggle the visibility of all of the other layers off. And if I toggle off the visibility of the background, we can see the transparent checkerboard in the preview area. Now let's target the background and toggle back on its visibility. The background layer is unique. There are several things you can't do because it is locked. For example, you can't change the stacking order, so I can't move it in the Layer panel above another layer. And I can't reposition its location on the canvas because it's locked. And if I were to select something like the eraser tool, well, I can't erase on a background layer. Instead, it's just going to erase to the background color instead of transparency. So in order to fix this, all we need to do is click on the lock icon, which will unlock the background and convert it to a layer. Now I could reposition it in the layer stacking order. I could also tap the V key to select the move tool and reposition it in the image area. And if I tap the E key to select the eraser tool, now I can erase to transparency. All right, I'll use Command Z once and then again, and then again in order to undo that. All right, on the Layers panel, I will target the grapes layer and also make it visible. I only want it to appear in the upper 50% of this image. So underneath the View menu, I'm going to choose New Guide and then enter in a horizontal guide at 50%. Now that I know where the top portion of the image is, I'll tap the V key to select the move tool and then reposition it until I like where it falls in this upper area, but I have all of this extra information that I don't need. In order to select it, I'll tap the M key. That will select the marquee tool. And then, using the guide as a reference, I'll click and drag over the area that I want to delete. With it selected and the layer targeted, I can tap the Delete key in order to delete that information, and then I'll use the Select menu to deselect the marqueed selection. Now, that is a permanent change, and there are more flexible ways to hide areas or portions of a layer. So I'm going to hide the grapes layer for a moment. I'll make the greens layer visible and target it in the Layers panel. And this time, I'm going to select the frame tool and I'll make sure that it's set to create a rectangle. And then in the upper left of the document area, I'll click and drag using the guide as a reference to create a frame around the area that I want to keep. Now, if we look at the Layers panel, we see that we have a new icon. So we have the icon for the frame and then the icon for the image. If I tap the V key to select the move tool and I reposition this, you can see that when both icons are selected, both elements, the frame and the image, move together. If I click to highlight just the frame, then I can drag one of the anchor points and resize or reposition the frame independently of the photograph. I'll use Command Z to undo that. And if I target the image, even though the area down here is hidden, I can still use the move tool in order to reposition it within the frame. Excellent, so at this point, we've done enough work on the image that I would want to save it. So I'll choose the File menu, select Save As. I'm going to save it on my computer to the 07Layers folder. Let's give it a name, in this case, Harvest. I'll save it as a layered Photoshop document and then choose Save. If we return to Bridge, we can see that newly created harvest.psd file right here.

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