A Beginner's Guide to Photoshop Layers

1. Introduction: Layers: Hello and thank you so much for taking this course on how to master layers in Adobe Photo Shop. This course is aimed at complete beginners. So if you have never used photo shop before and feel a little overwhelmed here is a great place to start. We're going to do one practical project together, and through this project, I'm going to show you how to import images into Photoshopped, how to rename and reorganize your layers, how to duplicate, delete or group layers together to help you be more organized. Then I'm going to show you how to add a text layer and also show you how to tell it apart from a regular image layer. Then we're gonna have a little bit of fun and mess around with our creation and show you the many different ways that you can use Photoshopped layers to your advantage. I can't wait to see you on the inside of this course, and at any point, please leave me a question and I'll get to it and help you out as much as I can. So, without further ado, let's get started in learning about photo shop layers 2. Setting Up Photoshop: Okay, so the very first thing before we dive into anything inside photo shop is making sure that we have opened it and that we have set up a new document from scratch. So when you open your photo shop, it'll probably look something very similar to this. Now there are a lot of Photoshopped versions I am using a day be fitter Shop Creative Cloud 2019. And if you're using the same one, your first introduction to photo shop is going to look a lot like this. But if it looks slightly different, don't worry. It's not going to affect the work that we are doing. You just need to open up the version that you do have and make sure you are ready to follow along. So, without any further ado, let's create ourselves a brand new document. So it's pretty simple over here. We're gonna hit, create new, and it's going to ask us what kind of specifications we would like to set up. So this is what's going to pop up, and it's got some recent file sizes that I have used. But let's do something brand new together. Let's make ourselves a nice square so we can choose 2000 pixels. There are other options here if you have projects to work on. But for now, let's just work in pixels. We're going to do 2000 by 2000. Does not matter our orientation because it is a square. Now. I always like to make my resolution a little bit higher than normal. If you're working on a big document, this might slow it down a little bit on the computer. But for the purpose of what we're learning in this class about layers and Photoshopped something like 70 pixels percent, Amita is a great place to start. It means it's going to be nice and clear and crisp. We consume in a fair way without it getting distorted. But it's not going to be so big that our program is going to crash on us. So let's leave that 70 pixels per centimeter. So in terms of color mode, I like to keep RGB, which is red, green and blue color. Some people might. You see him y que, which is Cyan, magenta, yellow and black, which is more of a Web based color palette. RGB is totally fine and 16 bit is a little more crisp, so I'm going to go with that. Once we're ready, we can go ahead and hit, create. And this is what you will be presented with a blank canvas with a bunch of tools old around it and everything is ready for us to dive straight into. So if you're Photoshopped, doesn't look like this. If you're missing some panels around about the area, don't worry. The default layout for photo shop usually has al layers panel over here on the right hand side. I've made my nice and tall for this exercise, but it might be a little square down the bottom for you might just be around about this size. If it is not a problem, don't even worry about it. But if you're missing the layers panel for whatever reason, you can come in here and click on windows and make sure that the tick next to layers that this has been checked off. If I were to uncheck this right now, you'll see that my layers panel has completely disappeared. So if you're missing your layers at any point, come up here to the window option. Make sure you have checked layers and you'll see that it pops over here on the right hand side. If you are clicking around a little bit and you accidentally move a panel of here and you're layers, this sort of stuck like this, and your colors and everything is sort of all over the place, and you cannot get them to go back. Don't panic. Go up to window, go into work space, and you can hit out essentials, which will reset everything and put things back to where they need to be. So once again, if you have accidentally move some things around, if you're clicking about and you see that something's been rearranged, you can go into window workspace and you can click the essentials default, and it will reset everything back to where it needs to be. Okay, so now that we have set up how workspace we know where our layers panel is located, let's get right to learning about them. 3. What are Layers? A basic Introduction: So now that we have out photo shop set up and ready to go, I want to let you know a couple of really basics when it comes to layers. These kind of tips and tricks are gonna come in handy when we move forward in this lesson and we get to work on a couple of image projects together. So one of the first things that I always find really important is making sure that my layers unnamed correctly this helps with workflow. This helps with making sure, you know, in what order your things on the canvass. All are. If you don't name your layers as you go along, you might find that you lose track of what is what it can get really messy and really frustrating and, quite frankly, very overwhelming. You'll see over here on the right hand side, the default layer name is background. You'll see that it also comes locked, which means if I go over here and I try and click and drag this around, it will tell me I can't because it is locked, so it's currently a background layer. I don't want it to be locked anymore. The quickest and easiest way to unlock it is either pressing this look or renaming the layer. So if you double click on the name, this new layer will pop up, it will ask me what I want to call it. Let's call this our white Leah click, OK, and you'll see that the lock has disappeared. This is now called White Layer. And if I try and move this around, I'm actually moving this white layer that we have made for ourselves on further shop. This kind of gridded gray and white square here indicates transparency. So if I were to save this as a picture as a PNG file, which will go into a little bit later, this grid here will be blank. Thes thes squares won't be there at the end. It will be completely empty. So going to move this back into the middle, you can see where it's lined up. This is our white layer. The next thing I want to tell you is how to duplicate a layer, how to make a copy off the layer that we currently have. So there are a few ways of doing this, but the most simple way to do this is to either to think a click or right click on this layup. Don't click on the text, Click on the layer next to it and we're going to hit duplicate layer. And it will ask us what we want to call this layer right now it's called Whiteley a copy. I'm gonna leave that for now and hit OK, and you'll see that we have to separate layers. I'm gonna color this a different color. So I'm coming over here to my color picker tool double clicking on that. And let's make this a nice blue collar. So I'm choosing this with my eyedropper tool. This is the color we want. This is the color we have. Click OK, gonna grab out paint bucket tool and simply just color this blue. And now I'm going to name this Al Blue Leia. So to do that you double click on the name and you can call it blue Laia hit Enter and we have our to lay is named. Now I've just gone back and I've hit this plus tool up the top here. This this sort of grab Artur I like to do that after doing any sort of move because it's a very neutral way to interact with your canvas. If I had the paint bucket tool, still, I may accidentally color something in that I don't want. So once you've finished doing something, come back over and hit that plus button. It's a much safer tool to use, so you'll notice. All we can see is the blue. We cannot see our white layer at all. And that is because of the order in which Aaliyah's are in how blue layer is up top and a white layer is underneath. And these operates just like a bird's eye view, so we can only see what is on top and then going down. So if I were to change the order Leia here, I'm going to click and press and drag it down. Until I get that little blue line and release it. You'll see that my blue layer is now underneath, and all we can see over here is our white Leia. That means our white layers on top and how blue layers underneath. If I were to move this over a little bit, you can see how blue is behind it, so I'm gonna put that back now. Another way to see what layers air underneath each other is this I tool right here on this lets you know if the layer is on visually or off. If I were to press this right now, you'll see that this white layer has completely disappeared from our canvas. We haven't delay Did this layout with simply turned it off visually. If I would oppress the eyeball tool again, it turns it back on. And it's the only thing that we can say. I'm going to make one more layer here just to show you another way of duplicating Aaliyah. I'm going to take out white layer, click and hold, drag it all the way down onto this brand new piece of paper button and then release it and you'll see that has instantly created us a new layer. I'm going to pick one more color like a pale pink click. OK, use our paint tool, color it pink. Come over here and make sure we rename our Leah so that we don't get confused. Now I'm riding the would lay out. Obviously you don't need to do that. And we weren't do that going forward. But this was just a really easy way to show you the order in which we are looking at how layers. So that's just a few basics with layers you can see if I were to move my colors around. We've got pink on top. We have white next, and then we have our blue layer. Last. You can see blue is behind, then white, and then pink is on top To make sure that you're interacting with the layer that you want, come across to the right hand side on the layers panel and select the layer that you want. Hold the command key on your keyboard, and when you click, you'll make sure that you're interacting with the layer that you have selected if you come across to this canvas and you just stop clicking around if I want to move the Blue Leia. But I'm I start clicking here. You'll see that it thinks that I want to touch the pink layer, which I don't. So, once again, if I want to move the Blue layup, click it over here, make sure that it's been highlighted. Hold the command key and then click around, and you'll make sure that you move the layer that you want to be moving. Okay, Great. So have a play around with that with a couple different layers, a few different colors and reorder them into whichever way you like. And I'll see you in the next lesson for a few more tips. 4. Using Images and Licensing: So I want to talk to you really quickly about image licensing when we are using images in photo shop and we want to export them and take them elsewhere to use for commercial use or personal use, we need to make sure that we're using images that are licensed for those particularly uses . Ah, good way to get around this. If you don't have any idea what any of that means is to use free to use images, royalty, free images and pictures that people have said, you can use this image for whatever use you want. I want to give you a couple of resource is. I have provided a few images for you in the exercise files for the Layers folder, which I'll show you in just a moment. But if you don't want to use those and you want to follow along with some of your own images, I want to show you a couple of places where you can get those for free. So the 1st 1 is this website here called unspool ash dot com. You can use any of these high resolution photos that people have taken, Ah, for anything that you would like these people have said you are allowed to use theirs. If you select an image that you like, you can hit, download for free, and it will tell you who you can credit in your credits area. So that's one place to do. You can search for whatever you would like here in the search bar, an Ex Places pixels p e x e l s dot com. This is also a stock photo and video website that you can use for free. The next website is free images dot com, which is pretty self explanatory again. You can type in any key would you want. Maybe you're going for a color theme. You're looking for something specific. You can type that in here and such. These images can be used for free Death to the stock photo dot com is not fully free, but you do have a 14 day free trial that you are allowed to use, so that's something to check out. If you're using images a lot and you find yourself restricted by other websites, you can certainly sign up to this or adobe stock as well. If you are using the free trial for photo shop. The last place you can do is Google. Now. You can't just type in anything on Google and pull the first image that pops up because it might be from somebody's website or blawg, and they have not given you permission to use that image. So something that's really handy to do is come over here to your tools icon. We drop down this menu that says Usage rights. We can make sure that we select this option that says, labeled for re use with modification. So things that we are doing in photo shop counts as modification, which means that we are not leaving the photo as is. So if you were to click that, make sure that gets checked on. These images here have been listed as free to use with modification, so there's just a few different ways that you can get some images. But if you go into the Exercise Files Layers folder that I have made for you, you will find all that we need today to learn more about Aaliyah's in the next lesson, feel free to sub these out for anything that you would like or follow, along with the exact same images until you get the hang of it. All right, I'll see you in the next lesson 5. Starting our Project: So let's get started with our first project using layers on photo shop. Let's come across here and create a new document. Instead of making this one a square, I want to make it slightly landscaped, which means it's going to be slightly wider than it is toll. I think I'm gonna make this around 3000 pixels wide. And 2000 is fine to leave toll. So I'm happy with the rest of that. I'm going to press create Great. So here is our blank canvas ready for us now. As you might remember, the default for our background is going to be cold background, and it's gonna be a locked layer. So before we renamed it by double clicking here and it took away our luck this time, I'm going to just press the luck and you'll see that it's renamed it to lay a zero or basically just a blank layer for us. So that's fine. I've got my history window open up here, so I'm just going to close that now. We want to bring in our first image into photo shop, so we want to open up the exercise files that's attached to this lesson they'll be inside and exercise files layer. We want to click that. The first thing we're going to bring in is our dog. So go ahead, click and hold Dragon drop and let that land right in the middle of your photo shop canvas . You'll see when you first dragon image in its got these points all around it, which basically let you transform it so that it's the right shape and it's placed in the right spot. All of this is completely changeable. Latest. Don't worry too much about it. I'm just gonna leave him as is. And when you are done, you can hit, enter or return on your key and our dog has been placed in our canvas. Now, if we come over to our layers panel, we'll see that this layer has already been called dog because that is the name off the file . I have this image cold dog for you, so this layer has automatically become an image layer. You'll see this little icon here. That means it's an image and it's cold dog because that's the image name that's nice and easy for you. We don't have to rename that. That's pretty self explanatory. So I want to go ahead and give our dog somewhere to sit. So open back up the Exercise files folder and we're going to drag in this beach image. So click and hold. Wait for the plus button. Drag and drop Wait for our beach to land. Okay, so this doesn't quite feel my background, So I'm going to use this dot up the top click and hold Drag it until it fits. I'm gonna do the same with the bottom. It doesn't matter that we have a little bit of overlap over here because this is just out background and so we don't have to worry about missing out on any of this image. I'm happy with the placement of this. So again I'm going to hit return. What you'll notice over here is that Aaliyah has been called Beach. We have Aleya called Dog, but we cannot see our dog. And so it's a fun question to ask. Why can't I see the dog? I know he's there. The eyeball is all next to the layoff yet I can't see out dog over here on the canvas. And the answer is because he is not on top out beach layer is taking up the full space, and it's blocking at our dog. So the easiest, easiest way to fix this is by taking out Beach Leia, and we're going to drag it so that it sits below out dog. So I'm going to click, hold and drag down until I see that little blue line and then I'm going to release and you'll see that our dog has appeared on top of out beach. That's really important to remember. If you can't see something and you know that it's on your canvas. Maybe your layers air in the wrong order, and you simply just need to re order them before we move on. I want to show you another really quick way to just make sure you haven't accidentally deleted out dog layer. And he's just hiding behind the beach layers. So I'm going to drag the beach. Leia back on top. There's that blue line I'm gonna release, and our dog has gone missing again, or he's still there because the Bible is on a really quick way. To tell if he is underneath is to turn the beach, lay off and back on really quickly, and you're like, OK, he's there. I just need to bring him to the front, turn the beach layer back on click drag and hide him underneath the dog. Okay, so that is some basics with bringing an image into photo shop for your layers. I'll see when the next lesson. And we can mess around with this image and have some fun. 6. Altering Layers: Let's have a little bit of fun without project. So the first thing you can see is that our dog is way too big for a beach that is not the size of a dog, although I wish that was It isn't and we want to make sure that we can resize this dog layer without affecting the rest off our document. So we're going to go up and select out Douglas just by clicking on it. And then we're going to press the keys Command T, which is bringing out those transformed dots that we saw when we first brought out images into photo shock. If you used the items at the top to drag, you can see that it's making him bigger and smaller. Thesafeside buttons also do that and keep it in perspective. If you were to hold shift, you can see that he gets warped and it's easy to miss. Shape him so let go of shift. You can use the side buttons as well, and it keeps everything in perspective, so I'm gonna keep him around about their once again. If I am happy, I can press return on my key and it will make him a new size. Okay, so I'm going to open back up our fold up. I'm going to bring in our glosses, so drag and drop onto our Photoshopped canvas, Give it a moment to load. And we have some sunglasses showing up right here. Let's resize thes together so that we can put them on our dog. I'm just dragging them down. I'm clicking, holding and dragging. You can play around with this Still a little too big, so I'm gonna make them slightly smaller. That looks about right to me. So I'm going to Price Britain. You can see over here in out layers panel that this has been named glasses because a game that was the name of the file that we brought in. So we don't have to rename any of thes at all, which is great. So the glasses air on top. But if you found that the layer has accidentally come in behind the dog, you won't be able to see them. So check the order of your layers over here. We want to make sure the glasses are on top off the dog on the beach. I want to show you how to delete, Elia, because we no longer need out background layer or are Leah zero. So let's get rid of it. Because it could get a little messy over here. If we keep everything, we're gonna just simply click on it. You can either just hit the delayed key. Or you can right click and press delete layer. It will ask if you're sure you can click. Yes. So all we're left with his out beach out dog and out glasses. I want to show you how to make a text layer. So so far, we have three image layers. We're gonna come over here to our T tool, which is out text tool, and we're going to select that. And then we're gonna click on our canvas, and you can see that it comes up with some text already here for us. Highlighted so that when we stop typing, it will override it. I want to right here. Day at the beach. Nice and simple. When I'm done, I'm coming over here to click the move tool just to reset everything. Now, if you come over here on our layers panel again, you'll notice that there is 80 next to this layer because that is our text layer. This helps you differentiate between what's an image, what is a text, or does a shape and all sorts of different kinds of layers were not going to get into them all in this lesson. But for now, we can at least tell the difference between a text and an image layup. The good thing about a text layer is that you can edit it at any point, so as long as this tea is still there, it is still alive text layer, which means that any point we can come in and make a change on, we're going to do that in a little bit. I'll show you in the next lesson. I want to show you how to add some effects to our text layer. So there are a lot of effects that photo shop offer. But I just want to show you a couple of really useful ones, the ones that I use a lot, and I think that you might need them as well. They're commonly searched ones. I just want to make them really accessible for you. So we are going to double click on our layer if we were to double click on the name, it's going to ask us to rename the layout, and I don't want to do that. I want to go into Aleya effects, which means I need to double click somewhere in the space beside that name here. So I'm gonna double click. And it's going to bring up this panel called Layer Style, which is going to let us add any sort of effects to this layer that we want gonna drag it down just a little bit so that we can keep an eye on out text. Anything you do within this layer, style is going to show up in real time on the canvas, which is a great way to see if you like what you're working on. If you come over to the left hand side, you'll see this one cold stroke. If you select that box next to it, you'll see that it gives an outline to the text. I'm turning it off and back on. If you click the strict buck, you can adjust how thick or thin the strike is and what color that stroke is so I could make it a red or anything I want, I'm gonna keep it black. The second thing I want to show you is a drop shadow. I'm going to select that on and you'll see very faintly underneath there and I'll zoom in in a second and show you that there is a drop Shudder If I click on this space beside the words drop shudder. We could go into the drop shadow settings which let us make the shadow DACA or lighter. Select what color the shadow is. I'm going to leave it black. Select how far away from the text the shadow is. You can see it moving behind it there. So that's all I'm gonna show you in here. I just wanted to add a stroke and a drop shadow to our text. Just a jazz it up just a little bit. Once I'm happy with this. I'm going to click. OK, over here on the right hand side, you can see that our text lay a day at the beach now has two separate effects listed underneath it. Here's our effects which weaken total on and off at any point. Using our I tool, we have the stroke, which is out outline you can turn that off if you changed your mind or out drop shadow, which we turned on together just before this tiny little error right here lets you hide that it's still on because we can see the little FX here, which means that there are some layer affects you. But I don't want to look at all of this because that, to me, is really messy. So I'm going to close that up and there is out text without brand new effects on it. 7. Grouping Layers for Workflow: Let's play around with this image one more time together. So we want to open back up our exercise files, and we're gonna bring in this file called grass dot PNG. So once again, hold it, drag it, wait for that plus and drop it on board. This is the wrong size that we're gonna use our dot CIA to drag it so that it fits out canvas. Once you're happy, I want to make sure I can't see any water here. So I'm gonna stretch up just slightly. Great. Once it's in place, hit return and you'll see that our grass image layer has been dropped in up the top here. We want to make sure that this is in the right position. And at this point, you've probably guessed what I'm about to do. I'm going to re order this grass layer. I'm going to pull it down underneath the dog underneath the glosses underneath the text, but not underneath the beach because I want to borrow the sky from al Beach. Leah, I'm gonna turn this grass layer off for a second. You'll see that the stand and the water are being covered. But I'm going to borrow the sky from this image, so turning the Grosh layer back on, I'm going to click over here and press down and then drag, drag, drag until the blue line is where I want my layoff. Release it and you'll see that our dog is now sitting on the grass. He is no longer sitting on the beach, which means that our text is no longer saying the right things. So I want to teach you how to edit a text layoff. Let's go over here to make sure that we are on our move tool, because that is the way to reset all of your tools. You don't accidentally click or move something. We're going to select our text layer up here, and then we're going to come across an hover over Letta and then double click really fast and you'll see that it's highlighted everything. So I'm gonna change the word beach to day at the park. Once I'm done, I'm coming over to select the move tool so that I am no longer editing that text layer. I'm going to make sure that my text layer is selected hold command so that I could move that without touching anything else. Put that more in the center and then release it. You'll notice that I didn't have to turn off the effects on this text layer in order to adjust what it said. That's important to know to. You could make a change to this text layer at any point, so long as there is still a tea over here, which is indicating that it is a live text layer for you. Something I like to do. And it's more of a workflow tip than anything is group my layers together when using things so that I can sort of total between one thing and another. We've made two separate images today. We made the day at the park and the day at the beach with this dog, and I want to set them up in a way where I can go back and forth between one and the other without affecting any files. A good way to do that is with grouping our layers. I'm going to select more than one layer at a time, so I'm going to click on the top layer here day at the park. Make sure that's highlighted. I'm going to hold the shift key, and I'm going to select all off the layers I'd like to keep in a group together. You'll see that 1234 layers have been selected here. I don't want my beach layer to be in this group because I want to do one of the beach and one on the grass. So once you've selected the ones you want in a group together, you're going to press command, G, and that will throw all of those layers into a group together. I'm gonna call this group pock hit, enter. And then we have that. I'm going to duplicate everything in this folder so similar to how we duplicated one layer at a time. I'm going to duplicate this entire folder, so I'm gonna hold press and hold, pull it all the way down to this new key, and you'll see that I have a park copy. We don't need both of these turned on because this folder is exactly the same as this folder right now. What I'm going to do is switched off this bottom fold up because I want to keep that exactly as is. I'm gonna open the park copy folder and call it beach hit. Enter. Now I'm going to delete the grass out of this folder because I don't want grass at the beach. I'm going to select that layer and press delete, and you can see that out. Dog is back at the beach. Which means we also should tech change out text layer. There's that little t select it. Come on over. Double click. Change this to Beach. It would have been better for me to do this stop. But I wanted to show you that at any point you can make these changes. Gonna close that folder and I'm gonna turn off that folder. Great. So you'll notice that the only thing we can see here is the speech layer. But remember that I borrowed the sky for both of these images with this beach layer. So I want to make sure that I have one copy off this beach layout in both of my folders. So I'm going to switch them back on just so that we can see what's going on inside them. Inside my beach folder. I have the text, I have the glasses and I have the dog, but I do not have the beach behind it. So I'm going to make a copy of this beach layer. Select, Create new and I'm going to drop this under my dog at the beach. Now he's there at the beach. Let's check out pock folder. We have day at the park glasses, dog grass. There's no sky, They're old and no beach background. So I'm gonna take this last beach picture. Click it, hold it, drag it in behind the grass. So now in both of our folders, we have our sky. Let's have a little look together the beach folder is selected on. So that is what we are looking at. If I were to turn that whole beach folder off, I'll Doug is at the park. We can see the sky because we made a copy of that and we can go back and forth between the beach and the park, and we're not affecting any of our players. 8. Saving Your Files and Projects: I want to make sure you know how to save a picture out of further shop when you save a picture. And the most common form of picture is a J peg J P E g file or show that up in a moment you will see whatever you are looking at visually on the canvas, we have our park folder turned on at the moment underneath Al Beach folder. But we can't see it over here on the canvas. It will not show up in our image unless you can see it over here. So exactly what you're looking at here is what will the image will be? We're going to save two pictures today file Say that's you can call it whatever you want. I'm gonna call this one beach. Now you can come in here to format and click J Peg hit Save it will bring up this option and it will ask you what size you want it It doesn't matter too much. J pegs aren't that large and image. So I'm going to hit OK and that will save as one picture here. Now I'm going to do it again without park. So I need to turn off the day at the beach so that I can save day at the park as its own separate image. I'm going to do that by turning off the entire folder. Here is day at the park. I'll come back over here to file save as I'll name this one park. I'm going to select J Peg again. Press save and OK, And now if I go to my desktop folder, I can see that I have to images here I have Beach and I have park, and they have been saved as two separate images. The last thing I'll show you how to do is save a Photoshopped file so that you can come back in later and edit. We're gonna click file save as you can name your whole project, choose where it's going to be saved, and we're going to keep Photoshopped as al format. Make sure you have selected Photoshopped. This is the most important thing I can tell you in terms of coming back later to edit your layers, you must make sure this is checked. So if it was unchecked, it's going to tell you that it has to save is a copy, Which means it can't be edited. And you're going to lose all of our hard work organizing and naming these layers because you can't come back in and edit that. So make sure that layers is selected. Hit, save. You can see down the bottom. It is saving the file, which includes all of our layers. Now, when we go to our desktop, you can see that we have a dog at the dot PST that is our Photoshopped file. And at any time we can come in, Open that up and we will be right back here where we left off. So there you have it. That is how you use layers on Photoshopped. Thank you so much for taking this course with me. And I'm thrilled to be able to have shown you the basics of using layers. Photo shop is not to be intimidated by, although it can look very overwhelming once you're inside. So I'm glad that I was able to show you some very simple places to start. If you have any questions about Photoshopped or about this course or about layers or anything in general, please leave them below. I definitely come in here and check those. So feel free to ask me any questions and I'll be as helpful as I can be. If you liked this course, please leave me a review and stay tuned because I will be bringing out some more basics on photo shop. How to use each tool very simply, very easy for you guys so that you'll be Photoshopped pros in no time.