Lessons

Lesson Info

Flat vs Layers

Today is all about layers and, well, actually two things layers and selections, because if you're working with layers and you don't have to use elections, you'll be very limited in what you're doing, so that means that we're going to create composite by a composite all they mean is something made out of more than one photo. Uh, so we're gonna composite are combined together more than one photo will also talk about selections and masks uh, if you've ever heard of a layer mask or quick mask, or even something called a channel will get into those, uh and we'll also talk more about adjustment layers because yesterday I just kind of hinted at him, I didn't really get into him and that's the general idea for today, I think you'll enjoy a lot of what we do because we're also going to end up doing some layouts where let's say you don't want to just have a straightforward photo as your end result. Instead, you want something that is looks like a greeting card looks like a wedding invitation or ...

announcement or something like that. You'll learn how to do that where you incorporate your photos and we'll incorporate your photos in a more interesting way than its oftentimes done, because my wife, karen, does hand lettering. Where she spends a lot of time she's first starts off with a pencil slowly sketching things out until she gets it exactly what she wants then she thinks that by kind of tracing it with an ink pen then she scans it cleans it up and does all this stuff and I had her work from multiple days creating graphics for this class so that if we want to have something like a birth announcement, you can have a hand lettered thing that says, you know it's a boy or something like that and when you put in your photo instead of it just sitting there and looking like a rectangle, it'll look like somebody drew a hand letter or a hand drawn frame that's containing your picture so that it has a different feeling than thie otherwise would, and so you'll see how we could incorporate some of that and if you get the class, you get all those hand lettered pieces coming along with it so I think would be fun. We'll also talk about getting other kind of border treatments on your images that you wanted to look as if it just doesn't have a crisp rectangular border instead it's a little more organic you'll see how to do that and if you want to you can add texture to your image as well, so it looks as if it's printed on canvas or anything um, so that's, some of what we get to look forward to today, but this being a one a one class, we need to slowly ramp you into those features so that you actually understand what you're doing and so that's what we'll be doing here, I'm going to start off just showing you the difference between working with layers and not working with layers, because if you're not working with layers, you're extremely limited in what you can do in what you're doing. It's maura less permanent to your image, it's very hard to make changes as you progress, whereas working with layers makes it very easy to make changes, and usually the bottom most layer in any document is the original picture. And so anything you do ifs long as it's contained within layers can be thrown away, and you got your original just sitting there so you can experiment to your heart's content never really harming your original picture because it will be on a separate peace at the bottom of your document, as you'll see. So here I have one of the images from yesterday remember when we kind of edit down a folder full of images to figure out which ones are worth editing? Why edited one of those images to come up with this, and here I'm in camera rock is that's where we were last kind of talking about adjusting images and we never really did much from here to get it open and photo shop, so I just wanted to show in the lower right in camera there were three buttons there's done cancel an open image, remember, cancel means that if you you were just experimenting, cameron, whatever it did, you did you didn't like and you want to throw away the changes you made the last time you entered camera that's what that would do done would take the settings that I've applied in camera in attach him to this raw file is some text called metadata, so the next time I open the picture would remember those settings and then open image is the same is clicking done a ce faras it, saving the settings under picture, but it also opens the image all the way into photo shop, so you can, uh, do additional changes there, so I'm gonna click open image right now, so now we're in photo shop on the lower right you can see my layers panel, and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to collapse down the other things that are on the right side of my screen just to the layers panel khun take up the most space, and just like when you're in bridge, you remember that you khun double click on the little tabs for each little pain that's in this interface, and if you do, you'll collapse down that, too, just the tab itself, and I'll do that for some of these areas that I don't need right now, so the layers panel could be nice and big now, these little thumbnails that you see these little preview things you see, you can control the size of those, and last night I was playing and I made mine really big that's, not default. Let me quickly change this to the default without telling you how and then I'll show you how to change it. So this is what it would usually look like, and if you look at my layers panel that's pretty darn small, if we're just going to be talking about a few layers, it might not be a bad thing to have in a larger, in my layers. Panel just a little easier to see what's going on there. There's a couple different ways of changing how large the thumbnails are that show up in the layers pale, but one method is to move your mouse into an empty area where there are no layers down here below, with layers show up, impressed the right mouse button remember if he only have one mouse, but because you're on a mac that only has one button holding down the control key in clicking the mouse is the same as using the right mouse, but if you can plug in a two button mouse and just write clicking is the same as control clicking you know, when I do that, I get this pop up menu now remember when I write clicked, I did it within the layers panel in the area below where the layers show up like where more layers would show up if you had them and I just pressed the right mouse button there and I could change the size of them if you want to mess with a co worker it's lunchtime going to sneak in there, set it to know thumbnails, it will mess them up a lot. People don't know that's possible of doing that, otherwise I'm gonna set mind to large and that's not a necessary step is just going to make it easier for you guys to see, so you don't have to squint so much. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to duplicate this image so we have two versions of it and I'm going to try to do the same process on both versions one of them will use layers with the other one, I'll try not to and you'll just see where not using layers makes it so it's not very flexible at all where is using layers makes things much more flexible so in order to duplicate this image, I'll go to the image menu and that's about halfway down I'll find a choice called duplicate just means make a second document that looks exactly like this one when I do that and asked me to name it and I'll just call it layers so that if you ever look at the little tab that's at the top of the document, you could tell which document I'm working on you see up here it says layers see see that's the version I'm using layers in, but the problem is right now way have two tabs of identical documents within one window we can't see them both at the same time, so I will then go to the window menu and there's a choice called arrange, which means arrange these documents on my screen somehow in one of the choices here is too kind of tile these two up, and if I choose that marge, what happens there? It made it now so I can see both documents one above the other so it just arrange them for me and while I'm going to do a zoom out so that I can see the entire document on each because right now it's partially cut off and I'll do that by typing command minus there's command plus and command minus its control plus and control minus and windows they mentioned yesterday is just something I used to zoom in and zoom out on your document and that's what I'm using, I'm gonna click on the other tab that sound here at the bottom to make it active, and I'll do the same thing just so we can see both documents, and so I'll be switching back and forth between these two and the way off switches. I'll just click on the name of the tab that contains the document you'll see the text within that tab turns white to tell you that this is the one I'm working on and the other one's kind of grey, so I clicked back and forth. I can do that, and I'm not going to make a pretty picture right now. I'm just going to do some stuff to this picture, so the first thing I'm gonna do is let's say, I don't want the edge of the image to be look like a rectangle instead, I wanted to have a soft edge on it that has more of a random appearance to it, not just a straight soft edge. One way I could accomplish that is to grab the brush tool, the left side of my screen and whatever you use the brush tool. Down the bottom left of your screen, you have your foreground color that's the color you would start painting with if you move your mouse on top of the image clicked and dragged. So right now I'd get gray. I'd like to have white because my prince on a white sheet of paper, wherever I, um, paint with white, it'll look as if it's fading out to the a sheet of paper, so I'm gonna click on my foreground color, which will bring up a color picker in within this big rectangle all dragged to the upper left corner, which is where white is click okay, so that that's white then I want to use a soft brush so we don't get a chris beds in the edge of the photo instead. It's a soft one so at the top of my screen remember the options bar that's horizontal expands the top of my screen those air all the settings for the brush are about to use if I didn't type a weird key uh, and one of the things up there is my brush. If I look where it shows me a preview of my brush right here, the number that's underneath it represents how large the brushes, but I find it more useful to just move my mouth's on top of the image to see it and I can change the size of the brush in a couple different ways. One method is to come up here and click within this area in here we have a size setting in a hardness setting for house harder, soft, the edges and how big it is. So this is one way of doing it, but to be honest, I absolutely never come up here to change it this way. This is like the old way of doing it back before there were other methods that were more efficient. But if you ever forget some method that might involve your keyboard or something else because you just don't remember the keyboard truck hats, you can always come up here, click within that little preview near the upper left of your screen and change the size or hardness. There are a bunch of different ways of changing our brush a way that you've been able to do it for a very long time meaning for a decade or so is you could use the square bracket keys on your keyboard. They looked like half squares, the right above the returner and turkey and your keyboard. Then if you press that the right one will give you a larger brush left one will give you a smaller brush and you can see the number changing in the upper left of my screen and if you see except pretty tiny but this number, which is the size of my brush when I use those, you could see it changing. The other thing is you can change the how hard the edge of your brushes by adding the shift key. If you hold down shift and then do the right arrow key or not a rookie bracket key or left bracket key, you're going to be changing how soft or hard the edge of the brushes, and you can also see that if you stare at that little preview, I'll do it now. Shift right bracket shift left bracket you see getting softer edged vs harder edged, and there are other methods as well for doing the same thing, but for now I'm going to use that is just what I'm used to, and I want a soft edge brush that is relatively large, all right? I'm just gonna start paying no my image, trying to put white on the edge, knowing that if I printed on a sheet of white paper that that's where it'll blend into the white paper, wherever we get white in the document, so much color here, and I'm just gonna paint to get kind of a random soft ej instead of a straight one, and when I do that, if you look in the layers panel, everything is in one piece it's on what's called the background there's that white stuff that I put on is not separate from the original image then I'm gonna click on the image that's above and that when we're going to use layers on instead so before I make any change to the image I need to create a new layer so go to the bottom of my layers panel and down there I got a bunch of icons one of them is supposed to look like a sheet of paper with a corner turned up that's the new layer icon if you need to know what any of these layers are called or any of these icons were called just hover over them without clicking and you should see a tool tip show up to tell you what is this icon represent so create new layer so I'm gonna click that and now we have this new empty layer anytime you see a checkerboard and photo shop that looks like this checkerboard it means that that thing is empty whatever it is it means it doesn't contain white it doesn't contain gray it contains nothingness it's completely empty so in reality though this is like taking a sheet of glass that's perfectly clean and has our anti reflection coating on it and just sliding it over your picture so that whatever you're about to do is going to be isolated from the picture itself instead it's contained on this big sheet of glass that's sitting over your image so now, with that active, I'll grab my brush and I'll paint around the edge again. And now, if you look in the layers panel, you can see the original picture is untouched underneath hasn't been changed all in on top of it is the equivalent to a big sheet of glass and that's where my paint got deposited, its on the sheet of glass and it's always as if we're standing at the top of the layers panel looking down. And so in order to see the image that's at the bottom of the layers panel, we're looking through that treat a glass at it and it's obstructing our view of what's underneath make sense, that's the essence of what a layer is now let's, go to the image of the bottom where we're not using layers. Now I really wish when I painted that that I got a little more random oven edge, and so I want to do something to make the edge, mohr random and I'm gonna do that by applying a filter or two, I'm going to come down and there's a filter under the sub menu called distort that is called ripple and it's just going to ripple whatever is active right now, what's active is the layer called background, so everything in that layer is going to get rippled, so I choose ripple. I get a preview of part of my image in here I can see the person in here aiken actually click and drag within this preview and I might get up here to where I can see that transition to the white edge and I'm just going to bring the amount up higher and higher until I can start to see some sort of change there at the bottom I can choose the size of my rippling if I choose large I might start getting a more dramatic change there and I'll just look okay so what have I done? I went to the filter menu under the sub menu called distort I found something called ripple I'm doing a large ripple with the amount turned way up click okay well the problem is if you look at the photo at the bottom and zoom up on it the ripple filter applied to whatever it was active and if you look in the layers panel that you can see what's active it's everything we have and so not only did the edge that I paint and get rippled but sort of the photo itself now let's do the same thing on the image above on the image above we have that paint that we put in on a separate peace a separate layer that is independent to the one that's underneath in whenever we apply a filter a filter can only affect one layer at a time and so we just make sure the layer we wantto effect is active and because that's the only thing that's active this that's underneath is going to be unchanged. So now just come over here and apply the same ripple filter and it should remember the settings last ones I used here I see a checkerboard because it is right now previewing the center of the document and if you look in the layers panel the center of this particular layer is empty. But if I actually clicked within this preview and dragged far enough, I'd eventually get near the edge of the document and I should see my white paint that's in there uh and I'll cook okay, just apply that now if I zoom up on that image and I might have needed to use a higher setting to make it more obvious, but can you see some sort of change? That's happened where the white stuff is if I choose undo, I'll do that by using the keyboard shortcut for undue. Most people are used to the keyboard shortcut for undue because you screw up in every program used I do at least so commands e controls and windows all type if you type it a second time, it simply re applies whatever you want did so you can see that I have done that then I might want to come in here and get a different look on the picture itself the main picture of the horse but this is a change that I might not want to have happen to the entire part of it or I might want to easily get rid of part of it and return that image looking to normal. So what I'm going to do this time is I'm going to click on the background layer and I'm going to duplicate it. There are many different ways of duplicating a layer one method of duplicating is to drag a layer to the new layer icon because remember we clicked on the new lawyer icon to get an empty later? Well, if you drag something on top of it, you're saying give me a new layer but make it out of this thing I'm dragging so there's my duplicate and I'm going to go over here and let's try blurring it I'm going to use a kind of blur that's called a radio blur and I can either spin or zoom will try zooming click okay and see what we get we say can you see that kind of look we have I'll do the same thing to the image below that's not using layers exact same settings just click okay now because the image of the bottom is made out of one layer any time you apply filter it ends up affecting the entire layer and so I can't somehow magically bring this back I can't make that not affect the border effect that we have there there's all sorts of things that I can't do two this one now there are some things though, that I could do a cz long as I haven't closed the document yet as long as you haven't closed the document yet you always have undo and you actually have more than one undo if you go to the window menu there's a choice in here called history, innit? A list everything you've done to this picture and so it tells me I opened the picture I used the brush tool to paint that border around it and then I applied the ripple and radio blur filters and if I click on one of these previous steps it's the woman to me undoing that and I could go all the way back to the original picture the other thing about using this thing called the history panel is there's a little icon over here do you see that guy that's the history brush icon and if you see that and you actually look over in your tool panel, I actually have to remember where it is I think it might be into the brush uh actually take me a minute to find it because it's right there because I never use it and I mean never ever ever because I use layers instead but in the brushes panel, you'll see the exact same icon in there just above the eraser that's the history brush with the history brush means is we can paint with whatever my picture looked like in any one of these previous stages in the default setting for what we would paint with is the original picture, but if we wanted to paint with what it looked like it any of these other stages we would just click on one of these spots to say I want to paint with what it looked like a this point. So if that's up there at the top, we could use this thing called the history brush and I could come in in paint and if I did, I could bring back what the original picture looked like because it's painting with what the document used to look like at a previous stage that's what the history brush does it hasn't in this history panel there's a little brush to say what version do you want to paint with? I want to paint with the version that had all these things applied right there where we were a few minutes ago and now I could paint it back in sounds great, but the problem is if you were to save this image in close it the next time you open it, that history left list would be cleared out because that history list on ly contains so many steps it's not going to like if you do five thousand steps to you and that you're not gonna have every album listed the paint on the version of photo shop you have it's going to have between twenty and fifty steps that it remembers and you could always get back to what it looked like at a previous state but the moment you close your document and you open it up again this would not have a listing it would just show it would have the word open all you've done is open your image and so if I save enclosed the image of the bottom would no longer have the ability to get back to any of these previous stages but if I use layers it's different because with layers were keeping all the parts that make up our picture within the layers panel itself we have the original picture down here at the bottom above it we have a version that had had that weird blur filter applied to it and above that we have the white paint that we put in in there physically separate pieces if we save the image we saving these pieces when we open it again we have the exact same pieces there and we can easily make changes to them whereas the version at the bottom if I click on it this is all it's going to save right there everything is permanently applied so with the image at the top there's a lot of stuff I could do let's say I want to change what color that edges that painted around I didn't want to use white what do something else? Well, I click on my foreground color and I change it let's say wanted black when she's black now I would like to change the color that's in this layer well, I can do that by going to the edit menu insane that I'd like to fill if I choose fill one of the choices that I get in this dialog box is to fill up my foreground color my foreground color it's the color that I have right here black if I just click okay? It feels everything because I didn't tell it not to it just said, ok, fine, you told me to fill I'll choose undo and I'll try one more time edit phil there's a check box here called preserved transparency that means preserve the empty parts of this layer that means if you look in the layers panel, any part of the layers of this particular layer that looks like a checkerboard is not going to change, so if I turn on that check box and now I click okay, I can easily change the color that I'd put in the edge because it preserved the empty parts of the layer filled everything else I switched to the image below how can I do that? Because there's nothing here to help me there's nothing that says, where is that white stuff it's not separate from the image itself, I could attempt to make what's called a selection to isolate that area, but creating a selection that's in this shape with this soft of an edge to get it to match and even if I did and I filled it, you'd still have it blending into the color that's here, he just wouldn't be able to do it in, so doing it with layers makes it much more versatile and that's how we're going to work, we're going to just do a bunch of stuff of layers today, but just in case you've never used layers and didn't make any sense to you yet, you just hopefully see at this stage that it helps to keep these pieces separate from each other. But any time you think about the layers panel, imagine you're standing at the top looking down and you simply need to look through the top layer to see what's below it and so what's in the top layer might obscure your view of what's underneath uh and then let's talk about saving our images I'm going to save the image it's at the top we'll just go to the file menu into save ass on ly certain file formats support layers and if you look down here in the save ask dialog box, I just went to the file menu and choose save ass to get here there's a check box called layers if I were to turn that off when I save my image, when I would open it in the future, there'd only be one layer it be called background in her to be a cz if this stuff was permanently combined together, kind of like the image that was at the bottom, so I want to make sure that stays on, and if I switched between various file formats, you'll find that some file formats don't support layers, and because they don't support layers, that little check box will be great out. It will be a warning triangle next to it, tio indicate you're goingto lose these layers, you'll still get the same looking and result is just going to merge them together. It is if they were permanently combined, and so there are on ly certain file formats that allow that check box to be turned on the main one's that people use or photo shop and tiff with both of those file formats. It does not degrade the quality of your picture at all, meaning you khun save into that file format, reopen your image as many times as you want, and you always get exactly what you have. At the time that you saved your image when you open it again, the main file format people are used to using that doesn't support layers is j peg so we're not going to be saving these this jpeg files I think of j peg is being a final file format not what I would call a working file format because the jpeg file format every time you save it tries to save space and it does that by compressing your image in a way that throws away a little bit of information and so I usually only want to use j peg at the end because I only wanted to throw away a little bit of information when I'm done. If I use it as a working file format where I save my image, close it and then open it the next day the version I open the next day is slightly lower quality than the one I had the day before make additional changes to its save it close it open it the next day it's slightly lower quality again because each time it compressed it in any time compresses it's throwing away information it's what's called lossy compression both photo shop and tiff we'll also compress your image a little bit well make it smaller but it's not going to be anywhere near a smallest j peg because both photo shop and tiff does not degrade the quality of your picture at all and because of that because they can't throw anything away, it can't be as efficient with making the image smaller file size but those were the two best working file formats photoshopping tiff and you could flip a coin to pick between the two it doesn't really matter, but there are a couple advantages of tiff if that arm or recent developments first off the tiff file format khun save larger pictures if you ever stitched a panorama that is ridiculously big and I do mean ridiculously big it's made out of I don't know forty pictures not five forty it might find that if you save it in photoshopped file form especially they kept all the layers it was made out of that it might say this is too big for the photoshopped file format and if so, you could switch the tiff because it can handle larger uh, image. There are some other advantages of tiff that I don't want to get into right now but just know I'm going to use tiff right now. It's what I've been standardizing on but if you're used to using photoshopped file format don't feel bad there's no problem as long as your files don't get too big uh you could flip a coin to pick between them so quick save this comes up with options for my tiff file you could just ignore it all and click okay to just say use default settings the main thing you want to be careful of is right here layer compression there's a choice called discard layers that would combine your layers together just like that layers check box that was in the save dialog box it would mean don't save the layers combined them together into one piece so main thing is, I don't want to choose that, so I'll click okay and it warns me hey, saving layers who's gonna increase the file size I just choose don't show choose again don't show again because I'm going to be saving layers and tiff files all the time. I don't want to be warned, so the main thing we learned so far is layers are nice because it saves the pieces that this is made out of, and we need to use certain file formats of support layers if you ever see that the layers check boxes great out, it means that file format didn't support layers senior switch something else it's, photoshopped file format and tiff that our two main ones for using layers and you can just pick between the two doesn't really matter. But tiff does have a couple advantages and that's the only reason I'm choosing it, so now we're going to start doing projects with layers and as a new projects with layers, I'll just introduce you to more and more features slowly with layers to get you more comfortable with him, and by the end of the day, we'll be doing some pretty sophisticated stuff with layers we got to start somewhere in some people that are watching the class have never used layers, and you're like, what is a layer inside to start somewhere before we move onto that? Any questions by chance? Because usually I close these documents in the moment I do boom, a question comes up about them, so yeah, as faras saving into first sis psd sometimes, you know, if you're sharing work like you're both working on something, you don't know what version of psd they're working with, is it better to do tiff? I mean, if they're doing, say, c s five or something and you have, you know, you're working at the more, um, the on ly thing they're relating to, that would be a ziff you're using features in photo shop that are not available in that previous version, for instance, there's something called smart object. Then, if you used one of those in there using a version of photo shop before smart objects were introduced, then there's something in that file that that version of photo shop doesn't know what it is, you know, smart object, and therefore it doesn't matter for use photo shopper tiff it's still not gonna understand that part because he used some technology that didn't exist in their version they make sense but it doesn't matter if youse photoshopped file format or tiff it's that you used to feature that isn't doesn't exist in their version there are things you can do there's something called rast arising a layer rast arising means turning it into just a picture that's no longer that using that special feature called a smart object it's like you permanently converted it to a normal layer then they'd be able to open it but it doesn't have to do with the with the actual file format used so much it's more um by using a feature that didn't exist in their version and if so is there a way I can create the same effect without using that feature we're make that features permanent so that it's no longer changeable but it still looks the same so but it wouldn't really influence which one of those file for my city yeah yeah when you said the tiff has an advantage of being able to sort of save larger files are you talking about number of layers are you talking about number of mega street final or you talk megabyte megabyte on what gigabytes gigabytes what's the I can't remember off the top of my head if you google it it might be that the photo shop file format supports either two or four uh gigabytes or something like that, and if you need to go higher than that tiff file format can go higher. There's also a limit on tiff file format. And if you run into that, you need to go to another file format called, uh called psb, which is photoshopped big format and that can handle just about anything but is not compatible with too many other programs. And that's why we only use psb when we have to. But if you want to see what psb s if I choose, save as if there's a choice here just called large document format that's called a psb file that one can save the biggest, you know, most number of megabytes or gigabytes in size, and you you'll find out if you run into it. I have images where I just have an image that might be made out of one hundred photographs, fold resolution, photographs, that's what the raw material is made out of in the file size is just so big that when I try to save in photoshopped file format, it tries, you see a progress bar and everything, and then it goes pink, and it brings up warning said, hey, we couldn't do that it's beyond the maximum size of a photoshopped phone format, so I do save as again trite if most of the work and, on a rare instance, very rare. I doubt anybody is going to run into it. It would say, hey, it's, even too big a tiff and that's, when I would go to a large document format because that's the ultimate. If he can't fit in that, it can't be saved. Yeah, so. But I'm talking really huge files files that most people wouldn't run into.