The Basics Of Layers In Photoshop - Computer 1chscomputer1.weebly.com/.../1/...in_photoshop__1_.pdf · Photoshop Basics: The Basics Of Layers In Photoshop By Steve Patterson, Photoshop

This Photoshop Tutorial © 2008 Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com.Not To Be Reproduced Or Redistributed Without Permission. 1

Photoshop Basics: The Basics Of Layers In Photoshop By Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com

It’s hard to believe there was ever a time when layers didn’t exist inside Photoshop. Yet prior to Photoshop 3, they didn’t. Hard to believe, you say? Wait, didn’t I just say that? Are you even paying attention? Well, you should be, because this is important stuff.

Layers are, without a doubt, the single most important aspect of Photoshop. Nothing worth doing in Photoshop can or should be done without the use of layers.

Layers are so important that they have their own Layers palette as well as their own Layer category in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen. You can add layers, delete layers, name layers, rename layers, move layers, adjust layers, mask layers, show and hide layers, blend layers, lock and unlock layers, add effects to layers, group and ungroup layers, and even change the opacity of layers. Layers are the heart and soul of Photoshop. Best of all, layers are easy to understand, once you wrap your mind around them, that is.

“That’s great!”, you say. “But that doesn’t tell me what they are”. Good point. Let’s examine then what exactly layers are.

Understanding Layers

Life Without Layers

We can spent a lot of time discussing the theory of what layers are in Photoshop, just like we could try to learn how to ride a bike by reading a lot of theory about it. Problem is, you could read every book and website there is on the theory of bike riding and still fall on your head the first time you try to ride one. The better way to learn would be to simply hop on that bike and start peddling, and that’s exactly how we’re going to learn about layers. Fortunately, we run much less of a risk of falling on our heads while learning about layers, but feel free to put on a helmet if it will make you feel safer.

Before we look at what layers are and how to use them, let’s first see what working in Photoshop would be like without layers. First, let’s open a new document inside Photoshop. Go up to the Menu Bar at the top of the screen and click on the word File to bring up the File menu options. The first one at the top of the list is New. Go ahead and click the word “New”, which brings up the New Document dialog box as shown below:

Don’t worry about naming the document since we won’t be keeping anything we’re doing here. The second option from the top though is Preset, and this is where we can choose from a variety of ready-to-go document sizes. If it doesn’t say 640x480 as the document size beside the word “Preset”, simply click on the down-pointing arrow to the right of the Preset option box, which brings up a list of all the available preset document sizes, and choose 640x480. It’s not vital that you use 640x480 as the document size here, it simply helps to keep us both on the same page.

Once you’ve chosen your document size, the only other option we need to look at for this example is near the bottom of the dialog box, Background Contents. Make sure it says White as the background contents, again so we’re both on the same page while working. If it doesn’t say “White”, click the down-pointing arrow to the right of that option box and select

THE BASICS OF LAYERS IN PHOTOSHOP



it from the list.

Once you’ve chosen 640x480 for the document size and have your background contents set to white, go ahead and click the OK button, and Photoshop will bring up the new document you asked for, sized to 640x480 pixels with a background color of white:

Now that we have our new document open and ready to go, let’s start drawing on it. We’ll keep our “art work” very simple for this example, since we’re really just trying to understand layers, not showcase our creative abilities.

Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool from the Tools palette. It’s the icon in the top left of the Tools palette which looks like a square made up of dashed lines:

With the Rectangular Marquee Tool selected, left-click your mouse anywhere inside your document and drag out a selection. Make sure to hold your mouse button down as you drag the selection out. Any size of a selection will do. If you want to drag out a perfect square, all you need to do is hold down the Shift key on the keyboard as you drag, and that will constrain the proportions of your selection to a perfect square. When you’re happy with your selection, just lift your finger up off the mouse button and your selection will be complete:

Again, your selection doesn’t need to be the same size or be in the same location as mine. Anything even remotely similar will do just fine.

Now that we’ve dragged out a selection, let’s fill that selection with a color. First, we need to pick a color. Near the bottom of the Tools palette, you’ll see two relatively large squares, with the one on the left looking like it’s sitting in front of the one on the right:



These are our Foreground and Background Color selectors. The square on the left is our current foreground color, and the square on the right is our current background color. By default, Photoshop sets the foreground color to black and the background color to white, which is why those are the colors of the squares in the screenshot above. Your squares may be different colors if you’ve been working in Photoshop already. If you want to reset them to the default colors of black and white, simply press the letter D (for “Default”) on your keyboard. Also, if you want to quickly swap the foreground and background colors, just press X on the keyboard. Pressing X again will swap them back.

Let’s choose a nice bright red for our color. Click inside the left square (the foreground color selector) in the Tools palette and Photoshop will pop up the Color Picker dialog box where we can choose a new color to use:

If this is the first time you’ve seen the Color Picker, you may be thinking, “Geez, I can’t even pick a color in this program without it trying to intimidate me!”, but what Photoshop is really trying to do is give you as many ways of communicating with it as possible so it knows exactly which color you want. You may find it easiest to simply click your mouse on the color red to select it. A web designer, on the other hand, may be used to choosing red using the hexadecimal value #FF0000 which is how web browsers understand color. Someone who comes from a print background may be more comfortable setting ink percentages to select red. Photoshop wants to give everyone the ability to select color using the method they’re most comfortable with, and that’s why the Color Picker dialog box looks like there’s way too many options here for something as simple as choosing a color.

For the purposes of what we’re doing here, which is to understand layers, not color theory, we’re going to keep things simple by ignoring everything in the Color Picker except the “visual way” of selecting a color. In other words, let’s ignore everything to the right of the tall, narrow color bar:

The “visual way” of selecting a color in the Color Picker dialog box is a simple two-step process. First, we pick the hue that we want. The hue is the actual color itself, for lack of a better term, be it red, green, blue, yellow, or whatever the case may be. The main color itself is known as the “hue”. Once we’ve chosen our main color (the hue), we then select the level of saturation and brightness we want for that hue. “Saturation” refers to how light the hue is (how much white is mixed in with the hue), and “brightness” refers to how dark the hue is (how much black is mixed in with the hue). Once we’ve chosen our hue, our saturation and our brightness, we have our color!



The area of the Color Picker we’re looking at here (the area in the screenshot above) is divided into two sections. There’s a large square on the left, and a long narrow bar on the right. The long narrow bar is our hue selector. It contains every hue there is in the rainbow, and selecting one is as easy and moving your mouse cursor inside the bar and clicking your mouse on the hue you want. Want red? Click on a red area. Green? Click on a green area. Same for blue, yellow, orange, purple, etc. For our example here, let’s pick a red color, so move your mouse cursor over a red area in the hue selection bar and click to select red.

The large square area to the left of the hue selection bar is the saturation and brightness selector. When you clicked on a red hue in the hue selection bar, the large square area became red (if it wasn’t red already). Now we can choose how saturated and bright we want our red hue to be. The area in the top right corner of the large square represents the “pure” color. This is the spot where there is no white added to make the hue lighter and no black added to make it darker. As you move further to the left of this spot, the hue appears lighter because you’re moving the hue closer and closer to white. As you move down from this spot, the hue appears darker because you’re moving the hue closer and closer to black. Let’s pick a nice “pure” red for our example, so go ahead and click your cursor in the top right corner of the saturation and brightness selection square. You’ll notice as you move your cursor inside the area that it changes to a circle to help you better see the saturation and brightness levels you currently have the mouse over. Click up in the top right corner of the square, as shown below:

We now have our red color! Why did we choose this red color? We chose it because we’re going to fill that selection we dragged out a moment ago with this red color, that’s why. Let’s do that now. Go back up to the Menu Bar at the top of the screen and this time click on the word Edit, which brings up all the Edit menu options. Near the middle of this list of options is the word Fill. Click on it, and the Fill dialog box appears on the screen:

For Contents, make sure Foreground Color is selected beside the word “Use:”. If it’s not, click on the down-pointing arrow and select Foreground Color. This will tell Photoshop that we want to fill our selection with the foreground color we’ve chosen in the Color Picker, which in this case is red (unless you chose something different just to be, you know, different). Don’t worry about any other options in the Fill dialog box. Once you have Foreground Color selected, click OKv and Photoshop will go ahead and fill your selection with red:



Press Ctrl+D (on a Windows system) or Command+D (on a Mac) to deselect the newly-filled shape. You should now have something on your screen that looks relatively close to what I have on the previous page.

So far so good. In fact, that first filled selection turned out so incredibly well that we want to add a second filled selection to our document. Let’s do that. First we need a selection, so select the Rectangular Marquee Tool from the Tools palette again and drag out another selection. Just for fun, start your selection from somewhere over top of the existing red shape so that the new green shape will be overlapping it a little. Not too much, just a little, so we can still see the red shape behind it. Once you’ve dragged out your new selection, we need to pick a green color to use, so go back to the Foreground Color selector square in the Tools palette and click on it, which brings the Color Picker back up. Left-click your mouse on a green area inside the hue selection bar, and then left-click on the saturation and brightness levels you want for the hue in the large square area on the left. Once you’ve chosen the green you want to use, click on the OK button. Finally, to fill our new selection with the green color, we need to go up to the Edit menu in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen and select “Fill” from the list of options, which brings up the Fill dialog box. Make sure “Foreground Color” is selected for the “Contents”, and click the OK button. Photoshop will go ahead and fill the new selection with green. Press Ctrl+D (Win) or Command+D (Mac) to deselect the selection, and you’re done. Here’s what I have below. You should have something similar:

If that isn’t a work of artistic genius, I don’t know what is. Although.... hmmm........

You know, now that I’ve been looking at it for a while, I’m not sure I’m happy with something. See how the green shape is in front of and overlapping the red shape, as it is in yours as well if you’ve been following along? I think I want the red shape to be in front of the green shape instead. Yeah, that’s the problem. The red shape needs to be in front of the green shape. Then this work of art will truly be a masterpiece! Let’s go ahead and swap those red and green shapes so the red one is in front of the green one.

We do that by..... um.... hmm. Uh oh. I think we have a problem here. How do we do that?? The simple answer is, we can’t. There’s no way to move that red shape in front of the green one because the green one isn’t really in front of the red one at all. It’s just an illusion. The green shape is simply cutting into the red one, giving the illusion that it’s in front of the red one.

So okay, we can’t move the red shape in front of the green one. That idea is out. At the very least then, let’s move the green shape away from the red one so it’s not cutting into the red shape at all. Let’s do that now. We can do that by..... Uh oh.

We can’t do that either! There’s no way to move that green shape independently of the red one because they’re both stuck together. In fact, it’s not just these two shapes that are stuck together. They’re also stuck to the white background



color. Everything in our document - the red shape, the green shape, and the white background, is stuck together! We can’t move anything without moving everything. We’re so limited with what we can do with our work now, it’s depressing. If we want to change something, our only real options are to either undo and undo and undo through all our steps and then redo the work again from the point where we want to make the change, or we can scrap the whole thing and start all over again from scratch. Neither one of those options sounds very appealing to me. There must be a better way to work, one that will give us the freedom to make these changes without having to redo anything or start over.

Fortunately, there is. Let’s try the same thing, but this time using layers.

Introducing Layers

The Layers Palette

Now that we’ve seen how limited we’d be in our work without layers, let’s create the same “work of art” we designed in the previous section, this time using layers.

First, let’s once again open up a new document inside Photoshop. Go up to the File Menu at the top of the screen and select New from the list of options. As before, choose 640x480 from the Preset document sizes if it’s not selected already, and make sure White is selected for Background Contents, which will give us a new document sized to 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high, filled with a background of white. Here’s what the New Document dialog box should look like:

Before we go any further, since we’re going to be using layers this time, we need to take a look at Photoshop’s “Command Central” for layers, the Layers palette:

Click OK when you’re done, and here’s our new blank document:



The Layers Palette is where we do pretty much everything we want to do with layers. We use it to create new layers, delete existing layers, move layers above and below each other, turn the visibility of layers on and off, create masks for layers to reveal only certain parts of a layer, add special effects to layers.... the list goes on and on, and it’s all done from within the Layers Palette. We’ll take a more detailed look at the Layers Palette in the another section, but there’s a few things we need to look at here first.

First, notice the section that’s highlighted in blue and says “Background” in italics. This is a layer! In fact, not only is it a layer, it’s a special type of layer called the Background layer. Again, we’ll take a closer look at why the Background Layer is so special in another section, but every time you create a new document inside Photoshop, the document is created with exactly one layer, which Photoshop names “Background” by default (there is one exception to this, and that’s if you create a new document with “Transparent” set as the Background Contents, which you’ll probably never do unless you’re creating web graphics, so we’ll ignore this one exception). The white background you see in your document window is this Background layer. Now, when we tried creating our artwork in the previous section without using layers, what we ended up doing was creating our two shapes (the red one and the green one) on this same Background layer, and that’s why they were essentially “stuck” to it, along with being stuck to each other as well. This time, we’re going to do things the right way. We’re going to put everything on its own separate layer and see what sort of a difference it makes.

We’re going to create a new selection and fill it with a color just as we did in the previous section, but this time we want to avoid having it stuck to the white background, so the first thing we need is a new layer above the Background layer on which we can create our shape (our filled selection). To create a new layer, all we need to do is click on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. See that row of icons along the bottom of the Layers palette? See the one on the far right that looks like a trash can? That’s not the one we want, but the one directly to the left of it that looks like a square page with the bottom left corner folded in is the New Layer icon. That’s the one we want:

Notice a difference between the Background layer and “Layer 1”? For starters, “Background” is written using italicized letters, but “Layer 1” isn’t. That’s because, as mentioned a moment ago, the Background layer is a special type of layer in Photoshop with its own set of rules, so Photoshop uses italicized letters to indicate that it’s special. “Layer 1”, on the other hand, isn’t special at all. It’s a normal, every day layer, so the name is written using normal, every day lettering.

That’s an important difference, but an even more important difference is that if you look at the large rectangular area to the left of the words “Background” and “Layer 1”, you’ll notice that the Background rectangle is filled with white while the Layer 1 rectangle is filled with a checkerboard pattern. The rectangular area to the left of the layer name is a thumbnail-sized preview of what’s currently on the layer (the contents of the layer). The checkerboard pattern you see with Layer 1 is what Photoshop uses to indicate transparency, while the white-filled area with the Background layer is indicating that the Background layer is filled with white (which is why our document is filled with white). Since the preview area of Layer 1 is filled with the checkerboard pattern, Photoshop is telling us that this layer is completely transparent. There’s nothing on it at all, which is why it doesn’t look like it’s even there in our document window.

Go ahead and click on it and you’ll see a new layer appear above the Background layer, which Photoshop will automatically name “Layer 1”:



We’re going to change that by adding our first shape to this layer. The last time we did this, we dragged out a selection using the Rectangular Marquee Tool and filled it with red, so to make sure that the only thing we’re doing differently this time is using layers, let’s drag out a similar selection and fill it with red.

Before we go any further though, let’s rename that “Layer 1” to something more descriptive, which, by the way, is an excellent habit to get into that will save you a lot of time with your work in the future, so it’s best that we get into it right from the start. To rename a layer, all you need to do is double-click on the name of the layer, which will highlight the name as shown below:

Now you can just type in a new name. Let’s call this layer “red shape”, since we’re going to be placing our red shape on it, so go ahead and type “red shape” and then press Enter (Win) or Return (Mac). Your layers palette should now look like this:

Now that we’ve renamed our layer, we need our selection. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool from the Tools palette as before:

You can also quickly select the Rectangular Marquee Tool by pressing the letter M (for “Marquee”) on the keyboard.

Next, make sure that the “red shape” layer is selected. You can tell that a layer is selected because it’s highlighted. The red shape layer should be selected and highlighted, but if it isn’t, simply click on it in the Layers palette to select it. Now, click anywhere inside your document and drag out a selection as we did previously. Continue holding the mouse button down to drag out the selection, and release the mouse button when you’re happy with it. As mentioned before, you can constrain the selection to a perfect square by holding down the Shift key as you drag. Another tip, and this one is really useful, is that if you want to move your selection around on the screen while you’re dragging it out, hold down the space bar on your keyboard as you drag. You can combine the Shift key and the spacebar while dragging out your selection to both constrain it to a perfect square and move it around the screen at the same time.

When you’re happy with your selection, we need to fill it with red, which means we need to select red as our foreground color. Click the Foreground Color selection square near the bottom of the Tools palette:

As mentioned previously, Photoshop sets the foreground color to black and the background color to white by default, which is why they’re shown as black and white in the screenshot above. Your foreground and background colors may be



different if you’ve changed them already while working. If you want to reset the colors to black and white, simply press the letter D on the keyboard. You can swap the foreground and background colors by pressing the letter X on the keyboard, and pressing X again will swap the colors again.

Go ahead and click on the Foreground Color selection square, which brings up the Color Picker dialog box:

Again, the Color Picker dialog box gives us several ways to select a color, but to avoid getting into a discussion over color theory and making things more confusing than they need to be here, we’re going to ignore all of those letters and value boxes on the right side of the dialog box and focus only on the “visual way” of selecting color using the long narrow colored bar (the hue selector) and the larger square area to the left of it (the saturation and brightness selector), as shown below:

We want a red color, so if red is not already showing in the large Saturation and Brightness square selection area on the right, move your cursor inside the long narrow Hue Selector bar on the right and click on a red area, which will turn the Saturation and Brightness selection area red as in the screenshot above. Then, pick a fully saturated version of red by moving your cursor into the Saturation and Brightness selection area and clicking in the top right corner, which will give us a “pure” red color without any amount of white or black mixed in with it. There’s no particular reason why we’re using red, or even pure red, for this example. It’s just a nice bright color. Once you have red selected as the color, click OK.

Now we want to fill out selection with this red color. Previously, we went up to the Edit Menu at the top of the screen to select “Fill” from the list of options under the Edit Menu. Let’s speed things up a little bit by using a keyboard shortcut this time. Hold down the Shift key and press F5 on the keyboard. This will bring up the Fill dialog box and save us from having to select it from the Edit Menu:



As we did before when we tried this without layers, make sure Foreground Color is selected for Contents. If it isn’t, click the down-pointing arrow and choose it from the list of available choices. Ignore everything else in the dialog box and click OK. Photoshop will go ahead and fill out selection with the red we chose in the Color Picker, and your document will look something like this:

The red-filled selection we just created is now visible in the preview area of the “red shape” layer. Notice that the rest of the preview area is still filled with the checkerboard pattern, indicating that the rest of the layer is still transparent, which is why in our document window, we can still see the white background “behind” the red shape.

Since we also had a green shape the last time we did this, let’s add a green shape here as well. Once again, since we don’t want the green shape and the red shape to be “stuck” to each other, we need to create a new layer on which we can place our green shape. So just as we did for the red shape, let’s create a new layer by clicking on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:

Once again, Photoshop has gone and named our new layer “Layer 1”. That seems a bit confusing, doesn’t it, since it also named our first new layer “Layer 1” before we renamed it to “red shape”. How can both of these new layers be “Layer 1”? The simple answer is, they’re not. If we had not changed the name of our first new layer to “red shape” and had left it as

Press Ctrl+D (Win) or Command+D (Mac) to deselect the selection. Now let’s take a look at our Layers Palette:



“Layer 1”, Photoshop would have named this second new layer “Layer 2”, but since we did renamed it to something else, Photoshop started again at “Layer 1” with its default naming conventions.

None of this really matter to us anyway, since we’re getting right into the habit of giving our layers more descriptive names. Go ahead and double-click on the “Layer 1” name of our second new layer and this time, name it “green shape”. Your Layers palette should look like this when you’re done:

And here’s what our Layers palette now looks like:

Again, notice that the preview area of the “green shape” layer is filled with a checkerboard pattern, indicating that it’s completely transparent and nothing is currently on the layer. Let’s change that by putting our green shape on it. With the “green shape” layer selected, grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool from the Tools palette again and drag out another selection. As we did previously, make sure part of the selection overlaps the red shape to give the appearance that the green shape is sitting above the red shape. When you’re happy with your selection, click on the Foreground Color selection square in the Tools palette to bring up the Color Picker dialog box. Choose a green color from the Hue Selector bar, and then a saturation and brightness level for the hue from the Saturation and Brightness selection area beside it, and click OK.

Finally, hold down the Shift key and press the F5 key to bring up the Fill dialog box, and make sure that “Foreground Color” is selected for “Contents”. Click OK, and Photoshop will fill the selection with green. Press Ctrl+D (Win) or Command+D (Mac) to deselect the selection, and here’s what your document should roughly look like:



As you can see, the green-filled shape is now showing in the preview area of the “green shape” layer. The exact placement of the red and green shapes in their respective preview areas will depend on where you dragged out your selections in the document window, so don’t worry if your green or red shape isn’t showing up exactly where mine is in their preview area (or in your document window, for that matter).

Now if you recall when we tried doing this without layers in the previous section, we decided we didn’t like having the green shape showing up in front of the red shape and overlapping it. We wanted the red shape to be moved in front of the green one. Without layers, we couldn’t do it. The red and green shapes were stuck together, just as they were stuck to the white background color behind them. This time, things are different. This time, we have everything on its own layer. This time, we can do it!

To move the red shape in front of the green shape in the document window, all we need to do is change the stacking order of the “red shape” and “green shape” layers in the Layers palette. And to do that, all we need to do is either click on the “red shape” layer and drag it above the “green shape” layer, or click on the “green shape” layer and drag it below the “red shape” layer. It’s that easy! Let’s try it. Let’s move the “red shape” layer up in the world by dragging it above the “green shape” layer.

The “red shape” layer doesn’t even need to be selected in order to do this. Simply click on the layer in the Layers palette and start dragging the layer up towards the “green shape” layer. You’ll see that your mouse curser changes to a little “grab hand” icon indicating that you’re dragging the layer:

As you can see in the screenshot above, Photoshop gives you a dotted outline of the layer as you’re dragging it. Continue dragging the layer up and over the “green shape” layer until you see a thin highlight line appear directly above the “green shape” layer, as shown below (it’s a bit hard to see, but it’s there):

The thin highlight bar that appears directly above the “green shape” layer indicates that when you release the mouse button, the “red shape” layer will be moved above the “green shape” layer in the Layers palette. Go ahead and release the mouse button once the highlight line appears, and the two layers will swap locations in the stacking order:



If we now take a look at our document window, we can see that the red shape is now in front of the green shape!

How easy was that? Without layers, we couldn’t do this at all, but thanks to layers, moving the red shape in front of the green shape was incredibly easy. The other thing we tried to do before without layers was move the green shape independently of the red shape (and of the white background), which we also couldn’t do. But let’s try that now. First, make sure the “green shape” layer is selected (if it’s not highlighted, click on it to select it). Then, go back to the Tools palette and select the Move Tool. It’s the tool directly to the right of the Rectangular Marquee Tool, as shown below:

You can also press the letter V on the keyboard to quickly select it.

Then, with the “green shape” layer selected, click inside the document window with the Move Tool and drag the cursor around. The green shape will move around the screen independently of the red shape and the white background. You don’t even have to click directly on the green shape. You can click anywhere inside the document window and still move the green shape around because it’s not the shape itself you’re moving, it’s the layer, and the layer takes up the entire width and height of the document window.

Try moving the red shape around next. Just click on the “red shape” layer in the Layers palette to select it, then with the Move Tool still selected, click anywhere inside the document window and drag the mouse around. The red shape will move independently of the green shape and the white background. See how easy that is? Layers give us complete freedom as we work. As long as we keep placing things on their own layers, they remain completely separate and independent of anything and everything in the document. Of course, this is only a simple introduction to what you can do with layers. To really start to understand what we can accomplish with layers, we need to look more closely at the Layers palette.

Before we do that though, try this: Select the Background layer in the Layers palette:



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Now, with the Move Tool still selected, click anywhere inside the document window and and try dragging your mouse around to move the Background layer. It may appear at first like something is happening, but when you release the mouse button, you’ll get an error message from Photoshop:

This error message is telling you that Photoshop can’t do what you’re asking it to do because the layer you’ve selected is locked. Remember earlier when I mentioned that the Background layer is special and has its own unique set of rules? This is one of them. We’ll take a closer look at what makes the Background layer so special in the next section.

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The Basics Of Layers In Photoshop - Computer 1chscomputer1.weebly.com/.../1/...in_photoshop__1_.pdf · Photoshop Basics: The Basics Of Layers In Photoshop By Steve Patterson, Photoshop