Lesson 42: Layers (1)

What are layers?

One of the main features in Photoshop is layers. But what is a layer? In its simplest form, a layer is a transparent platform that contains data. This data can be anything, such as text, photo, drawing, simply anything.
If you have different layers, they are superimposed.

The data on a layer, is totally independent of the data on another layer.

To work with layers, first you open “Layers” panel, of course.

To hide a layer, click the eye icon on the left of the layer.

To hide all layers except the one you click, hold the Alt key on your keyboard while you click the eye icon.

To return to show all, repeat this action.

To add a layer, click the “Create a New Layer” (1) button at the bottom of the “Layers” panel.

Important. To edit a layer, select it first in the “Layers” section, otherwise it may so happen that your hours of work are on the wrong layer.

The advantage of working with layers, is that you can edit and move the data on the different layers separately.

To move data from one layer, first select the layer, select the “Move” tool in the toolbar and you click and drag it to the desired position.

The “Layers” section

What are we going to find in the “Layers” section?

In the top box, we have the “Blend Mode”.
In the blending mode, we determine the blending style of a layer with the underlying layer. But a lot more about this in later lessons.

We also have the “Opacity” box. In the Opacity box, we determine the transparency of the layer. The lower the percentage, the higher the transparency.

Below that we have the “Fill” box. With the “Fill” box, we determine the transparency of the data in the layer, without changing the transparency of any applied effects.

We also have four buttons on the left. All these have something to do with the locking of the layer. When you move the mouse pointer over these icons, you will know what each lock is.

Below that we have different layers.

A layer consists of three parts.

The first part is the eye icon (1). What this does, I already told you in the previous lesson.

We also find a thumbnail (2) with the content of the layer. You can resize the thumbnail view by right-clicking it and selecting “No thumbnail”, “Small Thumbnails” and so on.

And finally we have the title (3) of the layer. By default, these names are “Layer 1”, “Layer 2”, etc. You can change it by double-clicking the name.

Below the panel, we have a menu bar. It just overflows from right to left.

At the right we have the trash icon. This serves to remove the selected layer.

Left, we have a icon to add a new layer. When you click this, a layer will be added above the selected layer.

We also have the folder icon. This creates a folder in the panel where we can place several layers into folders. This is useful to get a bit organized when working with many layers.

The next three buttons are “New Adjustment Layer”, “Layer Mask” and “Layer Style”. All these will also be thoroughly covered in this course.

And finally, to the far left, we have the “Link Layers” button. You need to have at least two layers selected from the panel. Then click this button, then these layers are coupled together. What that means is, for example, when you move the contents of a layer, the content of the linked layer also moves. If you want to disconnect them, select the layers again and click the button again.

When you delete a layer, you can replace the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Z button on your keyboard, or by the “History” panel.
But more on that later.

When you click on the downward pointing arrow at the far right of the titlebar of the “Layers” pane, it unfolds a menu with various commands. The same commands, plus a few other, are also reflected under the “Layer” in the menu bar and they are discussed in the later topics of this course.

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Lesson 42

Photoshop - CS4