Photoshop Basics Series Class 2: Fundamentals of Photoshop

1. Class introduction: Hello and welcome to the Photoshopped Basic Siri's. You are currently watching class number two out of five total classes in the photo Shopped Basic. Siri's in this class will build on what we learned in the first class about photo shops, interface and digital image types. As we start to learn the core fundamentals of how Photoshopped works, we'll start by learning about all the great utilities photo Shop has that will let us work faster and more effectively. Things like grids, guides, alignment, tools and actions then will continue covering the key features and Photoshopped as we learned how to work with layers, layer masks, blend modes, smart objects and so much more. After watching this class, you'll be armed with the skills you need to start working in photo shop right away. But, of course, there's plenty more to take you to the next level. That's why there's three more classes in the Siri's after this one. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We have a ton to cover in this class, so let's kick it off in the next video as we learn about rulers and guides 2. Rulers and guides: in this video, we'll learn how to use rulers and guides in photo shop. Now there's a couple different types of rulers that we can use. So let's start by turning on our rulers. To do that, we need to go to view and down to rulers. Now, as you can see, the keyboard shortcut for this is control are or command are on a Mac. And when we turn on the rulers weaken, see them up here at the top and then along the side. And these numbers here indicate the measurement. Now, what's unique about this or what's interesting about this is right now there's really no indication of what those numbers are actually indicating. Are those inches centimeters millimeters? What is this? What is this indicating here? Well, if we right click on the ruler weaken, see what unit were currently using. But we can also change between them. So currently this is using inches. But if I were to switch this to pixels, watch these numbers here and you'll see that they change now. Something else I want to point out about the rulers you notice as I move my mouse. Look at this little line it's it's right here. As soon as I mouse over this, it disappears. But when I'm over my workspace, you'll notice the line moving left and right. And then over here on this side, there's another one that's moving up and down. What that is showing us is exactly the location of wherever your cursor is. So if you're curious, like if we were going to the very top of this building, where is that? In our image, we can see over on the top. It's almost 2 2000 pixels, and then on the left hand side, it's almost Ah, it's between 608 100 pixels. It's almost 800 pixels. Ah, down from the top of the image. So that's really what those crosshairs are doing. Now we can take this to the next level with rulers, and we can left, click and drag. So let's start with this one. Appear if we left, click and drag in our ruler and then pull it down. Watch what happens. We're getting this line here. This line is called a guide. So this is these are the guides that are going to help us be able to, um really just organize things in our canvas. We can also pull them in from this side over here in order to ah, kind of pinpoint. We wanted to adjust something right along this corner. We could do that very easily. Now with that guide. Okay, so we have these guides in our workspace. What if we wanted to? What if you wanted to move them right now? If I have this The move tool here. If I have this selected, you can see when I hover over these guides, the cursor changes so we can left click and drag in order to move these. And here's a little pro tip. If you're not in your move tool, say if we're painting or something. Well, when I hover over with my paintbrush or really any other tool? If I switch to my selection tool, you can see no longer am I getting that tool on the ability to move this well, you don't have to switch all the way back to the move to if you don't want to. Again. Photo shop is all about speed and efficiency. So here's a little tip. If you hold down control or command on your keyboard. Now you're going to ta go. The move tool. Which means when I hover over this, I could move this guide. And then as soon as I let go of control on my keyboard, it's going to switch me back to whatever tool that I was on. So really cool little tip. If you want to move these guides around, you could just hold down control left, click and drag in order to move them to their new position and then let go. And you're back to whatever tool you were using before. Okay? So how now that we know how to create our guides, we know how to move them around. How can we? How can we get rid of them? What if we want to actually just get rid of them? Well, to do that, all we need to do is to move them back to their point of origin or back to where we created them from. So for this one here, this horizontal guide, we would have to move it back up here. The vertical guide would move it back to the ruler over here. So again, I'm gonna hold down Control. I'm going toe left, click and drag this up all the way up. And when I let go, it's gone. It's It's no longer there anymore. Photoshopped has gotten rid of that guide. Now, one thing to keep in mind with this is if you actually get rid of your guide and then you want it back, um, it can be difficult to get back, because how do you know exactly where it was? Of course we could come up here and we could do undo. Um, but there's actually an easier way than actually deleting and undoing if you want to just hide your guide and then bring it back at a later time. So what we can do is toggle the visibility of just the guides. To do that, we can come up to view, show and then guides. Okay, so you can see the keyboard shortcut here is control and then semi colon or a command and semi colon on a Mac. And if I turned that off, you can see our guide is no longer visible. But as soon as I pull another one over, if I were to pull another guide over, you can see the visibility of our guides is automatically going to be turned back on. Now there's another keyboard shortcut. If you can't remember control and semi colon. Ah, the one that I usually use a use for a long time is control H to hide. So that's going to toggle on and off the guides as well. That's control H on PC or command H on a Mac. So let's let's take this a step further than just these guides here because Photoshopped has another really, really cool feature called Smart Guides. And you know, this will actually be easier if we start with a blank document. So I'm gonna come up here and create a new document. And let's just use the default photo shop size create. Okay, so now let's let's use I already have a marquee tool selected, so let's actually create a few different boxes here, so I'm going to Okay, so I'm gonna come over here to the toolbar, and we haven't used this tool yet. Don't worry. We're gonna look at ah, working with shapes much later in this course, but I just want to create some boxes so we can see smart guides in action. So I'm gonna create a box. But I'm also if I were the left, click and drag, you can see that I'm creating a rectangle. But if I hold down shift, watch what happens? It's going to jump to a perfect square. You can see the height and the width are exactly the same. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna create one box. You can see this rectangle over here in my layer, and then I'm just going toe left, click and drag this a couple times. So what we end up with is three different boxes. Okay, So if I take one of these layers here, come over to my move tool, Let's move this. As soon as I start to move this, notice the's pink lines. And this isn't This isn't unique to boxes and shapes and things like that. This is just easier to see with this because we have this a small box on a white background and really, what's happening here Is this because we're moving this entire layer photo shop is automatically trying to align it to our other layers. It's a very, very fast way of very quickly and accurately moving our layers around so you can see it's lining it up. It says, Oh, hey, you have another layer that looks exactly like this. So I'm going t match that right there and then over here, you can see Oh, hey, this is the exact center of the document. So I'm going to line it up. I'm gonna snap it right there really, really cool stuff that we can do when we start to move these around. Not only that, but you'll notice The reason I created three was because so we could see this here where it's going to show. Hey, you set this one in the center. You set this one here to exactly 194 pixels away from this one here. So when you're moving this one, do you want him to be exact? If you want to be exact, the space between the gaps Photoshopped automatically snap that in there using smart guides . Now, of course, there will be times where smart guides tend to be a little annoying. If you don't want him to snap around, snap your your layers around. If that's the case, just come up to view show and smart guides. And when you turn that off now, if I move this around, you can see it's no longer snapping to the other areas. It is still snapping a little bit. That's because we still actually have snapping turned on. And that is something different than these smart guides, it snapping it to that layer. So here, if I turned snapping off, you can see we're moving this around and it's not snapping to anything. Ah, but I'm gonna go ahead and turn on the smart guides again so we can see those see. And now, if we turn that on when conjunction with snapping now, it's going to snap to those smart guides and get us back to where we work. Okay, now, the last thing I wanted to mention in this video is another way to measure things in photo shop, and that is using the ruler tool. Now the ruler tool is underneath of the eye dropper over here. If you see the little arrow down here in the bottom right hand corner, that means that their arm or tools underneath there, So if we left click and hold, you can see all of the tools underneath here. One of those is the ruler tool. Now, I do want to point out the shortcut here is I. But what you can do and this is the same for any tool. If you hold down shift when you use the keyboard shortcut, it's gonna cycle between them. So without selecting this watch what happens if I were to hit I and then hold down, shift and hit? I keep hitting. I you can see it's cycling between all of those different tools in there. Okay, So once we get to the ruler tool, this is something that we can use as the name implies, to measure things inside of Photoshopped to make sure that we have are our designs pixel perfect. So when we measure something, all we have to do is to left click where we start. So let's say we want to measure the size of this box. We left click, hold it down and then drag it over to where we want to stop. Now, when we do that, I'm gonna let go of the mouse. You can see the length up here is 372 which would be pixels in this case because we are currently measuring in pixels. But what if we wanted to measure in inches or centimetres or something else and not pixels ? Well, let me show you a little trick here. Um, if we come up to window and come over to the info panel, you can also see that we have this with in the ruler in order to eyes that 307 to. And that's the same with as we had before. If I were to start over and click and drag again, you can see we have, ah, both the width and the height, right, So or the overall length. Right? So 300.9 pixels is from over here. Toe over here and it's actually going 250 pixels this way and 166 pixels this way. But what's really cool about this is here in this panel, we can come into the panel options and we can switch the ruler units to be whatever we want . So let's say we want inches instead or centimeters. Instead, we can hit OK, and now we can see that the length is 2.54 centimeters. Right? So this is the length here. It's 2.12 centimeters this way and 1.41 centimeters high. But you'll notice that up here, we still have the pixels. So if we really wanted to weaken, use those two in conjunction in order to really fine tune and figure out again toe a pixel . Perfect level our designs already. So to recap in this video, we learned how to turn on rulers for our document. We also learned how to create new guides. How to move those guides around. We learned what smart guides are and how to work with the ruler tool. Knowing our next video, we're gonna take this a step further by taking what we've learned about guides and learn how to split up a panoramic image into multiple images. Knowing our next video, we're gonna take this a step further. We're gonna take everything that we've learned so far. Now, in our next video, we're gonna take this a step further. We're gonna take the things that we've learned about guides to a new level. By using them in our very first mini project, we're gonna learn how to split up a panoramic image into multiple image. So I'll see you there 3. Mini project: Using guides to slice a panorama for Instagram: In our last video, we learned how to use guides in photo shop in this video will take that to another level by learning how guides can help in a really world project. And this marks the very first, many project of the course. So before we begin, I just want to point out that we do have a number of many projects throughout the course, and they're really just a way to combine everything we've learned up to that point in the course with some new skills in a project based way. As you can imagine, project based usually means that we have quite a bit to cover in those videos. So for this many project or really any of the many projects feel free to pause, Rewind as you need to to follow along if you feel like I'm moving a little too fast, Okay, so in this video, this is what we're going to be creating. You can see this is what is really referred to as a multi image panorama on instagram, and so it's really multiple images put together on Instagram, but they're put together in a way that is completely seamless and makes it look like it's one image as you go back and forth. So to create this, the first step is to have a panorama. So in the project files, I have some photographs that I've taken, and these are four different images that we can merge together into a panorama and then split them back apart. Now the reason why we're merging them together first and then just splitting them apart, not just using these four has Our final image is because when you take a panorama you want toe, have some overlap in those images. Right that way, Photoshopped can use those overlapping areas to tell that Oh, this one connects. This image connects with this image on the right side or on the left side or top or bottom . Or however they connect. I can use those overlapping areas to be able to tell that it's actually what connects toe what? Um, and that's not really what you want when you're posting a seamless, multi image painted room. So the first step is to create our panorama. Unfortunately, that's very easy to do in photo shop, so I'm just going to select all of these images, dragged them into photo shop at once, so we have all of them opened up once they are all open. If we come into file, automate and go down to photo merge now in here, there's as court a few options that we can choose. My recommendation is, unless you have a particular reason, depending on how you shot the photo, what lenses you're using to use one of these other options, I would recommend starting with automatic first. That's going to tell Photoshopped to do whatever it needs to do to try to merge all of these together. And if that doesn't work, you can always come back and use one of the other options. But let's use automatic first, because that usually does the job pretty well. I'm not going to browse to the images, I already added them already opened them up in photo shop, someone to add the open files. And then I am going to leave this blend images together check box turned on on. What that's going to do is it's gonna tell Photoshopped to use layer masks in order to try to blend these images together into a seamless composition, and we're gonna learn about layer masks and how to create our own. How to customize all that later on in this course. But just know that when you check this, that's going to allow Photoshopped to try to blend them together into a seamless image. Once we hit okay, photo shop is going to go through a few steps. The first is to take all of the images and pull them into a single image, so you'll see the layers panel down in the bottom that will show the multiple images in a single one. And then it's gonna line them. And that's where it's looking at the overlapping areas. You see, it did it pretty quick. Ah, and then once it's aligned, it's going to try to blend them together and create the layer masks that it needs to in order to actually generate that seamless composition that you can see. It's it's actually working on right now. Ah, once it's all done, we have our panorama, and there we go. So the first thing you'll probably notice is that we have a lot of extra space up here. You can kind of see how it affected some of these images in order to create that panorama, and that's perfectly normal for most. Panorama is you're gonna have some of this extra space up here. Ah, that's just something to be aware of when you create a pain around. So what you're going to do is come into the crop tool and then crop this down, so that means you are gonna lose some pixels. So we're losing all of this sky up over here in this area over here. That's something to be aware of when you actually take the image, Um, that you're going to be losing some of those pixels. In this case, I'm gonna move it in. I want to get mostly the kind of this mountain range here, so something like that looks pretty good. Once we are happy with that, we can just click on the commits the check box up here in the options bar, and we have our panorama. So if I zoom in, I'm gonna hit control. Plus, in order to zoom in, you can see we're only at 25% zoom. And if I pan around this hold on space to pan around, you can see we have a pretty big image here Okay, so now that we have our panorama, when you zoom out so we can see all of it again the next step is to create guides where we want this to split into our seamless multi image panorama to post on Instagram. So we learned how to create guides in our previous video and we could do that if you wanted to. We could ah, pull over a guide, maybe pull over another one and start to lay this out and and say, OK, maybe this is one image. This is another image. This is another image. This is another one. We're gonna want to try to get them to be a square as possible. That's one thing with Instagram. Instagram typically prefers square images. It does support non square images. But I prefer square, especially when you're doing Ah, seamless multi much panorama. So that looks like it could be good. I mean, according to the eye, it looks looks pretty good, but is it picks so perfect if it's not picked so perfect, it's not gonna be seamless when we posted on Instagram and so I can almost guarantee that I didn't just randomly guess the exact pixels. Now we could, as we learned in our previous video, use our ruler tool measure in between each one. Make sure that it's everything is exact, but there's a much faster way to do this, and that is by coming up to view new guide layout Now. We could clear our guides first that we that we created there if you wanted to, but there's actually an option in here to do that. So if I click on this, you can see what we're given. This is a really fast way to create some guides that are going to be perfectly spread apart . It really depends on whatever settings that we choose. So for our project, because we know that Instagram scrolls from left to right, we will need to create columns when don't want to create Rose. We don't want top to bottom. We're going to create columns Now. The number of columns that we create are really gonna be, however many images we want to split up our panorama to, so that's going to depend on on your preference there. Ah, in my case, let's bring this down to Let's start with four because we had kind of gotten a rough layout of that, and I kind of like that. I think four might work to create kind of perfectly square images for these. But you'll notice that we're getting all these extra lines in here. That is this gutter right here. And that's really a space between the different columns. And we don't want any space between the different columns. We don't want any space. We want it to be seamless. So I'm gonna set that to zero, and we can see that it's going to clear out those gutters. But we also still have some existing ah lines there. Those are the existing guide. So I'm gonna clear out the existing guides as well. And that's going to leave us with one, 23 four. And they should be pixel perfect. Seamless. Okay, so click on OK, and we have our guides now. The next step of this because we're not quite done yet is to actually exports the images. So we've looked at saving files in a previous video, but it's time to learn something new. We're gonna learn about something that Photoshopped calls slices. So we used the crop tool earlier in this video. But if we hold this down, you know this is a little arrow down here, so if we hold this down their arm or tools under there, one of them is thes sliced tool. Of course, the keyboard shortcuts. See shift. See, in order to cycle between all of these different tools that cropped crop perspective, crop slice and select slice, I'm gonna go to the slice tool because we need to start to create our slices. So I'm going to zoom in here. Let's zoom into this 1st 1 because this is the first slice that we're going to create Is this image right here? And we want to make sure that we actually have this set to snap to guide. So if you go to view, snap and we'll look at snapping Ah, actually in the next video. But I just want to make sure that is set snapped two guides. And now, if I left, click and drag over, we should see that it's automatically snapping to those guides. So if you look closely, you see this little brown area here, that is the slice. Okay, so we could resize this if we want to. You can see, we can resize it. Um, but we want this to be the entire thing. Hey, so let's do that for these others over here as well. Basically, what we're doing is we're drawing a box for where these images are going to be. So this is number one. This is number two. So this is gonna be our image number one. Image number two And the guides are super helpful because they're going to make sure that there are pixel perfect between image number two now on average number three and image number four. Here we go. Okay. So, personally, I prefer to name things. So I'm gonna come in and name these slices to do that. I'm going to switch to these slice select tool, and that's going to allow us to actually select these different slices. You'll notice that it goes from ah, blue to kind of that brownish color. It mean it selected. If you double click on the slice, then you'll see the dimensions for the slice. So this one image is going to be 22 67 by 22 12. So it's not quite exactly perfectly square, but that's pretty close. and I think Instagram is going to be okay with that. Um, so with this, let's call this our panorama slice 01 And I'm actually going to select everything up here. Right? Click Copy this because I'm going to use it on the next, and I like to do things a little bit faster. I don't want to actually type all that out again. So click on, OK, that is going to name that first slice. And now we can come into our second slice, do the same thing. DoubleClick. Except now we can just hit control V in order to paste this or command V if you're on a Mac and type in the number two. So now we have our second slice name and let's move over. So hold down space in order to pan over, and we should be able to pan. There we go. Select our third slice control V three, hit okay, and then hold down space in order to get to our pan tool. Move over. Um, if it doesn't move the first time, my computer's kind of this kind of slowing down there as it's creating these. So ah, that's just really good computer trying to catch up. And then our 4th 1 we have Panorama slice 04 it Okay, All right. So we have all of our our all of our slices named now we need to actually export thes Soto export these. We don't need to save these individually because Photoshopped knows that their slices, they're going to be, Ah, multiple images that we export. Let's goto file export save for web And now when we do this, we can see our overall image is going to be like 8000 pixels by 2000 pixels. Um, right here, weaken, weaken. See if we if we move with our zoom tool and zoom out to, let's say fit in view, we can see we have one to three and four. Those are slices, Okay? And if we just hit save, tell it where we want it to save, we'll save it in the project files. And now if I pull open the folder, you'll notice that inside of this folder here we have a new folder called Images, and these are are perfectly sliced images. And now we just take these and upload these to Instagram like we would anything else? This is number one, So this could be far left. This is going to be the next one, the next one and so on. So as long as you do that, you post them in that order, you're going to get that seamless panorama. Ah, multi image panorama on instagram. All right, so one of the keys to success in this video that we looked at was making sure that the slices that we create actually snapped to the guides. Otherwise, we might have a little bit of a pixel here to difference, and that's gonna be noticeable. So let's actually move onto our next video where we're gonna dive deeper into snapping. 4. Grids and snapping: in this video, we'll learn about using grids and snapping. So let's get started by turning on our grid to view our grid, we just come up to the view menu, go to show and turn on the grade. You can see the keyboard shortcut is control or command if you're on a Mac and a single the single apostrophe, so we would turn this on. It's actually very tough to see here, but you can see the grid that got turned on. Let's actually make this a different color, so it's easier to see to customize our grid. The place to go to do that is to come up to edit preferences at the very bottom and then go to guides, grid and slices. Now in here, we can control not only the color, but we can also control the size of our grid. So let's start by making this black so it's easier to see and we can actually see our grid . I do also want to point out what we're in here. You can notice the you can change the color of your guides, the smart guides, things like that, things that we've looked at in previous videos. But as far as the grid is concerned, basically the way the grid works is it's just creating well, a grid based on whatever settings we have. So right now we have, ah, grid line every one inch so you can see these darker area the little little darker one. That is the grid line. Okay, so that's just the grid line there. This is actually a little dashed line. These are these subdivisions. So 1234 from one grid line to another. And 1234 from one grid line to another. So we're getting four subdivisions. If we only want to see those weaken, turn just on just the subdivisions on. If you want to do that, you can see the dashed lines. We also have dotted lines which would just show the grid lines in a dotted line. It's very, very hard to see there, though. Um, let me turn this back on to make it a little bit easier to see. So what we can do here is customize this however we want. So let's say we want maybe everyone pixel right. So one grid line, everyone pixel. That gets to be a lot. If I turn this back to the ah dot earth dots, you can see what happens here again. It's it's almost too much for it. Um, let me switch this to something that's nice and big to see on the video. There we go. So two inches and let's change the subdivision. So maybe three. Instead, you can see what it's doing here. If we want no subdivisions, weaken, set this toe one. And then really, the entire grid line is a subdivision. So really, what were effectively getting here is just two inches from one grid line to the other. All right, so you might be wondering, What can we do with this grid once we have it in place? What's really cool about the grid is that we can snap things to it. So let's create a new shape here. I'm just gonna create something simple that we can play around with, maybe like a square here. Now, if you want to move this around, you'll notice we have our smart guides going on. But it's not actually snapping to the great. If we wanted to make sure that it snapped maybe one every two inches right. So we wanna make sure that it snaps. Well, if we come under view. We've looked at this before and we have snapped. Turned on. But we actually, if we go to snap to weaken, see the even those snapping is turned on. We can have another level of control over what were snapping to Are we going to snap two guides? Are we going to snap to the grid? Are we going to snap the layers? Ah, the document bounds. Which would be this area all up here? Or do we want to snap toe everything, which would be all of the above? In this case, I'm gonna turn on snapping to the grid so we can see what happens when I turn this on. You can see now when I move this object, it's snapping to that grid. See how when I get close, it kind of snaps in there. It's snapping to the grid. And what's cool about this is it doesn't have to be just a layer that were snapping to the grid. We can actually snap guides to the grid as well. So instead of using the guide layout like we learned in the previous video when we created a new guide layout. If all we want is guides around maybe this area here, this grid a two inch by two inch uh, grid. We can just come in here and watch. What happens is as I get close to the guide, it will snap right to the guide, see, or I'm sorry, snapping the guide to the grid. And then we can do the same for this and this guy here and over here. And so we get essentially our guides that are snapped around just this grid area. And then once we're done with the grid, we can always come back in and turn that off. And we're left with our guides that we could still snap too, if you wanted to. I do not have snapping two guides turned on. So if I turned snap two guides. Now I can still snap to this to these guides, as we would expect so by using the grid in combination with guides and snapping to convene a really great way to get your objects spaced out evenly here inside a photo shop along whatever sort of dimensions that you need now, The last thing I want to point out in this video is another type of grid, and it's called the pixel grid. Now you can't see the pixel grid. When you're in a view like this, you actually have to be zoomed way into your image in order to see individual pixels. So if I were to zoom in here really, really far, you can see watch what happens. As soon as I get here, you'll notice that we have this grid turn on, and as I zoom in, these are actually individual pixels. So is a zoom out and then zoom in. The pixel grid will automatically turn on, and this is really like the other great. It's just a helpful way to be able to see individual pixels if you're like me, quite honestly. Usually the pixel grade birth pixel grid kits in the way a lot more than actually helps by zoom in this far. Usually I don't want to see the individual pixels themselves. I don't want to see the grid. Rather, I want to just focus on the pixels, so if you do want to turn this off, if you zoom in, you like what's going on I want to turn this off and come up to view, show and turn off the pixel grid. So uncheck this and then the pixel grid will turn off and you can zoom in and out, and you're not going to ever see that pixel grid. Okay, so in this video, we learned how to use the grid. We also learned how to control what we snap things, too, when we snap the guides to our grid and then snapping the layer to the guides. Now, in our next video will learn about yet another very powerful way to get even more control over how things are laid out by using photo shops, alignment tools. 5. Alignment tools: in this video will build on some of the utilities that we've covered so far in this section and learn about photo shops, alignment tools. So let's start with something simple and let's learn how we can get this shape to be aligned perfectly in the center of our image here. Now there's a couple different ways we can go about this s o far. We've learned about snapping, and smart guides would probably snap it to the center using smart guides, since the center of the document is one thing that smart guides help with. But there's actually an easier way, and that is using the alignment tools now the alignment tools air located underneath the move tool. So the move tool here and then these are the alignment tools. You'll notice that they're currently grayed out there currently disabled, and the reason for that is because right now we're telling photo shop to align things to our selection, and we don't have anything selected. That's actually the default for photo shop. I haven't changed anything there, so if you open this up for the first time, you're probably going to see something similar where they're disabled. But we can change that if we want to. Under these three little dots weaken, Tell photo shop to align to our canvas. Now, if you recall from a previous video, this is the canvas here and now you'll notice that these are Ah, these are no longer disabled. So if I click in the center, you can see it's aligning this in the center and then click in the center. As Faras Vertical is concerned, it's going to align it vertically in the center. Now what's really cool about this is we can start to use all of the different utilities that we've learned about so far to align things really however we want. So let's say we want to align it to 10 10 inches, right? So we have 10 inches here. I think that's injuries up centimeters, 10 centimeters. And let's say we want a line it to this guy that we've just created. Well, what we can do is come back here and align it back to the selection. Now let's make a selection that snaps. So our selection is going to snap to this guide here because we've created a guide, and now that we have this selection made. We come back to our move tool. Now let's align it to the left, so lining to the left edge and you can see it's going to snap to that is really snapping to the selection. It's just the selection we snapped to the guide. So we're compounding things and we're aligning things very, very easily. And of course, if we wanted to, we could do it to the top of the selection or the bottom of the selection. That's basically what the's are so left center rights and then vertically, we have top, middle and bottom and of course we can do the same sort of thing if we want with our grid. So let's say we turn on our grid and it's a little bit difficult to see. I think I have my grid set to be black and we have a black background. So let's change this to be maybe a light gray and now that we have our grid here, if we create our selection weaken, snap that selection to the grid and then and then we can align our object to the to the selection that we've made, so where we want just for the sake of this example, let's say Let's snap here. You can see as I get close it starts to snap that selection. Now that we have that selection made, we can come back to our move tool with our Ellipse selected. We can come in here and let's align it to the bottom so it's going to snap it to the bottom , and then we can align it to the left. We can get that perfectly aligned kind of wherever we want. So take some time to play around with that. Play around with the different tools that we've looked at so far. Ah, how you can make selections that snap to the guides, create your guides, work with the grid and start to align those and play with the alignment tools to figure out how you can start to position things a lot more accurately here inside of Photoshopped. But now that we're more familiar with the alignment tools in photo shop, let's move on to our next video, where we're going to do another mini project, and this is a pretty quick many project, but we're gonna learn about the automatic alignment here in a photo shop 6. Mini project: Using auto align to create a panoramic image: in this video will walk through a quick mini project as we learn about photo shops, Auto align, feature. All right, so if we open up the project files for this video, we have a handful of photographs and we've looked at creating a panorama out of these same images and our last many project. But this time we're going to go about it a different way. We're gonna learn how to do this in a different way. So the first thing we need to do is to bring our images into photo shop. So I'm just going to select him all and open them all up, just left, click and drag them into Photoshopped. Open them all up once we have them inside of photo shop. Now we need to get them into the same documents. So they're all in the same document. We've looked at how we can move images from one document to another. In previous videos, we've even looked at the fastest way to do that. And that's what we're going to do right now is file scripts load files into stack. Now, when we do this, we do have the ability to browse, So it could have browse to the project files from here if you want to, or just click on add open files. I usually prefer to open up the files and Photoshopped first. That way, I could just double check and make sure that you up those are the actual files that I wanted and see them nice and big here to make sure. And then I can add them in anything that I have open. Now, down here, we have the ability to tell Photoshopped toe auto, align these images. So I'm gonna check this box, and we're going to see what this does. Um And then we're gonna look at how we can get to it if we aren't using the load files into stack. But this check box is our auto align capability. So I'm gonna hit OK, and then Photoshopped is going to go through a two step process. First, it's going to take all of the images, merge them into a single file so you'll see the layers down here jump to multiple layers, one for each, and then it's going to align them based on the images. And when you're taking images for for Panorama is you're gonna wanna have some overlap. You can see where the overlap is here. So, like, here's an image and you can see this one here. There's actually quite a bit of overlap here, and then this one. There's quite a bit of overlap. This one. There's quite a bit of overlap. And really, when you're taking pictures for a panorama, you want tohave that overlap so that photo shop will be able to align them correctly. And you want to have enough. So it's not just a sliver, Remember, you can always just take more images and then ah, a line. All of those together. Okay, so we have our panorama here, and we do have some extra pixels up top weaken crop in on this. But the first thing I want to fix, you'll notice this isn't blended very well. Like you can see this hard line right here. This is This was obviously exposed a little bit darker than this one over here. Probably because the sun's over here. You can see the shadows, and so the sun is over in this direction. And so this one was probably just a little bit darker than this one. and so we want. It's not really blended very well. Well, let's see how we can fix that. Let's come up to edit. And the first thing I want to show is the auto align layers. Now, Right now, it is great out. And the reason for that is because we need to select the layers that we want to align. And we haven't really looked at layers too much in depth. Don't where we're gonna dive into those much later, but as a quick tip. One way that you can select multiple layers here in the layers panel is by selecting one. And then either you can hold down, control or command and select each layer that you want to select or de select. Or if you select, say, the bottom one. You can hold down shift, go all the way to the top and then left click in order to select all of them. And that works from top to bottom as well. It's pretty. Universal is far, as you would expect inside of, Ah, Windows Explorer or finder. If you're on a Mac, pretty, pretty similar process there. Once we have them selected now we can come up to edit auto align layers. And this is essentially the same as what we saw in the last many project. Except the difference here is that we're not doing it upon, you know, loading them into a stack and and aligning them at the same time. This is basically if we already have all of the images into a single document and then we want to align them a separate operations. Trust me, there's gonna be times when you want to do it all at once. And there's gonna be times when you want to do it one step at a time and do edits in between those steps. And so now you know both ways. So if we were to let's just leave this at Auto and see what happens by click, Okay, Photo shop is going to go through its process, align these different layers and it looks exactly the same. And the reason for that is because we checked that box when we were loaded the files into a stack. So basically, we already told Photoshopped automatically aligned these layers so it can't really do any better than it already did. But what we really want this to do in order to fix these lines here. We really want photo shop to blend these layers. And if you notice when it come up to edit, there's not only auto align, there's auto blend, and that's really what we want in order to fix these lines here. So again, I'm going to say that this is a panorama and we want seamless tones and colors, which is gonna tell photo shop to go in and try to actually change some of the colors. So it's gonna try to make it seamless here. So this is darker and this is lighter. We have lighter color values, darker color values. It's going to do its best to try to make that as seamless as possible. So when I hit okay, photo shots going to take a second to go through the process of blending all of these and let's see what our final result looks like here and here we go. There we go looks a lot better. You can see now it's all blended together seamlessly, and it looks like a great panorama, and we can take this to the next level. If you want to get rid of all of these transparent pixels. Let's just open up the crop tool and crop this down to where we're hiding. All of the transparent pixels were getting rid of all of those, and you can hate either hit enter or you could just click on the check box in order to finish that. And there we go. Much better result. We've gone through the process of loading the files into a single document using the load files into stack script. We've learned how to automatically align those using auto align. We've also learned how to blend them together using auto blend. Now, in our next video, we're gonna learn how we can copy and paste items here in a photo shop. 7. Copying and pasting: in this video, we'll learn about copying and pasting in Photoshopped. Now I know copying and pasting seems like it's a very easy thing to do, and fortunately it can be. There's a ton of different ways that we can copy and paste things in Photoshopped. Unlike all the utilities we've looked at so far in this section, which one you use at any given time is really going to depend on what you're working on. So let's get familiar with some of the options that we have available to us so that you'll know when you're working on your own projects, which ones you can use, and you'll know what options you have. So let's start with the basic process of copying and pasting pixels in photo shop. The first thing we need to do to copy and paste pixels and photo shop is to tell photo shop what pixels we want to copy, and we do that with a selection. So I'm gonna happen over to the marquee selection tool. Now we are gonna talk about selections later on. In this course, there's a thana ways to make selections. Very intricate selections inside of Photoshopped. Very, very powerful part of Photoshopped making selections. And then, of course, all of that works with copying and pasting as well once you have that selection. But for now, let's just do a simple selection here in the clouds. So now that I have this selection made, I just left click and drag in order to make that selection. Now we can come up to edit copy. You can see the keyboard shortcut, as you would expect his control, see or command see on a Mac, and then Paste is going to be control V or Command V on a Mac as well. And this is the straightforward part of copying and pasting. So let's copy this. And now if we just come in and paste, you can see what Photoshopped has done. Uh, over here in the layers panel, we can see we have a new layer that's been created, and that new layer consists of the pixels that we had selected. So we pasted them into a new layer. Now it doesn't really look like they're here, but if I turn off the background layer, you can see the selection that we had made the reason why they're hidden here is just that they blend in perfectly. If I move this layer, we can start to see. It's just that they just blend in perfectly because it just paste them right on top of of that background layer. Now we can take this a step further by copying pixels from one document and then pasting them into another document. So I'm going to delete this layer. We'll click on the trash can in the icon. I'm trashcan icon in the layers panel rather and has come back and let's make another selection. But let's select maybe somewhere around here, um, around this tree over here just so that we can, you know, see it a little bit easier. It's not just in the cloud somewhere. So once we have this selection come up and it copy used the keyboard shortcut, get familiar with the keyboard shortcuts. I'm using the menus a lot in this course because it's hard to see the keyboard shortcuts. Ah, when you're watching the video, but control, see? And then over here in this document, it's the exact same photograph. I just have it black and white that we can see what's happening when we paste this in. So if you go and hit control V or command V and paste this in, that's probably not what you expected. You probably did not expect it to be pasted directly into the center of the document. It's obviously not where the original selection Waas. Now there's a couple different options that we have. We could try to fix this manually. We can paste this in, and then we can use our move tools we've learned in previous videos move this around. Try to get it toe aligned perfectly. Looks pretty close. Is it perfect out of no Ah, we can use the auto align in order to ask Photoshopped to try to align things for us. But there's actually a better way to do this, so I'm going to delete this layer and let's look at another way that we can do this once we have our selection copied so we have this copied. It's it's still copied, but we can copy it again if we want to. Over here, instead of just pasting, let's go down to paste special and we paste it in place. That's going to tell Photoshopped to paste it in the same place that it was when we copied it. So now if I paste it in place is going to be placed exactly where we would expect. It's not in the center of the document. It's being placed now. There's something important to keep in mind with this. This is working perfectly in this example because both of our documents are exactly the same size. If they're not the same size photo shop is still going toe place it where it was from the original document. So, for example, here we can see we're about to. I believe that centimeters. If I right click Yes, centimeters. So in our ruler weaken. See where? About two centimeters over and about 10 centimeters down. So two centimeters over and 10 centimeters down is where it's pasted it. Because when we copied it, the selection was two centimeters over and 10 centimeters down. Now, if you have a document where two centimeters over to the left and 10 centimeters down means something completely different in that, you know it's not this whole image shifted over or something's not in that same place. Ah, photo shop is still going to place it two centimeters down to centimeters to the left in 10 centimeters down, but it might not be positioned where you might expect. So that's something to keep in mind. Ah, when you're copying and pasting between documents, paste in place is great. Ah, but it depends on the size of the two different documents that you're pasting to. And from now, before we wrap up this video, let's cover a few other ways that we can copy and paste. As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, what you use really depends on your needs. There's no right or wrong. It's all based on what you need to do, but we don't know what we don't know. So let's move a little bit faster as we walk through some of these options, some of these work flows and some of these things Ah, that may or may not work for you, depending on what you're doing in your project. So I'm gonna have back to the color here. And now that we already have a selection made, if I have my move tool, watch what happens when I move this selection by just left, click and drag. You can see it literally just moves this selection. It takes the pixels here and moves them over here. But it does not create a new layer were on that same layer. So let me undo this and watch what happens if I hold down Ault or option. If you're on a Mac, you hold down Ault and then left, click and drag. Same same process. We're just holding down a modifier key. Now when I do this and whoops, I did not have the right key selected. Let me undo this. I actually had my function key selected instead of Ault. Let me hold down Ault. And now when I move this, you can see we're making copies, right? So it took that original. It did not move it out. And and now every time we let go and then click again, it's making a copy of that again. It's not on a new layer. It's on the same layer. But depending on your project, that may be something that you need. Now we can do this across multiple documents as well, Sort of like we saw with copy and paste. We've looked at how to move things from one document to another and It is a simple as taking this selection. And once we have this with our move tool just left, click and drag move it up to the document tab. And then when we pull this over, you'll notice the black box around here. That means we're going to be moving it into this document, and it will move wherever we let go of the mouse. When I let go, it will move it right there. So again, it's not necessarily pacing it in place. It's pasting it wherever we have our mouse positioned. So again, it's just a different option for when you're moving selections from one document to another . Now, if we hot back to our color document here, there's another way that we can copy and paste, and it's a little more intricate. It's really copying and pasting one pixel at a time. So in order to see this, we're gonna have to zoom in, let me zoom in way over here were left, click and drag in order to zoom and really far. Ah, so we can see this a little bit easier. Let's make our selection so make a selection. And now with this selected, we're gonna have to use some keyboard shortcuts here. It's gonna be control and Ault or command an option if you're on a Mac. Once you hold down Control and Ault and then use the direction keys on your keyboard, watch what happens. As I move this, you'll notice it's copying one pixel at a time and pasting it. See, we're getting this kind of a streak effect. It's copy it, really. It's copying and pasting one pixel at a time as it moved. Ah, we can actually jump further and do 10 pixels at a time if you want. If you do control Ault shift, which would be command option shift and then use your keyboard shortcut. Ah, the directional arrows. So you can. I'm moving it left. We can move down. Ah, we can move right and we can move up. So it really kind of depends on what you're doing and how, what sort of project you're working on and how you need those pixels copied. Now, the last method of copying something is my personal favorite. It's something that we use all the time. It's really, really handy because it lets you make a selection and then copy that selection as a new layer inside of the same document, So I'm going to zoom out. So me hit control zero in order to get back to where we can see everything on our screen. And now let's make a selection. So again, I'm just going to select somewhere. Once we have this selected, we can come up to layer new and then do layer via copy. And that is going to create a new layer out of our selection if we want to actually remove the pixels from the layer below. Of course, weaken due later via cuts that is, shift control J or Shift Command J and then Command J is layer via copy, and that is a keyboard shortcut. I would recommend you learn, because it's one that you probably use a lot. Once you create this, you can see again we're getting a new layer that is just our selection. So if I turn off our background layer, you can see we have those pixels on a brand new layer that now we can move around and do whatever we want. And we still have that background there, so a little bit different than when we move these around these are embedded into the background layer. They've actually altered those pixels. Ah, this is a really, really handy way of selecting some pixels and then creating a new layer out of it. And then you can do whatever it is that you want to do with that layer. Okay, I know we covered a lot in this video. As you can see, there's a lot of different ways that you can copy and paste things here in photo shop. And, of course, even though we're only focusing on photo shop in this course, I do want to also point out that you can copy and paste between other adobe applications in Creative Cloud as well. For example, if you copy some pixels in photo shop, you can paste them into illustrator and vice versa. Now let's move on to our next video, where we're going to learn how to take advantage of undo and redo inside of Photoshopped 8. Undo, redo and the history panel: in this video, we're gonna learn how toe work with undo redo in the history panel in photo shop. So let's kick this off by looking at where Photoshopped keeps a log of. What we're doing is I'm gonna come up to window and history and that's going to open up the history panel. I'm gonna make us a little bit bigger just so that we can see this a little bit easier. Now, keep an eye on this panel as we do a few things. Now, if you are watching this course and order, we're gonna do some things that we haven't looked at yet. And don't worry. We're gonna look at how we can do things like this in more depth. Later on, I want you to stay focused on this panel so that you can see as I'm doing different things . Ah, this history panel is going to basically keep a log of what we're doing. So the first thing I'm gonna do is to create a new layer, create the new layer, and then I'm going to rename that layer, do something like color and once we have our layer named, that's come over to the paint brush, and I'm going to select maybe a nice, bright red. And let's start painting over some of these Berries. And that's pretty small someone to resize this. Maybe crank up the size of my paintbrush quite a bit more so we can paint over some of these Berries. Here we go. Once we have that. Now we're just going to set the blend mode to multiply and kind of give this look that are , are Berries are changed colors, right? And that looks like I went over a little bit there. We can clean that up. We'll learn how to do things like that and how to clean up things like that later on. But here in the history panel, you can see that photo shop has kept a log of all of the things that I've done now, as you can probably imagine, if I were to undo something, then that's going to step back one step in history. So if I were to come to edit undo brush Tool used the keyboard shortcut control Z or command Z on a Mac, then an undue you can see it's going to step back one, and you can see, the brushstroke that I had used there is has been undone right now. If I were to hit control Z again or use the keyboard or used the keyboard shortcut control Z Command Z Goto edit Undo. It's all the same thing by undo one more time, it's going to step back one more step further. Now we can redo if we're like Oh, you know what? I went too far and I actually like that last brushstroke. I want that back. Well, weaken either come up to edit and redo or use the keyboard shortcut Shift control Z or command shift z either way. And then when we re do, you can see it's pulling that back in history. Now, one thing that's really cool about the history panel is one. We have this open. We can actually jump back to a specific point in time. So if I were to left click on one of these, Maybe this first brush tool brush tool here by click all the way back, you can see Oh, that was That was when we had the brush way too small. That was actually I might like that one. So let's go back and go to this fresh tool. And once we have that, if we were to start painting again, you can see now that is the new point, the newest point in history. And now all of those other moments have been erased from our history panel. Which means, of course, if we start undoing things, then we're not going to be able to get those back. So that's something to keep in mind when you're working in the history panel. Now let's step this up a notch and learn about some really cool features that we can use in the history panel to save our document at different parts if we want to get some of that back, and one of those is called a snapshot. So let's say we really like this first brush and we want to keep this as a snapshot. This little icon right here will create a new snapshot. Watch what happens when we do this. It's gonna create a version of this document at that point in history so you can see up here at the top. We have our original file, which is 30 underscore begin, and we also have the snapshot So now I can come in. And if I'm all the way down here, I could jump all the way back to this snapshot that we saved at that moment in history. We can even rename this if we want to weaken, double click on it if we want to remember what we had saved their what we liked about that point in history. Now, if you find that you're using snapshots a lot, you can actually speed up this process by telling Photoshopped automatically save a new snapshot when you save your PSD file itself. To do that, all we need to do is cop to the history panel, go into our options, and then we can tell Photoshopped automatically create a new snapshot whenever we save. So that's something to keep in mind when you're working here in a photo shop. Well, let's say we were happy with the snapshots, but, you know, we really just want to take this in Ah ah, whole different direction and we like maybe some of these brush strokes that we've done and we want to start from here, but we want to keep what we currently have and just pull this off into its own document. Start working on that. While that is exactly what this button right here will do. And so that's going to create a new document from that current state. So you can see now we're in a brand new uh, we are history has been cleaned because we're in a brain new document. So we have our original document here and we have this document. If we start to paint, we're gonna be adding in history to this document here, and we can create snapshots. We can save this off as a Photoshopped document, but pretty much it's just kind of like version ing are edits weaken, do whatever it is that we need to do now. One thing I do want to point out about history is that it will clear as soon as you save that file. So if we save this off and we want to come back to it later, I'm gonna goto file save as let's save this in our project files as blending changed at PSD . That's fine hit save. Now if our to close out of this file and then open it back up all of our history is going to be gone. So watch this. We have our history in the panel right here. This is currently saving. You see? It's saving down here. Now. I'm gonna close out of this document. Let's go to file Open recent open up that file that we just saved off. And now when we open this up, look at the history panel, it's going to be completely empty. So that's one thing to keep in mind is that the history panel on Lee keeps history for the document that you have currently open. It doesn't save it with the actual document itself. Now, the last thing I want to point out is how, at any time weaken Tell Photoshopped to go all the way back to the version of the file that we have saved on the hard drive very, very quickly. And to do that, I'm gonna hop back over to this begin file because let's say we've made all these changes. But you know what? We saved off that Photoshopped file as a blending change, a completely different file and that's a version of it. So I want to revert back all the way to the beginning file because this is the begin. That way, when you're following along with this course, you'll have that beginning file that you can follow along with. It doesn't have any of those, Ah, the layer or any of the color added to it. So if you notice up here in the document, you'll notice this little asterisk on that little asterisk means that the file has been altered since it was last saved. So any changes that you make a soon as you make a change photo shop is going to say up, This has changed since it was saved. So if you want to save this, you should do that. If you want to save those changes, well, we can revert back to the saved document at any time by going up to file Revert or using the keyboard shortcut F 12. Now, when we do this, watch what happens. We're gonna lose everything that we had just done. You'll notice that the asterisk is gone. Our layer is gone, our color is gone. But because we still have this document open, you'll notice that our history is still here. So we could still get that back because we haven't actually closed out of that document. Now, if for any reason we do actually want to clear out all of our history and and clear that out, we can simply come up to our panel options and come up to clear history. And that's going to clear all of the history, except for the very last option. Okay, so to recap in this video, we learned that Photo Shop has some very powerful undo and redo capabilities that goes beyond just edit, undo and edit Redux. Not only that, but we also dug into the history panel toe. Learn how we can use that to jump backward and forward throughout operations that we've taken. We also learned how we can save and use snapshots as well as how we can create a brand new document from any point in history. Now there's another really cool feature about the history panel that Photoshopped can let us do that we haven't really talked about yet, and that is the ability to actually paint with history. But this video starting to run a little long. So let's move on to the next video where we're gonna learn about the art history brush 9. Using the history brush: in our last video, we learned how to use the history panel in this video will take it a step further by learning how to paint with history using the history brush. So, as we learned in our last video, history does not get saved with a document. So I have a new Photoshopped document for this video in the project files. And as you can see, we're not gonna have any history when we open that. But I wanted to show this part again of creating some edits in order to create some history , because it's important to know how those edits are being made in order to really understand how the history brush is working and what it's doing. So let's start by creating a new layer. I'm gonna double click on this layer and and name. It buries color and will change the blending mode to multiply like we did in the last video . And as I mentioned in the last video, it don't worry. We're gonna cover layers and blending modes and what all that does later on in this course . But just for now, we just want to make some edits here, and so I'm gonna come in and let's paint some Berries on the maybe the right side and maybe some on the left side. OK, so we have a couple, ah, sides that have been painted here. Now let's switch to the history Brush with history. Brush is the keyboard shortcut. Why on the keyboard? Or you can hop over here to the toolbar and come over to the history brush. That's it, right here. Now, if you notice this icon here matches this icon up in the history panel and the reason for that, if we hover over this, you'll see the tool tip that is setting the source for the history brush. So if our to paint right now, it's going to paint from this original file this point in history, wherever I paint. That makes sense. So here. So if I paid right here, you can see it's painting that original file. Now you'll notice it gets a little bit darker, and the reason for that is because if I turn off the original layer, you can see I'm painting on this same layer as the color and because that's set to multiply , that's why we're getting that effect. But let's come in and create a new layer. And I'm just gonna call this our history brush that we we have a fresh layer to paint on. And now if I paint with the original Ah, document. Now, if I start to paint, you'll see that we're painting that original document in there. And what's really cool about this is weaken set any point in history to be the point that we want to paint. So if this brush here was the one where we did it on the left so you can see we painted here on the left. Now, if I select this as the source, let's hop all the way back to our current fish history so that we have our new layer. But now that we have this, you'll notice Wait, I can't paint there. The reason for that is because when we're selecting this point in history, at that point in history, we didn't have this current layer. So this is where it starts to get to be kind of an abstract concept, cause you have to think about how the history was created. You can see we're trying to paint on this layer with Ah, history that did not know that that layer existed. So if we wanted to paint with this history, we're gonna have to paint on a layer that already existed in this case, this layer existed because we created it back here. But if I select this layer, you can see the even see the icon that is crossed out were not able to paint there. But if I select this one, I can paint and then I can paint this back. Let's actually turn off the visibility of this layer so that we can see that. See what we're painting here and you can see I'm painting this back. Actually, let me undo this back here just so we can turn off this layer. Let's go back, turn off. So we get back to here, just we can see what we're doing here again because this layer was hiding it If I were to paint the history Now I have this part here. That's the history that I'm is my source. And now if I paint on the various color layer, you can see I'm painting that part in history Back on to my image. Now, in my experience, the history brush is one of those tools that it is more of an abstract concept because you can't save history across Photoshopped documents. That also means that your history states are going to be unique. Each time you start working in your document, every time it's gonna the history you you do the operations you do are going to be unique. So I would encourage you to take some time, play around with this. Get the hang of this abstract concept of painting with the history brush. Now, in this video, one of the tools that we use is something we haven't really covered yet, and that is the paint brush tool. So after you're done playing with the history brush and seeing how that works, I'll see you in the next video, where we're gonna learn about the very powerful paint brush tool. 10. Basics of the paint brush: In this video, we'll get an overview of the paint brush tool now. The paint brush tool is something we've used a few times throughout this course and will continue to use it. Ah, lot throughout the entirety of this course. But let's take some time to get familiar with some of the core features of this tool. So here I have a blank document and toe. Activate the paint brush tool. It's over here in the toolbar. It is the keyboard shortcut. B. Begin C. Once we have this activated, all we have to do to paint is the left, click and drag in order to paint on our canvas. Now you can see. Right now we're painting with black if you use the color panel, which, if you don't have this, open you confined under window color or use the keyboard shortcut F six. With the color panel, you can choose what color you want and then, as you would expect once you start to paint, that is now the color that you're painting with, and you can also another alternative. If you don't have the color panel open, you can use over here in the toolbar, you can see the colors. You can just click on this and that will open up the color picker for your foreground color . This is the foreground color by cancel out of this and then this is the background color here. So basically, you can swap between these if you want to using these little arrows. Also use the keyboard shortcut X that is a keyboard shortcut. You're going to be using a lot toward recommend you get familiar with that and then another keyboard shortcut you'll use a lot is D and D. As in David, that keyboard shortcut is the same. Is clicking this button here and watch what happens when I do that You can see we're set back to our default black and white. So that's pure black and pure white. And then if we hit ex watch the foreground and background colors, you can see we're cycling between those so it any time we can update that. So if we wanted to say maybe toe have red and black Well, now, if we use acts to cycle between them, you can see we're cycling between so we can paint with black and we can paint with red. Okay, So up here in the options, we have a few different options for our paintbrush. And the key ones that I want to want to focus on in this video have to do with the brush shape so you can see under here we have a ton of different options for different shapes. Ah, if I make this larger and dial some of these down, you can see all of these different shapes. Dry media brushes. If you wanna make it look like you're drawing with a pencil, you can do this. Ah, this is a good one. Charcoal pencil. Ah, wet media brushes. If you're talking about actual paint brushes, um, oil's things like that, you can start to mimic a lot of those looks using different brushes and again later on this course, we're gonna look at how we can create our own custom brushes and really start to customize this. But I just want to point out that you have a lot of different options for different shapes . Eso If we select one of these and start to paint, you can see the difference between what we had before and what we have here. It's still the paintbrush, It's still red. It just looks very, very different. Now, over here we have a couple of different options in the tool as well for opacity and flow. And you can see by default this brush that we're painting with set the flow to 55% Now, in theory, it might seem like opacity and flow are the same thing, but they're actually different. The opacity of your brush tells Photoshopped the maximum opaqueness of the brush to use and in the flow tells Photoshopped this speed that maximum opaqueness is painted. So I'm going to switch back to just a general brush here and let's set this to 100%. Ah, for both of them, so we can see what happens. Okay, so this is kind of our our base here. Now let's set our opacity to 50% and you can see the difference between 100% 50%. Now, I'm gonna take this and let's bring all the way back up to 100%. And let's take the flow. I'm gonna I just left click in here, type in 50 and flow and you can see the difference, right? So the difference here again is we're telling Photoshopped with opacity What the opaqueness , how much transparency there is in that actual brush. And then the flow is going to be how, how fast, how quickly that is actually painted. Now, if you'll notice up here, we have another icon, and this icon has to do with pen pressure, and that is really going to drive a lot of, especially with flow in the speed that the opaqueness is painted. The pen pressure is going to deal a lot with that. So when you enable this, if you turn this on, then when you paint, you'll be able to. If you push really hard, then you'll get Mawr flow Mawr more speed for that mawr more pressure in there, whereas if he paint really light, it's actually going to affect that now, in order for that toe work. If I were to do that right here, you can see there's really no difference. If I paint this, I turn this off. There's really no difference as far as that is concerned, and the reason for that is because you have toe have a tablet or some sort of a tool that will support pen pressure for toe work. It won't work if he just use your mouse. So here's an example of what I'm talking about. This is a graphics drawing tablet, and these typically have pen pressure support so that when you push really hard, you're going to get ah, much heavier pen pressure, and it's going to affect how it actually, um, draws inside a photo shop and you push lightly and you're going to get something different now. In my case, my tablet is actually completely different computer than the one that I'm recording on right now, so I'm gonna have to switch computers for this. But here is the difference between painting with a mouse that has no pen pressure and painting with a tablet that supports pen pressure. So as you can see the device supporting pen pressure, I can paint really lightly to get some really nice light Ah, strokes or I can push harder in order to get heavier strokes. And again, the the flow is going to affect this more so than the A. Pass it Ian in that case, but really, it's a mixture of the flow on your brush as well as just how hard or how light you're actually pushing and you're using all of those together in order to get some really, really cool effects. So, as you can see, if you use a device that supports pen pressure, you're gonna get a lot more control over how your strokes look in photo shop. This is really crucial if you're doing any sort of sketching or illustration and Photoshopped, but you don't necessarily have toe have a graphics tablet to use Photoshopped. It all depends on what sort of projects you'll be using. Photoshopped four. Okay, I'm gonna get off my tablet now. And let's head back to look at some of the brush controls that we have in the last. Really key thing that I want to focus on for the controls is we saw some of the options up here. But if you're in your document, you're working in your document. There's a much faster way to access all of your brush controls, and that is simply to right click. So whenever you right click, you're going to get access to your brush controls so you can see we can change the size here, which again there's even an even faster way, then right clicking and changing this. Ah, if you want to change the size of your brush, just use left bracket in order to make it smaller and then right bracket. In order to make it larger, you can see that's the shortcut. You can even watch appear in the tool options. Watch how it's changing the size of our brush, so it's really fast way of controlling the size of your brush. But there are more options. When you right click, you can choose the hardness, so that's going to be how much feathering there is. So with 0% hardness, you can see how smooth the edges are. If I switch this hardness to 100% you can see we're getting 100% there and you can see how it's not 100% opacity. That's because it's we have the flow set to 50 so it's really we're getting kind of that overlapping effect because of the flow set to 50. Let me set that back to 100% just for this example here. And then. Of course, we have access to all of our same brush. Is that we have in here and we can customize this. We can create a round brush is we can load in brushes. We're gonna look at that later on in this course. But hopefully you're starting to get an idea for how powerful this can all be and really getting an idea for why Photoshopped is one of the industry standards for illustrators and artists all over the world. We're really only scratching the surface here of what it can do. As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, we will be using the paintbrush throughout this course for a lot of different things. And of course, we're gonna look at how we could. Customise airbrush is even more when it comes to getting familiar with your paintbrush. There is really no good substitution for practicing with it. And now that you know enough of how to switch to your paintbrush, change colors. Change the size of your brush, change the opacity, the flow, change the shape of your brush by changing some of those presets that we looked at. And even if you have a tablet, start playing with the pen pressure capabilities, just start practicing with it, getting familiar with some of the brushes. What are some of the brushes that you like? Some of the brushes you don't like and really start practicing? There's no substitution for practicing, so now is a great time to start playing around with the paint brush tool on your own. Start learning how these different things can affect your brush strokes when you're ready to move on. I will see you in the next video, where we're gonna learn about actions in photo shop. 11. Working with actions: in this video will learn about a time saving feature and photo shop called actions. So in order to find our actions, we need to open up the actions panel. And since it is a panel, you should know where to find that. It's up in window actions, and you can also use the keyboard shortcut Alter F nine or Option F nine. If you're on a Mac, once we open up actions, you'll see this panel pop out. I'm actually gonna take this and let's move this over here just so that we're not covering up our image and we can still see it fine. So these are actions, and there are some default actions that come with photo shop. And that's these in this folder here. So let's just see what happens when we run an action. Someone is select. Maybe this CP atoning action here, So once we have it selected, simply click on the play button, and that's going to run through the action. So as we can see, what happened here is Photoshopped ran through a number of options really, really fast. But weaken dig into this to see exactly what what options operations took place. So let's hop into our history so we can see what happened. We can see. So the first thing was, it created a new layer. So that's this layer here. Then it's stamped the visible. If we opened this up, we can see it's actually merging the visible things into that new layer. And then, from there, de saturated that layer to make it black and white. And then it applied a new hue saturation layer. That's this here and that you can see the adjustment layer here. Under here, it's adding colorization and certain Hugh values and saturation values. Now we're gonna look at adjustment layers later on. In this course, you don't get too bogged down with the details of that. But as we can see this action here, we can see the different steps that made a snapshot. We can see it made a layer. It made a new layer. It merged the the current layer into that new one. Then it de saturated that to get the black and white, and then it created this kind of a C p a tone. So that is what the action did simply by clicking on play. It ran through a lot of different options. And in a nutshell, that's what actions are. It's just a sequence of operations that can be recorded and then played back in photo shop . What's really cool about this is not just the default action that come with photo shop. We can create our own actions. So let's walk through this process first. I'm gonna hop back to the very top in order to get back to our original image here and in the actions panel. I'm gonna close that and tell you what, Let's actually create a brand new set or a new folder of actions comers called us Dan's actions. Okay, now, inside this folder, we can create a new action, someone to click on the icon to create a new action. And let's call this may be a cool. We're gonna add a cooling filter to our photograph. Now, we're gonna add this to the set that we just created. You can see the different folders here. We have the option to add that into just to organize our actions. We can add a keyboard shortcut if we want to. If we want to run this action by just hitting the F two key on our keyboard. Weaken Do that. We can use modifiers. We can use shift F two or control left to or both. Ah, we can also change the color. And that's just going to kind of highlight it over here in the actions panel if we want to . Ah, those were all options that we have. I'm just gonna leave these at the default and then click on record. Okay, so we are now currently recording our action. You can see the record button is in progress, and now all we have to do is to walk through whatever it is that we want our action to be. So, a first step, I'm gonna create an adjustment layer. And again, don't get too bogged down with the adjustment layers. We're gonna talk about them in much more depth later on what they're doing. But I was going to create a new black and white adjustment layer just to turn our image black and white. And then let's create a new ah photo filter. And let's make this a cooling photo filter so kind of much cooler. Look to it. We can increase the density. We can crank it up however much we want, but you get the idea. We're kind of cooling down, the the image there. We can even rename this. So let's take our photo filter and let's rename this to are cooling filter so we know that it's it's cooling the image on then this one here we can rename this to be black and white Adjustment Weaken. Rename it to be whatever we want and you'll notice as we're doing. All of this photo shop is recording all of those actions even down to what the current layer is that we have selected. So we want to end up selected on the background layer. You can see it's gonna go through the process, create all of it and then set the background layer as what is currently selected. When we're done, all we have to do is hit stop, and we have our action. Now. The real power of this happens when we want to apply that action to another image. We don't have to walk through each of these steps manually anymore. We only have to do it once, so I do have another image here. We can see this image here. In order to apply this, we do the exact same thing that we did before you dial that up just so that we don't need to see that we can select this hit play and photo shop is going to run through all of those actions. Gonna add the adjustment layer, it's going to rename everything. And then at the very end, you can see it even left the background selected, just like we told it to do. And there we go. As you can see, this could be a really fast way of running through a series of different commands here in photo shop. But tell you what, let's let's make this a little bit more interactive. I'm going to save this action off here and then show you how you can load it on your computer at home. So in order to save an action, and this is really cool cause you confined actions out there online in order to do aton of different operations Ah, to save in action, all you need to do is to select the set that you want to save, click on options and then save actions. Okay, Someone to save this off as Dan's actions. That 80 and that's the actions file. You can see where it is currently saving them, so it's saving it in a photo shot file. Now, once I have this saved off, I will make sure to to include that in the project files for this course. So once you've downloaded the product files, all you have to do is tow. Load them into your version of photo shop to get action, to get access to the action that we just mate. And now you're probably wondering, How do you load the actions into Photoshopped? Well, it's pretty much the same as what we just did when we saved them. We just have to load them. So let's come into the options here, and we can load actions now. Right now, you can see that I have the actions here in this folder, but you probably won't have them there because you didn't save them. So what you're going to see is something. If I take this, cut this out. Let's pull open our project files on where paces in the project files before I forget. So just grab them from the project files just right click copy. And then when you load when you open up this load action, you can just paste them right in here and then just load in those actions and you can see they've been loaded. In course, we have two of them now because I already had one. So in order to get rid of actions, all we have to do is to just left click and drag it down to the trash can, and that action is deleted. Okay, Now, in our next video, we're gonna learn how we can resize are Photoshopped document by learning the difference between canvas size and image size. 12. Canvas size vs image size: as you're editing photos, there are two key ways to resize your photo shop document. Which one you use depends on the outcome you desire. So that's why in this video we're gonna learn the difference between canvas size and image size. So let's start with canvas size so we can see we have this image here. And if we come up to image canvas size, we can also use the keyboard shortcut all to control sea or option command. See, on a Mac, we choose the canvas size. Let's resize this to something like Ah, 1920 by tenis we're gonna do a 10 80 image. So in order to get between these different I'm just hitting tab in order to cycle between them and you can change the unit that you want and there we go. All right, So watch what happens to this image. As soon as I click on OK, we can see we're going to get an error. It's going to say, Hey, you know what? This image is actually larger than the campus you're wanting is gonna clip. We click proceed and you can see what happened. The image itself does not resize just the canvas of the document. We've talked about this briefly and videos before, but just to reiterate this is the canvas of the document. So that is all that we've resized. We did not resize the actual image. We just resized the canvas. And now that we've seen canvas size and action, you can probably guess what image size does. So if I were to come up here and undo my canvas size to get this back, and then let's do image size to the exact same dimensions and see what the difference is. So if we come up to image size again, there's a keyboard. Shortcuts is all to control. I or option command I on a Mac and image size. We're gonna have these options here again. I'm going to switch this to pixels and let's set this to what we had before 1920 and you can see by default on the image size Photo shop is going to try to keep the height relative to the same ratio as the wit. So if I switch this to 1920 then it's not going to be distorted if the height is at 15 36. But we can change this if we want to. If you really want to, we can unlock this and then we can set this to 10. 80. But it's probably going to be squished. Weaken, See what's gonna happen as soon as I click on. OK? Oh, before we do that, I do want to mention this re sampling. There's other options for re sampling in most cases. Realistically, we can leave this at Automatic photo shop is going to try to decide what pixels need to be adjusted. Toe actually resize that image. Ah, but it is worth pointing out that if you try to resize your image larger than it is now, a photo shop is gonna try to do its best, but too much larger. You're gonna start to see some pics elation going on. That's something that we learned about in the section covering digital images. The difference between rast arise images and vector. And that's why, for the sake of this video were re sizing this image to be smaller, Then it was You can always make an image smaller than the original with ease, But that whole enhanced thing that you see on TV where they scale up an image and still can read Really small text. That's all fiction. Okay, so let's click on OK and see the difference between, uh, image size And then when we do canvas size so you can see this actually sized the entire image down and you can also see it squished it. And that's because we unlocked that height. And we told it, You know, we really want to force this to be 1920 by 10 80. Okay, so now that we know the difference between canvas sizing and an image size, let's go back to each one real quick and get familiar with some of the options that we have . Because again, depending on what your project is and what you're needing to do, you might need to change some of these options. So I'm going to come back up here. Let's undo this to get back to our original image. Let's come into image canvas size and in here. If I set this back to our let's set this back to our 1920 by 10 80 I'm just going to use keep using that. You'll notice that we have some options here, so relative is going to be relative to the original document. So instead of setting this to 1920 by 10. 80 then we could say, you know what? I want this to be relative to the original size. So the original size was 2048 pixels by 1638 pixels. Which means if we said it to 1920 by 10. 80 we're gonna be removing 128 pixels from the width and 558 pixels from the height. The cool thing about this is we can change this to B whatever we want instead of actually removing. What if we wanted to add some pixels to the height? We want to add 250 pixels to this image. Well, now that leads into this next area. What if where do we want those pixels to be added? Well, this little imagine this is this entire canvas here. So right now it's set right in the middle. If we were to adjust this, maybe click on this here Now this is going to be where are images and this is going to be the 250 pixels that we add to our canvas. And then this here is going to be what color we want our canvas extension color to be so we can change whatever we want. Background. You can see the background color. We could change to the foreground color that we have selected here. Or we can just change the black or white or whatever we want. We can also click on this here if we want to choose a custom color. So with this little diagram, here might seem a little abstract, but it'll make sense as soon as I click on. OK, you can see we have exactly 250 pixels that have been added to the bottom here of our image . And so our image has essentially been shifted up. Now there might be times where we do not want the canvas to add a white background. Now, the reason why it did this is because this is a J peg image. If we look at the top here to J peg image, if you remember from a previous video where we learned about the different file formats and some of the pros and cons between them, one of the cons for J pegs is they do not support transparency. So it has to be some sort of a color. No. If we want transparency, we're gonna have to convert this. Okay, so I'm gonna come over here and undo undo our canvas size. And one of the easiest ways to convert this is to convert this background layer into a normal photo shop layer. Because if you remember, J pegs also do not support layers. So as soon as we convert this to a normal photo shop layer, that's telling photo shop as soon as we save this, it's not going to be a J pic. So we can open up the ability for, ah, transparency as well, because Photoshopped documents support transparency. So let's see this in action. I'm gonna hold down Ault or option on ah, Mac, and then double click this layer and you'll see it gets converted. It's no longer locked, it's no longer background. It just layer zero. And now if you walk through the exact same process, if we come up here, we go to our canvas size. We switch this to relative want pixels 250 pixels added down here are image going to shift up to the top. Click on. You'll notice there's no canvas extension color anymore. We click on OK and you can see now we have our canvas that has been resized, and these pixels down here are now transparent because this is a normal layer. Okay, so in this video, we learned that re sizing the canvas will not affect the size of the the pixels on our layer. But it will change the dimensions of our Photoshopped documents canvas, whereas re sizing the image will affect the pixels of the image itself. One of the things we did in this video was to convert our background layer to a normal photo shop layer, but we haven't really talked about layers that much yet, So let's move on to our next video, where we'll start learning Mawr about layers by first getting an understanding what the concept of layers even means. See you there 13. Understanding the concept of layers: in this video will kick off this section by getting familiar with the concept of layers. Now one of my favorite ways to explain layers if you think about those times when you're rearranging the layout of your home, if you're like me before doing the work of moving everything, you might create a very simple lee out for what your home looks like, and then place the furniture on top for one room and then the other just to see where things fit. And if you think of those different elements in this case, the furniture that were stacking on top of the floor plan as layers and layers are exactly what they sound like. In that way, they're basically different elements that you stack on top of each other to get the final result. But this is where it starts to get a little more complex when you start to factor in some of the rules. That photo shop has surrounding layers because there are multiple types of layers inside of photo shop, and each each type has different rules for what you can do to it or what you can do. Ah, with it. So up until now in the course, if you're following along in order, we've played with layers a little bit, and most of the layers that we've looked at have been pixel layers. And so those air layers that just contained a bunch of pixels and you can use tools to edit those those air probably some of the most popular layers in photo shop. And then we also looked at the concept of pixel versus vector, and we will look at vector layers later on in this course will also be looking at adjustment layers. Those air, different type of layer. They're smart objects in three D layers and video layers were going to be covering all of those in this course. But just know that they are different types of layers. And so what you can do on a pixel layer doesn't necessarily mean that you can do the same thing on a vector or a shape layer. Now there's another type of layer that you may have seen again if you've been following along, and that is the background layer. The background layer is a special type of layer that by default is at the very bottom, and it's locked so the background layer is what Photoshopped calls whenever a file type does not support normal layers or any of the other layer types. That photo shop has. So, for example, J. Peg images. We've looked at some J pegs. We've learned some of the pros and cons of working with J pegs, and one of those is that J pegs do not support layers. So when you open a J. Pagan photo shop in the Layers panel, you'll see one layer that's called background because that's a special layer type that basically tells Photoshopped that there are no other layer types in this images on Lee. That one layer now one of the big powers with power behind layers, of course, is not just one at a time, but being able to use multiple layers together. And in photo shop, you can use something called blend modes in order to create some really cool new effects and new looks for your image. But don't worry, we're going to talk about all of that later on. In this course, we're just kind of getting an idea. Some of the terminology in some of the concepts for layers now one cool thing. Once you start, Teoh, create your layers. As you can probably imagine. If you're working on a very complex project, then you can start to add up and get a lot of different layers. And so layers inside of the layer panel. You can rearrange them. You can rename them tow whatever you want. You can put them into groups or folders. Ah, and you can really do a lot in order to help organize them. And we'll look at how to do that as well. Now there is something to keep in mind that Photoshopped documents. PSD files do have a limit of 8000 layers. Now we realized that is a lot of layers, and realistically, you probably won't come across that very quickly. Um, we're probably not going to come across that at any point in this course, but that's something to keep in mind. Just like PSD files have a file size limit of two gigabytes, they also have a limit of 8000 layers. So if you need anything more than that, just like you would if you need a bigger file, then you will want to use a PSB file or a Photoshopped big file if you need more than 8000 layers. Okay, so not that were more familiar with some of the concepts of layers and some of the terminology. How about we see him in action? That's exactly what we're going to do in our next video as we look at how to create, duplicate and delete layers. 14. Creating, duplicating and deleting layers: in our last video we got familiar with the concept of layers in this video will build on that knowledge by looking at how to create, duplicate and delete layers in Photoshopped. Now, by default, Photoshopped has the layers panel open. But just in case it's not open, you confined it where you can find all the other panels under window and layers. Or use the keyboard shortcut F seven to toggle that on and off so we can turn it off or turn it on. And you know what? Actually, wow, we're talking about turning on enough panels. Let's go ahead and close out of libraries and then right click close and close out of learn . Ah, that will collapse that and give us a little more, more space. We can focus on on the things that we're going to focus on in this section, Ari. So right now we only have one layer in this document, and we learned a little bit about this layer in the last video. This is the background layer. It's a special type of layer that is going toe. Always be locked. You can see it's locked, which means that there's a limited number of things that weaken do. We can still paint on this if we want to, but we can't really erase it or go through and create transparency and things like that. There's a limited number of things that we can do with a background layer because it's locked. Now we can convert this into an edible layer by using a keyboard shortcut. So the fastest way to do this is by holding down the Ault key or using option if you're on a Mac and then double clicking with the left mouse button. So when I do that, you see that not only had just been unlocked, but the name has changed. Nothing has changed on the layer. And if we had something else on the layer, if it was a photograph or something like that, nothing will change. It just gets converted to an edible layer, and this is going to be a pixel layer in photo shop. Now, another way to create a pixel layer is by coming down here in the layers panel and looking for this new icon right down here and actually tell you what, let's tear their soft just so it's a little bit easier to see in the center instead of going all the way down there to the bottom. So this icon right here is going to create a new layer, and that's gonna be a new pixel layer. The pixel layers are the default layers in photo shop because Photoshopped works really well with rast arised images. We learned this earlier in the course. Illustrator is really the vector tool for in adobes Creative Cloud and ah, photo shop is the pixel based or rast arised editor, So pixel layers are the default in photo shop when you create a new layer, once you have a new layer created, you can double click on the name double left mouse button, click on the name and then type in whatever you want. So we can maybe call this paintbrush hit enter in order to change that name. And because this is a pixel layer, we can start adding pixels to it, and we looked at how to use the paintbrush in a previous video. So let's come over to the paint brush and let's just paint something in here. You can see I have the opacity set to 50% which is why it looks like that you said this to 100%. There we go, so you can see we're painting on this layer. But if you look closely, you'll notice that there is actually some transparency there. So the the checker in this preview here, let me see if I can actually make this preview bigger. Go to panel options. No, it is the biggest that it can get, so but you'll notice. If you look closely, you'll see the little checker covers some of that. Read this read here. It's because it's partially transparent. By turn off the white layer on the background, you can see that it's partially transparent. That's because when I painted this, the opacity was at 50%. So it was painting 50% opacity for those pixels. Well, let's say we create this layer, and we're really happy with it, but we want to duplicate this layer. We want to get an exact copy of this layer. Well, we could come down here, create a new layer and try to paint exactly what we just did, but we're not gonna ever get it to be pixel perfect. So the easiest way to duplicate a layer. There's multiple ways we can do this. That's one way is, I guess easiest is relative. It depends on which one you prefer. Ah, you can simply right click, and you can go to duplicate layer, and that will duplicate the layer. My personal preference is to take this and just and drag it down to the new icon, and then that's going to duplicate the layer. Now, another way that we can duplicate this is by with this layer selected, we can go to layer new layer via copy. That's control J as the shortcut. Command Jay as the shortcut If you're on a Mac, we learned about this feature in a previous video when we were looking at making a new layer out of a selection. Well, if you don't have anything in the layer selected, then when you use a layer via copy, it's just going to copy the entire layer instead of just whatever you have selected. So now that we have a few different layers, how about trying toe? Organize some of these one easy way that we can organize layers is by creating a group, so this icon down here is a group. Ah, sometimes they're called folders. Photoshopped officially calls them groups, but you can think of them like a folder. It's pretty much just a folder that's just going to help you organize so we can say, maybe these are our duplicated layers. Give it a name DoubleClick in there to give it a name, and then you can left Click and drag your layer and notice the blue highlights around the group that's going to add it to that group. And now, if I turn off the layer or I'm sorry, the group, you'll notice that any layer inside of it also has the visibility turned off, and that works for one layer. It also works for multiple layers. So if I left, click and drag this layer, you'll notice the blue line. If I move it up, I can move it down. This is gonna be the order. Top to bottom Photo shop always reads from top to bottom, so you can rearrange the layers however you want. But if I move it up in here, it's going to drag it into that group or that folder. And now if I turn off the visibility, you'll notice that two layers, both layers are being turned off as well, and we'll talk more about organizing layers and things like that and how this can affect different things in your layers and and the overall outcome how the organization can affect the final output. But the last thing I want to talk about in this video is how to delete layers once we have them. As with most things in photo shop, there's a couple different ways we can do this. You probably saw this when I right clicked on the layer. If you right click on a layer, you can duplicate it, but you can also delete the layer as well. So if I just click on delete, it will pop up. Are you really sure you can choose to not show this again? If you want, click on Yes, and that layer will be deleted. Now we can. Actually, Another way to delete them is very similar to the way that we duplicated it by dragging it to the new icon except instead of dragging it to the new icon. If you drag it to the trash icon, then that will delete the layer. You'll notice that there is no confirmation box when that when that happens, when you drag it down there now I'm gonna hit control Z or election. Let's just come up here and undo this real quick because I want to point out that you can have multiple layers selected and drag them down there to delete it. So if I hold down control or command on a Mac, select multiple layers dragged them both down. Now we can delete multiple layers in that way. And if you do get a confirmation box asking you asking to pop that pop up, it's saying, Are you sure you can hold down Ault or option on a Mac in order to bypass that confirmation when you are deleting your layers? So in this video we learned a couple ways to create new layers and Photoshopped. We also learned how to duplicate them, renamed them, reorder them and how to get rid of them by deleting them. As you can probably guess, we'll be doing a lot of that throughout this course, creating, duplicating, working with layers. So those air operations that you should get really familiar with I'd encourage you to take some time between videos just go crazy, create a bunch of layers duplicate layers, move them around in the layers panel. See, what happens is you get familiar with these different ways to create, duplicate and delete your layers. Now, when you ready, I'll be waiting for you in our next video, where we're going to take a step back from photo shop again as we build on our knowledge of layers and start learning about the concept of layer masks. 15. Understanding the concept of layer masks: In this video, we'll learn about the concept of layer masks. Layer masks are a ton of fun because they give you even more control over how things look. In a nutshell. Layer masks are a gray scale map that tells photo shop what to show on your layer, something that is ah, 100% white, pure white. It will show that part of the layer if it's 100% black or pure black, then it will hide that part of the layer. And then anything in between will be a partially transparent, depending on what that value is. For example, 50% gray is going to have a 50% transparency applied to it. So here is an example. So this is an image here, and there is no layer mask applied to it. On the right hand side, you can see it is completely white, which means that it is showing everything. Now, as soon as we introduce in this case a black circle, you can see what's goingto happen to that image. Now you can see that it's it's looking through that image. Really. What's happening there is this is a layer and we're seeing through that layer, so everything beneath it is transparent, so the black value equals transparent, 100% transparent because it's pure black, and then the white areas around the edges are 100% white, which means it's 100% opaque. As I mentioned earlier, grayscale values are going to be partially transparent. So if we were to pick something that a 50% gray and apply that, so this is what it looked like. Before we add 50% gray into this, you're going to get partial transparency in that area now. Now that we kind of understand the concept of that, it can start to get even more complex because layer masks can be as complex as you want. Here's another example image so we can see we have this turtle on a log if we wanted to. To change this here is a little bit more of a complex mask where we've masked out the turtle on the log and the background is hidden. So the black area is 100% black. You can see that there's transparent there, and then 100% white is what's shown. Now. What's really cool about this is this can really start to really control how your final image looks. So this is something that is very common is you're gonna mask out a layer so that you can see through that layer toe, whatever's below it. And when you see what's below it, that's going to effectively be like you're swapping out the background. Let's see what this what I mean by this. So here we have this turtle layer, right? So this is, say, if this were the top layer and we add a layer below it. But what is that layer was another photograph something like this. Now, as a reminder, photo shop reads layers from top to bottom. So the way that photo shop is looking at this in the way that this final image is going to display is it's going to read from top to bottom. So the way that these stack up means that we're going to see through this transparent part of this top layer and see the layer below underneath and then areas over here that's opaque . That's going to be hidden. Basically, you're not going to be able to see that layer below because we have an opaque part on top. So the way that the layers actually stack up, it's gonna look something like this. So again, that's kind of Ah, from a three dimensional view toe where we can kind of see the visualized the layers there . But this is what it's actually gonna look like in photo shop. If you have the mask and then you put that image behind that on a layer, you're gonna see how that background is changed out. So in a nutshell, that is the concept of layer masks anywhere that is white will be fully opaque. Anywhere that is black will be fully transparent, letting you see any layers beneath the one with the mask. And you can get his complexes you want doesn't have to just be swapping out the backgrounds a lot of different uses for layer masks. But now that we're more familiar with the concept of layer masks, let's move on to our next video, where we'll hop back into photo shop and see them in action 16. Creating, duplicating and deleting layer masks: in our last video, we got familiar with the concept of layer masks in this video will build on that knowledge by looking at how to create, duplicate and delete layer masks in photo shop. Now layer masks, as the name implies, are applied to layers, so we have toe have layers before we can apply masks to them. And that is one thing about the background layer, the mentioned on previous video that is a special type of layer and the background layer. One of the limitations that it has is that you cannot apply layer masks to it now, down here at the very bottom and let me tear this panel off here so we can see a little bit easier. So this button here is going to add a layer mask to this layer. But watch what happens as soon as I do this. As soon as I could click on that to add a layer mask, you'll notice this got renamed. It's no longer called Background, and it's no longer locked. This is no longer a background layer. Photo shop has gone through the process of automatically converting this, in this case to a pixel based layer and then applied the layer mask to it. Now, in the concept video where we were looking at the concepts of layer masks, we learned that white 100% white will beef 100% opaque, 100% black is going to be 100% transparent. So in order to show this here, we need to switch to our paintbrush, and then we're going to switch to either white or black. And a quick way to do that is by clicking on this little icon right here. Or you can use the keyboard shortcut D on your on your keyboard if you want to switch to the default color, and then you can switch back and forth between those two by using this low these little arrows here or used the keyboard shortcut X and you can cycle between those two default colors. And this is gonna be handy because as soon as I start painting black, you can see I have black selected and I start painting black. You'll notice that we can see right through this layer, see so we can see the layer mask that we started to paint. We can see that transparency because there's no layers underneath this. So we're just seeing a transparent background. That's what that checkered area is now. If we wanted to get that back, we're not actually a racing this. That's the true power of masks that were not really erasing anything. And because you never know when you might need to bring something back when using masks, using layer masks is a way of working non destructively. So if we wanted to bring that back, we just make sure the mask is selected. You can see how this is selected here just to show the difference. I'll select the layer. You can see the whites kind of brackets around the layer. We want to paint on the actual mask itself right here. So left click to select the mask thumbnail. And now if we switch, I'm gonna hit X on the keyboard. Watch the foreground and background colors over here by hit X on the keyboard. Now we're on white, and I paint this and it's gonna paint the image back because really, all it's doing is it's showing and hiding different areas of this mask Now course, depending on what's on your layer, could mean that you need a very simple mask, or it could mean that you need to spend hours meticulously, creating a great mask for your layer. So I will save you the time of coming in here and painting all this out. I have another Photoshopped document in the project files where I've gone through, and I've already masked that out. So this is a little bit more complex of a mask, and we could still go in there, continue to tweak things however we want. But here's here's a pro tip for you as far as when you're painting your mask out would recommend getting in there as close as you can using control plus zoom in. Get us close as you can use space in order to move around and really start painting. So I'm going to use the left bracket to make my brush smaller. You can see, and if we come into our layer mask now, I can start to show or high different areas and really focus in on these different areas. And this is where you can start to get really detailed if you want to, for you don't have to. I'm so I'm using X in order to switch back and forth. You get his detail as you want. Hopes I made a mistake. No problem. I'll just hit X switch back to white to show that layer and then paint that back in. So again, you can get as complex as you want to. Or you can get as as simple as you want to. It really depends on, ah, what sort of image doing what sort of project you're currently working on and what sort of result you want. So what if you wanted to duplicate this layer? Well, in a previous video, we learned how to duplicate a layer. Um, so if I were to click this and move it to new, you'll see, not only is it duplicate the layer, it duplicates the later mask as well. It's sometimes we want that sometimes we don't. If you select the mask just like a layer, you can drag it down. To delete this, we can, when we do, this photo shop is going to ask us, Do we want to apply this mask and I will apply this so you'll see what happens if I were to delete. Of course, it's just gonna delete that. But if I hit, apply, watch what happens. You can see now if I turn off this layer this layer here, all the transparency around it, it's no longer a mask. It's actually applied that is actually erased those pixels. So if we ever wanted to get those pixels back, we cannot get those pixels back. Those are actually gone from that layer. I guess I should say, once you save this file, those air gone. Of course, since we just did this operation, we can always come in here, undo and ah, undo that operation. But as soon as you say the file as we learned, history is going to go away and you're not gonna be able to undo that anymore. So that's one thing with layer masks is you want to make sure that if you do apply that layer mask, then you actually want to ah, get rid of all those pixels. So if I were toe delete this, I'm gonna show another technique here. Let's actually delete just the layer mask. You can see what happens now. We're back to our original image. So we have this image. What happened if we want to get that layer mask back, Well, we could come in here. We could create a layer mask like we learned, come into our paintbrush and start painting away Hit exit were switched to black so we can start painting away and start. Start chipping away on this. Maybe make our paintbrush bigger with the left or the right bracket. Size it up. Start painting away on this. We don't wanna have to recreate everything, and we already have it done. So a really quick way of duplicating just the layer mask from one layer to another. This is a little protest for you is to hold down the ault key on your keyboard or option. If you're on a Mac and then left, click and drag the layer thumbnail from the layer that you want to the layer that you want to replace. When you do that, if you already have a mask on the layer than Photoshopped will pop up, this little dialogue says, Are you sure you want to replace the mass? Because that's going to lose the edit that we did right here. In this case, Yes, we want to do that and you can see it's actually replaced that mask on that new layer. Okay, so in this video, we learned how to create a new layer mask. We also learned how to delete layer masks with applying them so that we actually delete those pixels. We also learned how to delete them without applying them. And then how we can duplicate layer masks from one layer to another, using Ault and the left mouse button to click and drag from one layer to another. Or on a Mac that would be option and left mouse button click from one layer to another. I just might sure that you're actually clicking the layer mask and dragging that from one layer to the other. But the fun with controlling our layers doesn't end here because there's another great feature and photo shop that will effectively turn our entire layer into a sort of mask. That feature is called clipping paths, and we'll look at them in our next video 17. Clipping paths: in this video, we'll learn about clipping paths in photo shop. So clipping paths let us take one layer and use that as a mat of sorts or almost a mask. Like basically, you're making sure that everything in one layer stays entirely inside of another layer. So here we have a photograph and you can see we just have the one layer. Here in the layers panel we would like to do is to put this put this into a frame of sorts . So let's start by creating a new layer. So I'm going to come over here to the rectangle tool. Let's just create ah frame or, ah, container a box for our photograph to sit inside of and you can see the rectangle in the layers panel. Let's actually move this layers panel up so we can see it a little bit easier. No one you're working with clipping paths. The order of the layers matter by that. What I mean is, you want the the container. If you think of 11 layer as the container and the other layer is the pixels, that air filling the container, you want the container to be at the bottom, and then you want whatever to go inside of that container to be on top. Okay, so let's see this. To take this rectangle, I'm gonna have to move this down somewhere left, click and move it down the layers so that it's beneath the photograph. And not only does it have to be beneath it, it has to be right beneath it. It has to be the very next layer underneath the the one that you want to be inside of the clipping path. Now you'll notice that our rectangle is still here. It's just not visible because the photograph is above it, so we just can't see those other pixels. Now there's a couple different ways that we can create our clipping path, and one of them is to simply right. Click on the layer above and come in to create clipping mask. Or we can come in. And if you hold down the Ault key on your keyboard or option if you're on a Mac, watch what happens when I hover the mouse right between the layers. See how that icon changes. That icon is three icon for the clipping path. So what, we're going to do is left click, And there you go. So as you can see now, this photograph is inside of this rectangle. And what's really cool about this is we can still move things around. We can still take this layer if we wanted to. And we can move it around so we can move the photo inside of this this rectangle if he wanted to, just move this. Let me lock this in place real quick. We can select this. We can move this around. So we're moving the rectangle. That is the ah, the container. For for this some really, really cool stuff that we can do with clipping paths or clipping masks is another name for them. I'm gonna unlock this here because the last thing I want to point out is this can work between any two layers. Why should say any two in particular pixel layers? It works with vector layers, adjustment layers and things like that. Um, but the order does matter. So, you know, taking a pixel layer into an adjustment layer isn't gonna work as much as the other way around. Well, look at that. Later on. For now, just know that the shape on the layer of the pixels that you have on a layer Don't really matter as much. You can have whatever sort of shape that you want. This is where they can get to be really powerful. So I'm gonna select this rectangle. Let's delete this and let's create a new layer and just paint something random. So I'm gonna come in with my paint a paintbrush and maybe use the right bracket in order to make it bigger. And let's just paint a random shape So we'll just paint kind of around these flowers here, just something completely random now. But take this layer again. In the order matters, we have to move this down beneath. And then if we right click, go to create clipping mask, it's going to be inside of that rain dome shape that we created. Okay, so in this video, we learned that clipping paths are a great way to take the shape of one layer and then force another layer toe Onley display inside of them, sort of like using a layer mask. But instead of just a part of the layer mask, her part of the image were actually using the entire layer. There's a ton of cool things that we can do with this. But tell you what, let's do something fun with all of us. Let's actually move on to our next video. We're gonna take everything that we've learned so far in this section and apply it to a fund many project. 18. Mini project: Tips & tricks for painting layer masks: in this video will take everything that we've learned about layer mask so far and learn how we can use them in a fun little mini project. Okay, so here we have this image and we've looked at images before. I'm going to start by unlocking the background layer will hold down Ault option on a Mac and double click and order to unlock the layer. Now, let's add a layer mask so we can calm down here to the bottom of the layers panel. Add the layer mask and I'm gonna just try to paint out this turtle Now again, as I mentioned before, you can spend as much time get isn't as intricate as you want in this case, I'm just going to do a quick little mask here, and we can always come in and tweak this later on if we want to the benefit of layer mask because you're working non destructively. So you're not actually losing a lot there, you know, actually, racing the pixels. Let me this get all this. I'm using the open and close brackets the left bracket to make it shrink, make the paintbrush shrink and the right bracket to make it go larger and any time that were You know, we want to really get in there. I'm gonna hit Z to switch to my zoom tool left, click and drag in order to get to zoom in here. If you have scrubby zoom turned on, then you can just go like this or you can turn off scrubby, zoom in orderto zoom into an area and then really paint paint this in so again you can get is detailed as you want. And if you want to see some videos or work flows about, you know, selections and such, we will cover selections later on, I should say. But if you want to see some more in depth Ah, more advanced work flows for painting layer masks and things like that. By all means, let me know. But for the sake of this video, I think this should be pretty good. Let me ah, actually get rid of some of this here because I just want to kind of get mostly the turtle gets tail and again, we can always tweak this later on. But I'm pretty happy with this. We'll see how how this old, how this will look and weaken. Tweak it as we need to. Okay, so now that we have our layer mask, there's something that we haven't really looked at yet. And you can see the layer mask preview here. But what if we want to see the layer mask over here nice and big? Well, we can do that by holding down Ault on your keyboard or option and just a single left click on the layer mask and that will show you the layer mask over here. Which really nice about this is now we can go in. We can see. You know what? There's a spot right there that I miss. So I'm just gonna paint that in, and then I'm gonna hit X in order to switch from my foreground and background colors and swap those. So now I'm going to be painting with white paint in some of these areas here that I kind of missed. Um, so it's really, really nice way kind of paint this in and know that the show is probably not gonna really have those spots like that really, really nice way to be able to see spots that you might've missed. Clean up some things. And then whenever you're done, you can either again hold down Alton and left. Click on the layer mask. Or you can just click on the channel here or the layer in your layers panel to switch back . Okay, so now that I've mass this out, I'm going to duplicate this layer. Let's duplicate just drag it down to duplicate the most. Select the layer mask on this bottom one and delete it. I want to just delete the layer mask. So now what we effectively have is one version of this image that is the entire turtle. So I'm going to, uh, let's zoom out a little bit so we can see. And then another version that has this masked out. Now it's cool about this is even though we mask this out. What I really want is to just get this turtle shape on its own layer. So I'm going to select the layer mask because thes air just colors telling it what what it can be. We can actually, in vert this so there's a couple different ways we can do this. One of them is to go up to the menu weaken, go to image adjustments and invert. We can see that the keyboard shortcut is control. I will command I if you're on a Mac, so that's what I'm going to use. I'm gonna have this selected hit control I and watch what happens. It's going to take everything that's white, make it black, everything that's black and make it white. Which means because this is a layer mask, it's going to make just the turtle visible really, really cool stuff. Now let's take this to the next level because we haven't really looked at adjustment layers yet, But let's create an adjustment layer. So I'm going to create an adjustment layer, maybe something like levels, and we'll look at what the levels are actually doing later on in this course. But here are our levels here so I can bring this down, maybe darken it a little bit, say maybe the shell is just a little bit too, too bright in the shot. Okay, so we have this. Now. If I turn on this layer, you'll notice that this adjustment layer, if I turn this on and off, it's affecting everything underneath of it. And that's the way adjustment layers work because remember, photo shop is reading top to bottom, so it's reading everything underneath of it. Which means it's affecting not only this layer but this layer as well, which is why we see it on everything. And here is where we can use clipping paths that we learned about in previous video to our advantage so we can take this adjustment layer. And if I hold down Ault and hover right between these two layers, you'll notice the icon. Change. Watch what happens when I turn this into a clipping path you can see now this is Onley affecting this layer, right? So if I turn this off, we can see it's on Lee affecting this layer. But because underneath of it we have the same layer effectively. It looks like this is affecting on Lee the turtle. Now, in this case, now that I've done this and because we're working with layer masks and they're completely non destructive, you'll notice this area here. We have a little bit more color information right here than when we turn this on, so I'm going to select my layer mask. It's come to my paintbrush and let's make sure where I'm black start to paint some of this out so we can paint this out in order to get our kind of some of our color information back . I'm actually going to right click. Let's change our hardness. Give us a nice kind of soft edge there to kind of blend in a little bit more something like this. Very, very cool. You can see how we're kind of bringing this back, and it's It's not too harsh, but we've still darkened a lot of the rest of the A lot of that shell and brought back some of that color definition. And that is a very common workflow to effect on Lee certain parts of your images. In this video, we learned how to create layers. We created layer masks. Basically, we took everything. All the concepts that we looked at so far layers, layer masks, clipping paths or clipping masks. If you want, call him that and we looked at how we can combine all of them together in order to effect just It's very specific part of our image and really get a nice level of control over just part of our image. Okay, now we've touched on this briefly. We actually had a little bit in the very beginning of this video and how toe unlock the background layer. But what if we wanted to lock that again? What if we wanted to turn that back into another background layer? Well, let's take a little bit of time in our next video to look at the background layer in a little more detail and see how we can work with that. 19. The background layer: in this video, we'll learn about the background layer in photo shop in the background layer. And photo shop is especially er that's the Onley layer for, ah file type that doesn't support photo shops. Normal layers. So, for example, J pegs are probably one of the most popular file types out there. And because, as we learned earlier in this course, J pegs do not support layers. Now, when we open it up in the layers panel, the Onley layer that we will see is that special background layer. You also noticed this little icon here. That means that the layer is locked at least partially locked toe where there are certain things that we can't do to this layer. One of those is to move the layer. So watch what happens if I have the move tool and try to move this layer. If I just hold down left, click and move it, photo shop was going to say, Hey, wait a minute. This is a background layer, and you can't move a background layer, change its stacking order blend mode or opacity so you can see there are some limitation toe what you could do with a background layer. But photo shop is really smart program and it says, You know, if you really want to move this, you just have to convert it to a normal layer and gives you the option to do that right here. So as soon as I do that, you'll see that our move operation is completed. So why does this matter? Well, one of the most important things about this is now that we've converted this to a normal layer because J pegs do not support layers. If we came in here and tried to just save this file, just goto file save Photoshopped won't actually save the file. Instead, it's popping up. Save as which means it says, you know what? Because this this actually has a layer in it, Even though is the only one layer. This is a normal photo shop layer. J pegs don't support no more photo shop players, so you have to save it as a PSD. If you want those layers, you could come in here and save this office a J peg if you wanted to, but that's going to save it as a new J peg and not saving over the one that you currently have. So it's cancel out of this because at any point, if you wanted to, you could take this layer and we could convert this back into a background layer. So if we have that selected goto layer new background from layer and now you'll notice it gets rid of all the transparency, Something else about a background layers because you you can't have transparency on it. Ah, that's another limitation to JPEG files as well. They do not support transparency. But now if I come up here and just goto file save or control s or command s on your keyboard now, we don't get that save as dialogue because photo Shop says Okay, this is a J. Peck. The is only one layer, and it's that special background layer. Now we get the J peg options, which means as soon as we hit OK, now our file has been saved and we have this new ah file that has been created. So we've over written that existing file. Okay, So in this video, we learned about the background layer in Photoshop. Now, one of the things that we noticed on the background layer has to do with this little lock associated with it. And while the background layer is locked by default, it is not the Onley layer that could be locked in photo shop. So let's move on to our next video, where we will learn about working with locked layers. 20. Working with locked layers: in this video will learn about locking layers in photo shop. Now the term locking layers probably gives you a pretty good indication of what it's gonna dio. And in my experience, it's not really the sort of feature that you'll use on every single project. But when you start accidentally making changes toe layers that you didn't intend, then you're gonna be happy that Photoshopped lets you do this. And there's a few different options that we have for locked layers. We just looked at one type of locked layer in our previous video with the background layer . And as we learned, we can convert the background layer into a normal photo shop player just by holding down Ault or option on a Mac and double clicking with the left mouse button. Now when we do that, you'll notice that we have these options available to us now. And these are all the different types of ways that we can lock this layer, and each lock is going to do something a little bit different. So let's start with this one here on the left. If we hover over this, we can see that this is going to lock transparent pixels. Okay, so with this turned off, so it's it's not turned on right now. Let's come over to our eraser tool and let's just erase something so you can see that we're getting transparency behind this layer. So we're actually deleting the pixels in this layer, and we're getting transparency behind it Now. If I turn on this transparency lock, watch what happens when I erase. You can see we are no longer getting transparent pixels. Instead, it's really just turning it white. So we've locked the transparency, and that layer will not allow transparency anymore. Now the next type of lock, I'm gonna unlock that one with transparency that has to do with pixels. So basically it's going toe lock the pixels on that image and not allow you to edit those pixels anymore. So let's pull open our paintbrush here, and let's just paint something I do not have that turned on so I can paint something now if I locked the pixels. Now, if I start to paint, you can see it won't even let me. You can see the icon has changed. I can click, but it said you can't use the brush tool because the layer is locked so you can't actually add or change any of the pixels on that layer when you have changed that that's actually a common one to use once you have a layer kind of the way you want and you don't wanna accidentally be modifying your the pixels on your layer, you can lock that down. And then, of course, you can. Just until check that any time that you want to unlock the pixels on that layer, the next one is toe lock movement. This is fairly straightforward. Pretty much is gonna lock the ability to move this. So if I come to my move tool right now, I can move this layer around as soon as I lock the movement. Now, if I try to move this, you can see it's not actually moving anything, so that's another common one that you'll want to do. Ah, is if once you have everything in position, if you have a layer in a certain position you don't want to accidentally move it, then you can lock that down lock just the movement of that layer. Now, this next one has to do with art board, so We looked that here in a second, but this option here allows you to lock everything. So it's basically locking transparency. It's locking the pixels. It's locking the movement. It's locking the art boards and it's locking everything. So with this selected, you can't move it around. Ah, we can't come in here and paint on this layer. And when we try to erase its not gonna let us do that either, because it's also locking the pixels. Aziz. Well, it's transparency. Okay, so we talked about art boards earlier in this course, and this lock right here is something that is specific toe art board. So I have another document here that has a couple art board set up. And let me just kind of explain what we have here right now. We have the let's say we have an art board that is our ah, phone. We have another one. That's the phone, and we also have a design element. So this design element, if I move this around, you can see it's this little icon right here. Let me zoom in. When do control plus use the space bar just so we can see this a little bit easier. So this is our design element. So watch what happens when I take this design element. And I drag it from art board one toe art for to watch what happens in these layers when I left. Click drag it over here. Watch what happens in the layers as soon as I let go of the mouse, You can see now it is an art board to The reason for that is because our boards are a special type of canvas. So it recognises that these pixels moved from this art board to this one. Okay, you must want it in this art board now, so it's automatically going to move them between the art boards. If we don't want that, we can use this lock here toe lock that that element that, um, those pixels on that layer. So now if I were to move this and move it back over to our board, one watch what happens, you can see nothing. It just disappears. The reason why it disappears is because it's actually still in art board, too. So it's still in this Ah, this art board and because the way art board works is that you can't see anything outside of that canvas outside of the art board canvas. This design element is over here, and we can't see it anymore. As soon as we take this and move it into this art board weaken, see exactly where that's at. So in a nutshell, that is what The locking for this icon right here it's locking. The automatic nesting is what Photoshopped calls it. Ah, in an outside of the art board. So when I drag it from one to the other, it's not automatically going to move it into that other art board. Of course, we can still do that manually if you want to, or we can turn this off and tell Photoshopped automatically move it from one art board to another as we move those pixels around. Okay, so in this video, we learned how we can lock and unlock layers and specific ways to keep Photoshopped from modifying things like transparency and pixels and movement or the entire layer. Overall, in our next video, we'll learn more about the differences between layer opacity and layer. Phil 21. Layer opacity vs fill: in this video, we'll learn how to control your layers, opacity and how it's different than layer Phil. So let's start by hopping over to the two things I just mentioned. Opacity and Phil. We can see them here in the layers panel. We have opacity right here, and we have Phil right down below. So I'm going to start with the diagram over here on the left side. So these these layers right here, we can change the opacity by just coming in here, selecting it and moving the slider down to whatever we want. We can see how that effects that layer. There's actually a much faster way. Has there usually is in photo shop, a much faster way to do this, and that is to use keyboard shortcuts. So when we have the layers selected, just used the keyboard Shortcut five, and that will change the opacity to 50. You can see we change if we hit the keyboard Shortcut three. That'll change it to 28 will change it to 87 to 70 and so on. So I'm going to switch us back to five or 50%. Uh, now, you can also type in exact number. So if you want, like 56 I'm just typing in 5659 things like that. If you want a specific number, Um and then I'm just gonna hit five to get back. Zero will take you all the way back to 100%. Or if you tap it again, I'll go to 0% a toggle between those two. So really, really fast ways of being able toe to get that. So I'm going to go back to 50% opacity. Now it's cool about this is we can set this across multiple layers at the same time. So if I were to select all three of these layers and then I hit three on the keyboard, um, looks like a hit four opacity is 40% hit 3 30%. So it's changing the opacity of all of those layers at once. And of course, we can come in here if you want to type it in. We could do that. We can type in a very specific number. We can still use the slider. Ah, but really, the fastest way is to just use the keyboard shortcut for the numbers there in order to change the opacity. Now, if we were to come over to these and select all of these and set the layer Phil to be 50% you can see that it looks pretty much the same. And so this is a great example of how it can be confusing to think about opacity and fill as the same thing. But there's one key difference that makes them different. The only reason we're not seeing it here is because thes layers don't have anything applied to them that will really show that difference. So to show the difference will have to add something that we haven't really talked about yet. Those air called layer styles. So I'm going to select one of these layers. Let's start with the green one and down here at the bottom, you'll notice the effects. Icahn here I can pull off the layers panel. If it's a little tough to see at the bottom, let's move this over so that we can see we're working with this. This guy right here, come to effects. Let's add a stroke. That's gonna be a line around. Are our layer in this case a circle and let's make this something big so we can see it really well. So 24 pixel wide stroke that you can see we have around that layer. So now that we have this applied and don't where we're gonna look at layer styles here in a little bit But now that we have this applied, we can really see the difference between opacity and fill. Because this Phil here, you'll notice that this is still it's it's still at 100%. The stroke is still at 100%. We take this fill all the way up. You can see that difference. See how the just the inside just the Phil is being affected. But watch what happens when I change the opacity. You can see the entire thing is being affected. So that is the key difference between Phil and opacity is that Phil is really just affecting everything inside of the layer. Opacity is affecting everything on the layer, and that really starts to come into play when you start to use things like layer styles and effects and things like that, because those you'll notice that this is not actually inside of this layer itself. It's applied to the layer. And so that's why the opacity and fill work a little bit differently. Okay, so in this video, we learned that the key difference between opacity and Phil is that opacity takes everything in the layer and makes it transparent or partially transparent, depending on the setting. On the other hand, we learned that Phil will Onley affect the pixels on the layer. The effects or styles that we have applied to the layer are not affected. Now. In our next video, we'll learn more about layers by getting familiar with how we can organize them better here in a photo shop. 22. Organizing layers: so far in this section, we've learned a lot about layers. In this video, we'll learn how we can start organizing our layers a little bit better and how that actually affects our final image. So let's start by learning how we can reorder our layers. Reordering layers is a simple as left clicking on the layer and then moving it to where we want it to go. So we just left click and then you'll notice the blue line show up. That tells us where we wanted to go. So if we want item eight to be organized below item B, you can see how that happens there. Now, if you notice when we do this, you'll notice that the colors air actually changing here in the image as well. The reason for that is because, as we've learned throughout this course, Photoshopped displays are document from top to bottom. So it's reading blue first, then red, then green. Because each of these layers is at 50% opacity. We're getting a little bit of semi transparent there. So how those colors air blended together where they overlap is going to be different depending on how those layers are actually organized, So that does make a difference. And roll left. Click Watch what happens in the in the late in the workspace. You can see how that actually affects our final image. So that's something to keep in mind as you're reordering layers in your Photoshopped document. If you're not careful, that order can actually affect how your final image is going toe. Look with that said, not everything is going to effect how our document looks. For example, if we create a group, this icon down here in the layers panel, let me tear this off. Let me move this over here and just docket right here so that we can see this a little bit easier. Uh, actually, you know what? Never mind. I don't like that. Let me move this up. I want to be able to see these icons down here without going to the very bottom of the video. So this icon right here is to create a group. Think of a group. Just it's a folder. It's just a folder. And in layers, they aren't visible. They really pretty much just help you organize your layers. So if we create a group, let's double click on the group name in order to rename This is called This are vent diagram. Now, in order to add a layer to the group, we just need to left Click and drag it in notice that when we get to the group now that blue Line really kind of encompasses the group. If you can see it there and then when we let go, it's going to be added into that group, and we don't have to do this one at a time. We don't have toe. Add are layers. One a timer work with our layers one at a time. If we select one layer, we can hold down control or command if you're on a Mac and then left, click on another layer in order to select multiple layers. And then again, we just left. Click and drag move it into the group, and now we have all three of our layers inside of that group, so we can open and close this if we want to. To show and hide. To make it a little bit easier, you'll notice that nothing changes in our image. Nothing's changing there course you can turn it on and off if you want to. We can affect the opacity and the fill of this entire group at once if we want to. We can change blending modes on this entire group if you want to. I will look at blending modes. Ah, here in a little bit. But one thing that's really cool about these groups is that it's a fast way to be able to organize things. But it's also a fast way to be able to duplicate things if we want to. So we learned in a previous video how to duplicate single layers. But once we have it in a group, weaken, duplicate that entire group the same way. So if I were to, I'm just gonna hide this. Hide the layers inside the group real quick. And then if I take this, I can just drag this down to the new icon here, and then we get a duplicate copy. And inside each of these folders are those layers to really quick way of duplicating things . And one thing that I like to do. This is just a little pro tip. Any time that I start working on something ah, that is going to be a more complex project. One of the first things I'll do is I'll make a copy, and then I'll come in here and just call this a backup. So this is my back up. I'm gonna turn that off. And now, at any time if I come in here and I make changes to this and move this around and I move all these I'm like, Oh, you know what? I really messed this up. How do I get these back to where they work? Well, this isn't gonna be exact. How do I get this back? I always have this backup copy that I can refer back to move these in and out of the different layers groups if I want to just left, click and drag to move this into this new this group here and now. Of course, I could just take this layer, drag it down to delete it, and we've successfully moved this layer in here. Of course I can do that for the other layers as well. If I want to move those in here, we can see how I had moved the others around. So let's select this layer. Hold down. Control or command on a Mac. Select this layer. Click delete you say. Are you sure you want to delete all the selected layers you can hold down Ault or option? If you want to bypass this little pop up, I'm gonna click on Yes, and we're back to our original there because we saved a backup. And of course, you can delete groups just like you would any other layer. You can just select this click on delete, or you can drag it down to the trash can and delete that as well. Now, everything that we've done so far moving layers around and working with the layers is really helpful when you have your layers named very well so you can see I have ABC have named my layers. I probably know that a goes on top, be and then see, and that's kind of the or that I originally want. But what if you're not really sure what item is what or where things are? This is a very simple example, so I can see. Obviously, this is the red circle. This is the blue circle. This is the green circle, pretty obvious which one is which, but there's a handy little feature in photo shop. And again, this is a little pro tip. That's a handy little feature. If you right, click with your move tool and you right click. You can see all of the layers so you can see we have our group, the Venn Diagram Group, and we have item B and background. Those are the three things that are underneath where my mouse waas So the background being the white layer item B and the folder or group. Now, if we over if we select one of these areas that overlap, you can see Now we have this, but we also have item a item A and B overlap here, one of these areas over here you can see we have a B and C. So it's a really nice way of being able to see really quickly in your document. What layers? Air located where? And of course, when you're looking at this list, really be a good idea to name your layers very well. And of course, you can do that just by double clicking. Type in whatever name that you want, and then, of course, you'll see that when you right click and and see that layer and then you just select it and that will automatically select the layer in your layers panel. Okay, To recap what we've learned in this video, we covered how to reorder layers. We learned that the layers order is important because Photoshopped displays from top to bottom. So depending on what how your layers air set up, it may actually affect the final outcome of what your image looks like. We also learned how to create layer groups. We also learned a little tip on how to find layers in the canvas. Using the right mouse button shortcut in our next video will get an understanding of another popular feature and photo shop called blend modes. 23. Understanding blend modes: In this video, we'll get an overview of blend modes and how they work. Ah, blend modes air how we tell photo shop to blend any two layers or multiple layers together . The way that this works is you have to have the layer that you want to apply the blend mode to on top and then the layer that you want it to blend with on the bottom or any layers that you wanted to blend with on the bottom. So here we have an example, just so we can see this clearly. If I were to set Ah, this item A. You could see it's currently set to 50% opacity, but let me change the blend mode here. You'll notice that there's a lot of different blood bodes in here. But if I would have set this to something like overlay, you can see how that affects our final image. It almost looks like this top part has disappeared, but what's happening is the pixels are over laying on top of each other, so it's preserve. The overlay Blood book preserves the highlights in the shadows of the base colors. So because this base color here is white. That's why it looks like it's just disappearing on top. If we turn on this photo back here, we have kind of this. Ah, photograph. You can see that top part is still there. It's just that it's not really being applied. It just looks like it's ah white because of how it's being over laid on top of the white pixels. Now, another common blend mode is multiply. So if we switch this to a multiply blend mode, you can see how this looks. Ah, the keyboard shortcut for that would be shift ault M or shift option em to switch to multiply. Each of the blood modes have keyboard shortcuts that you can look up and and learn. If you want to switch to them very quickly, the multiply blend note. And again, I'm gonna turn this on so we have something a little more than just the white background so we can see how how it's different, depending on what layers are beneath it. If I turn this on, you can see the difference here. Something switches back to overlay and then switch this to multiply, and you can see in this case a slight difference But the way that multiply works the multiply blend mode. Photoshopped takes the color values of each pixel on this layer, which in this case is just the same color. It's all the same color red, and then it multiplies them with anything beneath it. So in this case, all of this area here, it's gonna look different because the color values do you recall we learned in different earlier video the color values from a value of 0 to 255. When you multiply those, it's almost always going to be darker than the originals. That's why multiply is going to give you a darker result. Now. The opposite of Multiply is a screen blend mode so you can see screen is turning it lighter . Now the screen blend mode is basically the inverse of multiply the the with the screen blend mode. The inverse of the color values are multiplied, so it's always going to give you a lighter color once it's actually blended. Now, as you can see with this drop down here, there's a Thanh of different plan modes. Ah, and really, there's no way that we can cover them all in this video. So we're not really gonna try overlay, multiply and screen, or probably three of the most popular ones that you might use and kind of get started with , Um, but really blend modes could be an entire course in and of itself and diving into all of these. If that's something you'd like to see, Bio Ming feel free to reach out and let me know. But I do want to point out that, as I mentioned briefly with Multiply, there are keyboard shortcuts to switch between blend modes, and for the most part, it's usually shift Alz or option on a Mac. And then whatever the Associated Letter is so like, um, say shift Ault and M to switch to multiply. We select this layer shift Alton and will switch to multiply shift Ault and S will switch to screen. Ah, shift. Ault and K will shift dark in ah shift Ault and oh well, goto overlay. So that's kind of the keyboard shortcut there. But you really don't want me listing off all of the keyboard shortcuts for all the different blood modes, so there's a great reference. Let me pull up in my browser here and you can see the default keyboard shortcuts If we filter here by the blend modes, find the blend modes Here, here we go use for blending modes. You can see all the different keyboard shortcuts, so shift okay for dark and shift all m Ah, this is a great resource if you want to memorize them or really start to memorize some of the ones Ah, that are, um, that you use more often than others. Ah, The one I do want to point out of here, though, is to cycle through the blend modes. That's shift plus or shift minus. So if we hot back to photo shop and we select this, we could use shift Plus in order to cycle between these and see the different effect that they're they're having on our layer or shift minus to go back and cycle back the the other way now which blend moan you use It's really dependent on your project. Your layers how your layers are organized. You can see this layer here If we set this one to multiply as soon as we change this one. If we sit this to multiply, then it's going to change not only this but also affect how this layer is affecting that as well. So it's really a compounding effect, because once we start to get these blending together, you're going to get some really, really different results now. Like I said, I can't cover all of the different blend modes in this in this course could be an entire course in and of itself. But I do want to point out again if we hopped back to Adobes website. There is a great description here in their help documents that goes through what each one of them does so you can see. Like we learned, Multiply is going to take the color information in this challenge and multiply the base color by whatever it's blending it by. So the result is always gonna be darker. And that's, you know something that you can go through each of these to see exactly what it's doing and how it's affecting this color values for the different layers. So I'd recommend taking some time between videos. Check out this page on adobes website, start learning some more about the technical side of exactly what each blend mode does to your layers because that's going to give you a head start to know if you need a multiply blend mode or screen blend mode, depending on your project, your layers and what the final result is that you want. Now, when you're ready, I'll see you in the next video where we're gonna learn how to merge multiple layers together. 24. Merging layers: in this video will use our skills with layers in a mini project where we'll focus on merging layers together. So here we have a photo and you can see I have multiple layers over here in the layers panel. And if I were to turn these on and off, so this see, like colors, you can see the effect that these layers air having as I turned these on and off. You can see how that changes. You can actually left click and drag on the eye here in order to turn on and off multiple layers at a time. So left, click and drag to turn those hold on left, click and drag in order to turn those all off. And then I also have some layers that are the light on the ground. So because we've kind of changed the color hue of the lights, we also want that were in the reflection, too. So if I turn these off, you can see this is the original photo, and then turn all of these layers on and you can see the change that we've made. Now, before we start merging layers together, I always like to make a backup with the layers I currently have. This isn't required. Of course. This is just something I've learned from my experience that you never know when you might need one of those layers back. So until we're done with our edits like Toe, have a backup that I can refer back to our pull something back if I absolutely need to. So the first thing I'm going to do is to organize these a little bit. And let's use some of the skills that we've learned in previous videos to organize our layers somewhere to select em. And then I'm going to hold down control. I'm sorry, Shift on the keyboard and then select. See at the very top that's going to select all of those layers. Now we can hit the folder down here in order to create a set or the keyboard shortcut for that is controlled G or Command G. If you're on a Mac control G, that will create a group or a folder inside of the layers panel, so I'm going to double click on this in order to rename this. This will be our light like color, and then I'm going to the same for all of these layers as well. So I'm gonna select all of these control g and then double click. And this is the, ah floor bounce color. Once I have both of these. What's really cool is you can have groups inside of groups somewhere. Select both of these groups again, hit control G in order to create a group. And this is my original layers back up. Okay, now that we have this all inside of a group, if we open this up, we can see we have all of our layers here, all of our layers. Here, everything is nice and organized. Now I'm gonna take this group. I'm going to duplicate it. So there's multiple ways we can do this. Ah, we can right click, and we can duplicate the group. We can drag it down to the new icon. One of my favorite ways to duplicate is to use the keyboard shortcut control J or command Jay. And we saw how to do that with layers. It works with groups as well. So when I hit control J, you can see it's going to duplicate that group. So with this, I'm gonna turn off my back up. Let's left, click and drag Move it up to the top and double click on this guy and this will be the layers to edit. Okay, so now that I have a copy of all the layers safely tucked away that I can refer back to it any point if I need to Let's start looking at how we can merge these layers together because we might not actually need all of these different layers. So here I have one layer. Once we have a layer selected in order to merge, we're probably gonna want to tell photo shop what we actually want to merge this layer with . So the easiest way to do this is toe have the layers selected in the layers panel. So when I select the end layer, hold down control or command. If you're on a Mac, select the O layer so we can see what these two are affecting over here. The m in the o, with both of these selected that come up to layer and calm down to merge layers. So the keyboard shortcut for that is control E or command E. If you're on a Mac when we merged these layers. Watch what happened. You can see now we only have one layer. You can see we have this one layer that's affecting both of them. But you'll also notice that our our layer looks a little bit different now. It doesn't look like it used to. And that's something to keep in mind when you merge layers together. Ah, you're probably going to lose your blend modes. You could see my blend mode is back to normal and the opacity in all of those settings. So this here, you can see all the other layers are at overlay opacity of 75%. So in order to get this back, I'm gonna switch this back to overlay and let's set the opacity to 75%. So now we have this one layer that's affecting multiple objects or multiple Here. We re emerged those together. So it's probably a good idea to rename this just so we know that now we have one layer that is affecting multiple. So we've merged those layers together. Now, we could go through this process of merging all of these different layers together one of the time if we want to Ah, weaken, Select. You know, that s merge it in with the O and the M and you know this layer here and merge them together. Or if we wanted to, we could even come in and select multiples of these and merge those together. But there's a faster way If we wanted to take all of these layers and merge them into each other, What we can dio is come up to layer merge visible on keyboard, truck it for this is shift control e or shift command. If you're on a Mac now, what's going to happen when we merged these? Let's just do it and see and kind of reverse engineer so we can see what happened. So watch the layers panel as I as I click on Merge Visible, you'll notice everything got squished together. So now we only have this one layer. We still have our original backup players, and this is a reason why I like to create backups. The reason why we still have this, because the visibility is turned off. So when we merge visible, it's not going to merge any of the layers that we have turned off and you'll notice that it kept all of the effect, all of the overlay and all of that that affect the blend modes and everything that we had on those different layers. Those were not affected as it merged it all into a single image. Or, actually, I should say, merging it all into a single layer. Now you might be wondering, Why would you want to get rid of all those layers? Eso You lose all of that control now? Big reason for that is because when you get rid of all those layers and you flatten them down, that's really going to keep your Photoshopped document much, much smaller because there's not as much information in that document. So if I were to do this again, let's come up here right click, flatten the image. Okay, now let's come in and let's save this off as our end file. So we have begin and we have end. So this is where we started with all the layers and end is going to be a Photoshopped document, but it's on Lee going toe have this one layer. If we pull over the project files, you can see there's a significant difference in the file size between the begin with all of our layers and end where we flatten everything down. Of course, I want to point out when you merge all these layers together, keep in mind that when you save your file, if you open up your history panel, you're not gonna have that anymore. As we learned earlier in this course, you're gonna learn all of lose all of your history. Once you save this off, close it out and you open it back up. You're not gonna have that history. So if you haven't saved a backup of the original, you're gonna lose all your layers for good. So I would always recommend keeping a backup of your original file. If you ever think that you might need to get those layers back for any reason. Okay, Now let's move on to our next video because we're going to get an overview of how layer styles work in photo shop 25. Layer styles overview: in this video, we'll get an overview of layer styles and how we can use them in photo shop. Okay, so here we have a few different layers that were working with. You can see we have. If I turn these off, you can see we have a handle. We have a glass, we have a highlight, and we have another highlights. If you can't tell when I turn these all on, we're making a magnifying glass. Now, we can do this with layer styles in this particular instance, but there's a couple different ways that we can apply layer styles to these shapes. The first way that we're gonna look at is by selecting the layer. We have a layer selected down here at the bottom. You'll notice the little effects button that is to add layer styles. So let's click on this and let's add a color overlay toe are handle. And when we do that, you can see we have a few different options here. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change the color, maybe make it something like a bright red. Here we go. Now, what's cool about this is we're not actually changing the color of the actual shape itself . What we're doing is adding an overlay to it, like the name implies. So that means we can change the opacity of the overlay. You can see how that's affecting it. The original shape is still black, but we have that overlay. And of course, we can add our blend modes and do whatever we want to do with our blend modes. We looked at blend modes in a previous video when you're looking at them from layers, but you also have them on layer styles as well. To really fine, tune exactly what you want and how you want your images to look. Now, once we have a layer style applied, you'll notice down here at the bottom that you can turn on or off your layer styles so we can turn this on and off. You can see just affecting that one, or we can turn off all of our effects. But let's actually move on to another way because there's another way that we can apply layer styles, and it's actually an easier way. I know. Ah, like we've learned about so many times so far in this course and will continue to, um, there's almost always an easier way to do something inside a photo shop. And easier than selecting a layer and coming down here and clicking on the icon to pull open this drop down as if we select the layer that we want to apply a layer style, too, and then simply double click on that layer in the panel. Now you want to make sure that you're not actually double clicking on the name, because if you double click on the name, then Photoshopped thinks you want to rename that layer. So let's just double click on the layer in the panel, and then the layer style dialogue will pop up. And as you can see in this window, there's a lot of different layer styles we can apply. Here is no way we can cover them all in a single video. Do you want a course covering all these layer styles? Bio means feel free to let me know, and I'll add that to my backlog. But what's cool about these layer styles is we can add multiple styles to the same layer, so we already looked at color overlay. If we apply this. Let's maybe change the color, so make it Ah, white color. There we go. So we have color overlay applied and again we can turn the opacity up and down. We can see that the actual shape color is not changed, but we can also come in and imply another layer style. So let's add a stroke. It's essentially an outline. So if we add this stroke here again, we have some different options. We can choose the position. If we want. We can choose outside the shape inside the shape I usually I will prefer inside for this shape. Here, let's change the color again. Maybe make it a red to match the handle and then we could change the size. So how thick is this stroke? So I'm gonna make it something pretty good. Maybe something like a 40 40 pixels and then click on OK. And then again, just like we saw what the handle, we can see the different effects that we have. But now, because we have multiple effects applied, we can see that we can turn these on and off individually, or we can turn on and off the effects overall. So this is the original shape with no effects applied. And then this is with our layer of factual layer styles applied to them. Now again, I'm gonna talk about another way that we can speed up our work flown work a little bit faster because if we wanted to say, add another layer style to this handle highlight. We don't have to start from scratch. We can copy our style from one other layer and then paste it on to this one. So let's take our handle. Select this right click, go to copy layer style and then on our handle highlight right click paced layer style. And when we do this, you'll notice that the same color overlay has been applied. Now, in this case, it turned it red, which kind of hides it and kind of defeats the purpose of a highlight. So let's double click on the override because what's really cool about layer styles? We can always come back in here to adjust them afterwards, just double click on that, and we have our settings that we've copied, just changed the color toe white and there we go very, very cool stuff Now, now that we're more familiar with kind of how layer styles work what they are. There is one key thing to point out, as you can see from this magnifying glass that we've made throughout the course of this, video styles are applied to the entire layer. Now that works great for this example where we're working with, you know, this entire layer we turn off all our other layers can see this entire layer is being affected. This entire layer is being affected. So it's fine when we're working with layers that are not the entirety of our of our canvas . But layer styles might not necessarily have the same effect that you want. If you're working on something much larger, that's applied to the entire canvas. So let me show you an example here. If I scroll up, I have a photograph that covers the entire canvas so we have this photograph of a magnifying glass. If I were to come in here and let's select my color overlay, right click copy, come in right click paste, the layer overlay. You can see we have our color overlay that's being applied, but because our layer takes up the entire canvas, it pretty much just looks like we fill the entire canvas with white. Just probably not the look that we're going for. So that's something to keep in mind. But with that said again, depending on what your what? Your projects are on what you're working for, we can still use layer styles on something like this in order to stylized our photos. Ah, really common trend is adding borders to photos. So if we were toe double click on our effects, open up our effects. Here we can turn off the color overlay. Maybe let's add a stroke to this, make it white, and then we can size it down and at a nice little border to our to our image to style eyes are photo and make it look really nice. So we, without the stroke and with the stroke, were adding this white border to the photograph. All right, so to recap, layer styles are, well, exactly what they sound like. Styles that we can apply to the entire layer. We learned about color overly and strokes in this video, but there's a lot more styles we can use. In fact, layer styles could be an entire class in and of itself. Now there's still a special type of layer that we haven't talked about yet. Smart objects. So let's move on to our next video, where we'll get an understanding of the concept of smart objects before we figure out how to create and edit them. 26. Understanding the concept of smart objects: in this video will get an overview of the concept of smart objects in Photoshopped. So a great way to think of smart objects is to think of the picture in picture capability on some TVs. Except this time we've got our Photoshopped document. We've got an entire picture or an entire image embedded inside of it with a smart object. Now you can tell which layers are smart objects by looking for this icon in your layers panel. A huge benefit, too. Smart objects is that you're actually embedding the original source file inside of Photoshopped. In other words, smart objects let you work non destructively a lot better. Let's look at an example of how this helps and one benefit of smart objects has to do with scaling. So here we have two identical photographs. One on the left side is a smart object, and the one on the right side. I have imported into Photoshopped as just a normal layer, and that's the way that we've looked at bringing images into photo shop. Currently, as far as this course is concerned now, if I were to skill this image up to 500% you'll notice on the left side. It's still nice and in focus and on the right side, we're starting to get some pics. Elation going on. I scale this up to 1000% you can see on the left side. We're starting to get some pics, elation and on the right side Ah, there's a lot of picks elation there. It's it's ah really, really pixelated. So why does this happen? The reason why this happens has to do with what is going on kind of behind the scenes when you scale something in photo shop, photo shop, re samples, that image and its tries to figure out what those pixels should look like at the new scale , whatever scale it is that you're you're scaling it to now when you scale something Ah, that is a normal layer. Photo shop on Lee has those pixels on the layer to figure out what that new what that new image should look like or what the new, uh, pixels should look like once you scale it. When you're scaling something that's a smart object. Photo shop will actually refer to that original source document inside of the smart object . When you resize it so that's going to give you more pixels toe work with and be able to skillet. Much better now. It is worth pointing out that for with the example I used here, the image was actually the photograph. The original photograph was much larger, and so when I scaled it up, it had mawr pixels toe work with. So the size of that source image will determine how far you can scale it up before it starts to Pixley. Any time you go over 100% then it's going to start to pixel ate. But if 100% of the source image is very different than 100% of your Photoshopped document, then you can get away with scaling it up much larger, like we did in that example. Now, another benefit, too. Smart object is instances. So here's another example. So on one side I have the smart object on the left side, and then I've just duplicated that smart object, that layer of smart object. Now watch the episode number up with the top right hand side. Episode 100. When I updated on one side, it's going toe automatically update it on the other side as well. So what's happening here is because the original source document when I update at one side , I'm updating that original source document that's embedded in in there as a smart object. And so when I go back to the Photoshopped document, then because I changed it in the source document that source documents being referenced in multiple places when you duplicate that smart object. And of course, you can actually duplicate smart objects in a way that they create a new a new instance, an actual copy and so you can have them be separate if you want to. But by default they're going to instance each other cause you're referencing that same original source document. Now, as a general rule of thumb, I would always recommend using smart objects when you can, when you're pulling images into your photo shop document in particular. Ah, yes, it is going to make your Photoshopped document file size larger because you're actually embedding the original source document, but it helps you keep the source image just in case you need to go back to it for any reason. If you need to scale it up and you have extra pixels to work with their the source document . Ah, or if it is a design like we saw in your instance ing things and you want to reference it multiple places. There's a lot of benefits to smart objects. So just as a general rule of thumb, I would recommend using them over just normal images when you're importing them into Photoshopped. Okay, so enough talking about the concept. Think you get the idea? Let's move on to our next video, where we're gonna hop back into photo shop and see how we can create and edit smart objects . 27. Creating and editing smart objects: in our last video we got familiar with the concept of smart objects in this video will see how to create an edit. Smart objects in photo shop. Okay, so let's start by turning an existing layer into a smart object. So here we have this layer and you can see it's just a normal layer. I don't have that icon that we mentioned in the last video. That means that it's a smart object. So once we have a layer or layers, if you have multiple layers that you want to convert to a smart object, just select them in the layers panel. And then there's a couple different ways we can do this one. We can come up to layer smart objects and convert to smart object or, ah, faster way is just to right click on the layer and go to convert to smart object right here . Now, when we do this, you'll notice that we get that icon here, which means that now this is a smart object. So if we want to actually edit this smart object, all we have to do is to double click on the thumbnail of the layers, so I'm going to double click on the thumbnail here, and that's going to open up the smart object. No photo shop is just gonna let us know. We can check to not show this again. What it's saying is in order to actually see a difference in a smart object because smart objects on the back end to get a little technical with it, it's actually saving them as PSB files Photoshopped big files. And so what it's saying is, Hey, we actually need to save that in order to make any changes. So I'm gonna hit OK, you can see it opens up the smart object you can see it's ah psb file in here. Now if we want to make any sort of change, maybe let's add a layer. And that's just paint something up here just so we can see that we've We've made some changes to this Now that we've made this change by coming over here just close out of this document, Yes, we want to save the changes and you can see that has been altered in our original document now. No, it's cool about this is we learned in our previous video, we can actually duplicate this smart object to get an instance of it. And then when we edit what's inside the smart object once it's going to update all of the smart objects. So let's see what I mean by that. So I'm just going to take this layer and again, there's multiple ways that we can duplicate it. Layer, we've looked at this. Ah, previously in this course I'm just gonna take it and drag it down to the new icon. So we have this layer, so we have airplane duplicated, rename that layer. And now if I come into one of these smart objects, maybe delete this layer, we're doing our edits. I'm gonna add an adjustment layer, maybe make it black and white. Something like that. Okay, so now that we have this, we can close out, save our changes, and you'll notice that both smart objects have been updated. We can really see this. If I take one of these, move it down, maybe take the other one and move it up so we can see that we have The two documents are the two smart objects. Layers inside of our document in both of them have been updated now there will be times where that's not what you want. If you want a smart object, maybe you want them to be separate. You don't want to actually edits both of them at the same time. And if that's the case, then there's ah. Then you want to actually create the smart object via copy. So if we were to do that, let's maybe select this here and again. We can go to the menu in order to do this or faster ways just to right click and do create a new smart object via copy. Now, when we do this, I'm gonna open this up. And let's say this is this is the copy. I already said that. I don't know why actually renamed it to the exact same thing, but okay, so we have the version of the smart object that has been copied. Now watch what happens if I come into one of these others. Maybe get rid of my adjustment layer. Just drag it down and delete it. Close out, save. Save this. You can see this version here because we copied it. It's now different. It's not updated. These other two, we actually have to in here that we created earlier that are linked together. But this one here because we created the new smart object by a copy. It is not lengthen. So if we open this up, we'll see that the moment that we created it, it still had the black and white adjustment layer. And it still has that in there now. Okay, So in this video we learned how to create smart objects from layers inside of photo shop. We also learned how to duplicate them and how to create new smart objects via copy. And of course, we learned how to edit those smart objects and how it affects them in our original document . But we don't have two already have something in ah Photoshopped document in order to convert them into smart objects in our next video will learn a couple different ways. We can import images directly into photo shop as smart objects 28. Open images as smart objects: in this video, we'll learn a few different ways that we can open images as smart objects in photo shop. So let's start by opening an image as a smart object. So I have a couple of different images in the project files that we can play with here. And the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna copy the path to the project files. So I'm gonna select this right click copy so that I have that. And now if I hop into photo shop, we can go to open. But we can also go to open as smart object. And there is no keyboard shark it associated with this course we learned earlier in this course. If you want to change keyboard shortcut, you can do that. You can assign it. Ah, whatever you want to this if you prefer. If you use this a lot, we open as a smart object. And now, if I hit Control V in order to paste in, you can see that's gonna take me to the proper video that we're on here. And now let's come in and open this image up as a smart object, it opened, and as we can see what photo shop has done is it's actually created a new temporary document. You can see this is not a J peg right now. You can see there's no J Peg extension here. Ah, and the reason for that, as we learned earlier Ah, file type limitation of J pegs is that they do not support layers and smart objects being a a photo shop layer, I cannot live inside of J pecs. So instead, when we opened it as a smart object, you can see this layer was added to the document as a smart object. And we can come in here, double click, open it up and inside of here. We actually have this, Jay Pek. Now, if I close out of this and if we were to come in here and you hit control s or command ass or just come up to file save, you'll see that we get the save as dialogue box. And the reason for that is because, as I mentioned earlier, this is a temporary document. We actually haven't save this document anywhere at all. And so I'm just going to save this in the project files in case you want to open it up and play with it and see what it looks like on your end. I'll just hit safe now. We don't always have to open images as new documents. What we can do is import them. Let me pull the project files over here, and we have this other Photoshopped documents called Import Me in the project files as well . And if I were to take this and drag it over here, we've looked at how we can do this before and watch what happens when I pull this in. You can see that this is actually ah, we have the ability move around as soon as I hit. Enter, Watch the icon. There you can see Photoshopped by default. When we take an image and and pull it into the document, it's by default. It's pulling it in as a smart object, and again we can open this up. We can make whatever sort of changes that you want. You can see that this is the actual PSD file in here that has been embedded into the image . Now the last thing I want to point out in this video is a little tip that I've learned the hard way from experience. And by explaining this, hopefully I will alleviate that from your experience as well. Now, if you noticed one of the images that we imported was a Photoshopped document and the other one was a J. Peck. And even though smart objects are the same as faras, this document is concerned if I just come up here and save this document so you can use that in the project files over here, they're all the same as Faras. This document is concerned. They're smart objects and they're just referenced those different images. But JPEG images cannot have layers. So watch what happens if I come into this one here. Lets turn off this top one so we can see this one a little bit better if I double click to open this one. This is a J. Peck. So watch what happens if I try to maybe add a new layer. Ah, do some sort of painting on it. Whatever. Whatever we want to do. Just adding something up here. Now, if I close out of this and this is something we saw in a previous video, this is gonna be a little bit different than what we saw in the previous video, because before we were using a Photoshopped document that supports layers. Now, this is a J peg file that does not support layers. So if I close out of this is going to say, Do you want to save? Yes. But it's going to say this is actually now requires that it needs to be a file type that supports layers. Basically, because we've added later, Stewart, we can't save it as a J peg anymore. So in order to save this, we need to say this off as a photo shop document or afford a shot big document. So I'm going to hit Control V again in order to get back to our project files location. And let's call this our open me. Now we can just leave. Leave it at that. We have This is a different, different name. So when we have that saved here, look at that. It didn't update the reason for that. And this is this is interesting, because the reason for this is because with we open this up, we're back to R. J. Peg, what happened to the photo shop document? we just saved off. We made an edit. We changed our document. We saved it off, but we didn't ever have that. Photoshopped documents embedded as a smart object. We only have the J peg image embedded as a smart object. And so when we save that off, it's a completely different file. And of course we can come in, we can drag that. And if we want to, just like we did before with with this other one, we can bring that Photoshopped document in. But a lot of times, if you're working here, that could be really frustrating. And so this is Ah, the little tip that I want you to avoid. You can re link that smart object. So in order to do that, when we have the layer selected, I'm going to right click and let's go to replace contents and let's replace it with the Photoshopped document that we just created. Now, if we place this, you'll notice that now are edit is in there. And if we double click to open this up, you can see this PSD We actually have the PSD file in here, okay? And that brings us to an end of this class. And now that we're familiar with how to move around inside, a photo shop in the images will be working with in the next class. In this photo shop basics Siri's. We're going to dive into some of the core photo editing tools in photo shop. After all, that's probably what will be doing most of the time inside of photo shop Mons, a reason why it's called Photoshopped. So when you're ready, find class number three photo editing in photo shop and I'll see you there.