Lessons

Lesson Info

Layers

I might end up with a bunch of adjustment layers in an image sometimes I even have, like fifteen of them in an image. It all depends how picky I am about what the image looks like in I have images that I'm doing in a hurry. I took a picture of a friend's car. He wants the picture, I'm going to email it to him. I'm going to adjust it real quick. Hopefully just in camera be done with it, send it to him. But then there are other images and that would be like my fine art images. I end up running my fine art images five feet wide and canvas. They hang on the wall and I want you to walk up real close to him and look at it as much details. You want those images I spent as much time as it takes. If it takes me fifteen minutes fine. If it takes me a day and a half, I'll spend it because it's something where it's going to be huge. I want somebody to purchase it. Where? It's you know it's really my reputation behind the image. And so in those cases, I might go in and find to all sorts of things. ...

For instance on this image there's a little red turn signal over here, orange one I might find tune its color with human saturation, thie orange that's on here that showing through the paint, I might end up fine tuning, I might end up darkening other areas I have tinted black and white applied only to the sky here, that kind of stuff, I'm just going to say one example of what I might do in this case, I'm going to create an adjustment layer and doesn't matter what kind of adjustment amusing just to show that all use brightness and contrast, and I'm just going dark in the image, and then we talked yesterday about having adjustment layer and that it comes with a mask where if you look in your layers panel right, there's your mask and you can tell if the mask is active or not by the corners, if there have brackets around it, if they don't, you'll have to click on that to make it active and the mass controls. Where can the adjustment apply? Any part of this that turns black will prevent the adjustment from coming in. So what I might do is with an adjustment layer, I might zoom upon my picture over here, and I'm going to turn on that thing that shows you my keyboard shark it's again, um, and what I might do is try to make this jump out of the picture. To make it feel more three dimensional. So with my adjustment layer, I would simply grab the paintbrush tool I would paint with black, and I'm going to get a smaller brush. Not sure if I mentioned this yesterday or not, but to change the size of your brush, you can use a square brackets. I know I mentioned that, but if you add shift to that, you'll change how soft the edge of your brushes if you hold on shift, which I have right now and use the right brackett, you're making it a harder edge brush. If you do a left bracket it's becoming a softer edge, you can tell if you look close up here on the upper left. Watch that little preview shift right bracket shift left bracket you see, it gets softer that's left bracket, right bracket harder in there, I think are a total of, I think it's five settings the five seven it's would be one hundred percent seventy five, fifty, twenty five and zero that's what you're going between and it's just so it's. The same is clicking on the little down point arrow here in changing the hardness setting between those twenty five, zero, twenty five, fifty, seventy five, one hundred so you can use your keyboard for that. So anyway, I'm gonna come up here and I'm going to try to get a brush that matches thie edge quality of the object I'm trying to isolate, so it has a pretty crisp edge on, so I wantto relatively crisp edge brush, but almost nothing in the photograph has, as chris pittman edge text would, you know, there's always a slight softness, so right now I'm one setting down from the hardest that means if the hardness study was using one hundred for the hardest time at seventy five and I'm just going to come in here paint with black and get it off of this area, there's a tip about using your paintbrush tool and that is if you click once like this and then you go somewhere else, you could hold the shift key and click and it'll connect the dots so the straight line so I just painted a straight line down there, I'll click over here and then I'll move to the top and I'll hold the shift key and it'll snap a straight line between the two ok, then I could go over this object and I could do the same thing just paying with black black removes the adjustment from the image, and it does it by inserting information into the mask, pain across this in a smaller brush here and paint in there now the only problem with this is when I'm painting I'm not I'm only seeing the image get a little bit brighter when I'm doing this because that's just hiding the adjustment and the adjustment was darkening the image slightly so I'm only seen a small change as I paint and it's hard to tell exactly where I've painted and where I haven't so here's a tip the paint shows up in your layers panel you can see it over here you see a little bit of pain but that is really a full size picture just like this represents a full size picture it's just it's not visible right now it's not showing it to you do you remember the thing called quick mask mode where it showed a red overlay on top of my picture in the red overlay indicates areas that were not selected? Well, there's a way to get that thing to be over late on my picture and here's how you do it if the mask is active, the mask has to be active, so you have to see the little of things around the corners you know little brackets around the corners, you can press the backslash key, not the ford slash key use for typing and web site address is the other one goes the other direction it's right above the returner in tricky and your keyboard press it all by itself and it'll overlay that on your picture so you can see where have you painted with black where haven't you and therefore I can see that I get over spray anywhere did I you have a gap somewhere for whatever and you just hit the key again a turnoff so if you watch my screen overlay when I pressed the key you'll see what it looks like here's the back side so now I can come in there just find out where was that I miss things and tune them up I'm not going to be as precise as I usually would be here because that's simply takes more time and I don't know if you guys want to sit here for you know fifteen minutes to watch me paint versus two minutes to listen to me talk about what I would be thinking about but just so you know what I was doing straight lines if I click here and then I hold shift and I click down here you see it through a straight line I can hold shift and go across here go up there so I could get a bigger brush hold shift you say connect the dots here okay so I'm gonna hit backslash you get a turn that off and now let's see what this adjustment layers doing I'll turn off its eyeball it's darkening things but do you notice those little to pieces over there not being darkened in that can help cause and feel like they're jumping out towards you bright things usually feel like they're towards you dark things kind of recess and so I could give it a little more of a three d feeling the other thing I might do for this image is get a softer edged big brush and paint in the middle to say take away the darkening right here where I want your eye to be and that will keep your eye words bright your I can't help but look at bright things so I'm darkening now but I'm not darkening those two objects over near the left in the center of the photo I'm not darkness I want your eye to be drawn there so often times and doing a lot of that kind of painting if I do the overlay you can see where I've painted might not want to get quite a much pain on the sky because they don't need that part right? But all right, just another example of that here's an image that karen made this is karen's dog nyah and she and the um and uh with knife edge the original picture if I turn off the adjustment layer looked like this in the color surrounding where somewhat distracting it wasn't making it so your eye goes right tonight s o she did a human saturation adjustment layer and that's, where you have a slider called saturation we could turn it down to make the much less colorful and that's what I'll turn on here. She's made it for us and you see how it just made it less colorful around her dog. And if you look in the layers panel, you can see the mask there where she's painted over her dog to remove the adjustment from there. The one thing that suggest there was any time you paint on the mask is show the colored overlay because usually they're gaps in your paint strokes. I bet you we can check parents work, especially she didn't turn over mask let's see should know it's going to this backslash key. See those gaps throughout there? She's like he's shaking her head now like, oh, man, last time I give him an image to use so I might come in here and just touch this up a bit. I'm just getting the brush of a good size right there. I see less red so I could get coming here and saying let's where that here there's some gaps in her paint strokes and I can fill them in. And all that now, this is not just four times when we have an adjustment layer we've painted on a mask. This will be any mask you ever used. That's attached to a layer it's called layer mask. You might want to hit backslash to double check your work because it'll look a little better. All right, now let's, start using layers in a different way. Let's start using them or just to stack some images I want to make let's say aye, we're going to do a brochure. You know, like, for instance, I'm doing enough coming trip to iceland and here's a bunch of image for iceland. I want to make a promo to put up on screen during the breaks here or something. So you guys see pictures from iceland? Maybe we have the word iceland and, you know, it's. A nice little slide you could say, um, I want to show you how to do that. But first I have a question quickly. Just if I'm using the lay a mask, I can also use all the selection tools we talked about yesterday, not just a brush. Yes, you can use selection tools. So let me do the overlay quick like this, you could go over here and ground the lasso. And I could say, hey, let me select this part here and then you just somehow need to then decide what do you want to do with that selection? The selection is isolated in that area to say whatever I do can only affect that now it's up to you to figure out what to do you could grab your paintbrush tool paint with black inside of that or you can go to the edit menu and choose phil to say fill that with black black would go into the mask which changes your over life but it's not like he might be thinking, which is if you start with a selection and then adam asking it's like converted into it, it doesn't happen automatically if you already have a mask sitting there you make a selection, then you have to decide you want to fill it with black or white what do you want, tio? So it takes a little bit of getting used to their so anyway, I want to make a stack images here we have a bunch of files I'm just going to open any one of these files now first off with layers there's a special thing in your layers panel that is called the background notice that I noticed that I called it a thing I didn't call the layer the background is not a layer it shows up in the layers panel but if all you have there is called a background, your image is considered to have no layers layers are things that you put above the background the concept of the background is somewhat antiquated in that it I don't know if we fully still need the concept uh because modern file formats have more choices and such but the background notice it's got a lock symbol next to it there's a lot of things you can't do to the back print you can't poke a hole in it with a normal layer if you poke a hole in it and there's nothing underneath that you'd see a checkerboard showing up checker word indicates an area that's empty it's just to show you there's empty space there you'll never see that I'm working on the background because no part of the background could becomes partially transparent or could be deleted away so if you use the eraser tool when you're on the background it doesn't erase things the eraser tool simply becomes a paintbrush and it paints it just paints with your background color usually the paintbrush to it would paint with your foreground color it's on top but the eraser tool on lee when you're working on the background says hey, this won't let me a race and therefore I got to do something and so it just paints with your background color so it acts like just a paintbrush other things that I can't do if I had a normal layer in fact let's put a normal layer in here, I'm just going to go and open another file I'm going to copy this and paste it into the other. The only problem is if I go to the edit menu copies great out because it doesn't know what part of the picture I want a copy so before I could try to choose copy, I have to select all in his selection to say what part of that then I can copy it let's go to the other file and I'll just choose paste that's one way to create a layer when you copy and paste you get a layer, watch my layers pound won't see the layer with a normal layer you can move your picture so that it extends outside of the actual document you know part of that later for a pullback in comes in here but it's extending beyond the edge of the actual documents dimensions that is what is sometimes referred to his big data data bigger than the file itself extending beyond the filing system that could never happen in the background no part of the background can ever extend beyond the bounds of your document that's one of the other limitations in the background the background is also always stuck at the bottom of the layers back you can never have it anywhere else when it's a background those are the main limitations of the background can't extend beyond the bounds of the document can't poke a hole in it where you khun have part of it, be empty it must be stuck at the bottom of the layers panel it just seems weird why would they put all these stupid limitations on anything like that and that's? Because those were the same limitations for most of the old file formats like j peg but j peg, I can't have anything that extends beyond the dimensions of the document can have big data anything that goes beyond the edge of the document would be thrown away when you say that a j peg with j peg I can't have areas partially transparent what looks like a checkerboard if I save is the j peg and I have that visually in my picture it will be filled in with my background color because j peg does not know how to save transparency and j peg does not save layers so it would all get merged together into one just be sitting there and so the concept of the background has the same limitations as some of the file formats that we use, but I think they can largely remove that concept there's not a huge need for background because now we have file formats that could support transparency, we have file formats that can soar port big data like tiff like voters shot, file format and other things and so the concept of the background is just becomes confusing for people what you don't have to have a background layer double click on its name name it anything and now you've just removed all of its limitations you can now move it up in your layer stack to have it somewhere other than the bottom you can now use the eraser tool and it actually will a race you can now move it so that it extends beyond your documents bounds all limitations have just been removed because it's no longer a background okay so the background layer is kind of oddity kind of come from the old days of photo shop where they wanted to have something where you have some limitations that air same as your file formats also if you ever merge or flatten your documents the on ly difference between the choice of merge and flatten flatten means give me a background merge means on lee have a background if there was one there before so if you want to see him move these things around and I'll say layer merge visible merge official means combined together but don't do anything special beyond that so emerge it it's in one layer we still have transparency if I move this we well usually still have stuff extending beyond I guess not when you merge choose undo if I flattened though layer flatten image that means combine all the layers together, threw away any layers that are hidden if there's any information extending beyond the bounds of my document, trash it. Uh, and if there's, any parts that are transparent film in flatten, flatten is like finish absolutely done, it will never need to touch any of those layers again. I want to just make it a picture that could put on the internet or something else, and I don't need any of those special things flat otherwise if you're just trying to combine some layers together, merge them, don't flatten, flatten him his final, you could think of, we'll talk more about that a little bit. So what was I trying to do? I wanted a merge a bunch of images together into something that just showed up stack of images sitting there so let's do it. I've already gotten one image in here. I did that by opening a picture, selecting all copy paste that's one way of getting a layer let's do that or some other images I'll go back to bridge. I don't know if you remember the keyboard shortcut for bridge it's, the same keyboard shortcut for open command o control own windows, just add the shifty, grab the next damage, double click on it to open it, and I wish copy would be available just roll by itself but it's not because it doesn't know what you're working on do you want to copy a layer a mask something uh so you just go up to the select menu to select all and then copy becomes available I can close this picture now because I'm not gonna need go back to it when you copy it it's stored in a place called the clipboard clip or just a temporary spot anytime you copy anything in any program that's where it goes and then when I come over here and choose paste it puts it in this document so if you watch my layers panel when I choose paste it automatically plunks it on a new layer so go grab another one that would click just going through the same process liked all copy closed that documents that aren't needed anymore and paste so now we have the stack of layers showing up in my layers panel and we have this view of my picture so how do we think about that well let's see if I can find it really old but useful by diagram here here's how I think about layers in general a lot of people seem to get confused about layers if you never used it before but it's just like stacking anything on my table in front of me I have a stack of papers I think more on the ground under me and my eyes will grab so here in front of me and if you guys can see it on camera or not but I have a stack of papers and most people get used to a stack of papers and it's like imagine these are books imagine there any object and this one is obviously on top of the ones that are below it entered obscures my view of what's underneath it then below that is another sheet of paper I could look those two up and see what's under it this is just like having layers there just like sheets of paper or books or anything else stacked on top of each other with a few limitations here with paper I can mess with things where aiken bend the paper in three dimensional space and I could make it go below this one and in some other areas above another one so it feels like it's interspersed within them I can't do that with layers layers are always flat objects that are perfectly stack it's like having a stack of glass big panes of glass that are the exact same size as your document and they're stacked so it's like this so you have this this is the first image you open it's just it's three dimensional here is if you're looking at it like a sheet of paper at an angle and then you copy from one document and you paste onto here and you get a new layer it's a ziff whatever you pasted on there is sitting on a big sheet of glass and that sheet of glass makes it so I can't bend it can't make go below another one and above something else I just copy from another document I paste you get another layer copy paste taken another layer is that's. What you see in your layers panel is the individual pieces and it's a ziff any empty part is a big sheet of glass, then I have my main screen view and it just reflects what I have there here's my layers panel show me, I got a little picture there shows me a little thumbnail that represents what's there over here I see the end result through another layer on top I don't see the glass that see through, so I don't see it. I just see through to the image, but there is a protective bear there barrier there, it's like a sheet of glass or it's like saran wrap you know this clear rap or something? However you think of something that would give you some sort of separation and then put another one on another one on in here on your main image, you're seeing these pieces, but when you apply a filter or you paint that paint has to go on one of these layers, whichever layers active so you click in your layers panel say, hey it's on this layer, and now if I grabbed the paint tool, it will visually look like you're painting over the sky. But if you look in your layers panel, you're really painting on this piece of glass that this layer is attached to that may help see it all or not, but you know, whatever layers active is where the pain's going to go. You grab your paintbrush in, you paint over here, it looks like it goes on your sky, but it didn't go in the layer that contains your sky. It went on the big piece of glass that whatever layer you're working on is on. So let's do that here I have an image, I'll move this used to move tool for moving things around and where I move this out of the way and I can see what's underneath imagine there's glass right here, glass attached to this image, where, anywhere I move this there's a huge sheet of glass extending out in infinite directions above and below and all that. And if this layer is active, when I grab my paintbrush tool and I paint, I'm not painting on the green photo that's underneath, I'm painting on which ever layer is showing up here. In that little checkerboard that you see that's, the glass glass is hard to see, so they do put something in there so it's, easier to see, say, ok, there's an empty thing there, but it's like glass in that the paint doesn't drop down and fall on the photo that's underneath. Instead, the paint just goes right. I'm not sheet of glass, and you could see it right there. So when I run a filter, if I go to the filter men into sharp in something like that selling in effect one of these, whichever one's active, if I grabbed the paintbrush tool and selling it, affect one of these, whichever one's active, and if I used to move tool to move it. Now I can move this around, and I'm just moving that huge sheet of glass that whatever is on this layer is on. It doesn't matter if I click on the picture or I click on this empty part. It's a ziff I'm just touching that sheet of glass moving around whatever is on it and that's how it works in general. Get rid of that ugly paint, though, okay question. So when you say it's active, is that that top layer? Yeah, if you look at my layers panel it's, whatever layer is highlighted so when I say highlighted it's this kind of great with bluish in thing so when I clicked between them and you cook in the name you change which layers active, you can actually have more than one layer active if you hold shift, you can grab now I have to but when you have to there's only certain things you khun dio you can move them together you could scale them larger or smaller ah, but you can't paint onto it once because it would know where the paint a go to go up here to go down there you can't apply filter because it wouldn't know which one it just can't apply filters to two at once, but you can move them in scale, which is kind of convenient but usually there's only one layer active and its whichever one is highlighted in the color so let's try some things the move tool that's going to move the entire contents of a layer is long as there's no selection active a selection would say hey, we only can work on this small portion and you'd only be able to move whatever areas selected, but if there's no selection active, the move tool is going to move a layer around repositioning so there's a way to move between two documents so far we've copied and pasted well, now it's used to move tool instead here's the move tow instead of copying pacing, I'm going to move between the documents. Here's, what you do need to move tool to be active. I click within this document and then I drag up to the tab that contains the other image. When my mouse gets on top of that tab, the tab should come to the front now I used to just not a habit let go right now assuming it would appear in this document, it won't if I let go, nothing happens. What you need to do is the move to all needs to be within this document you drag on to the other tab so it comes to the front and then before you let go track down into that document otherwise it doesn't know where put it so it just wants to know where should I put it in there? Put it in there I could go and close the other document now let's, go and open our last one was try it one more time. So notice that I'm clicking on the tip of this rooftop dragged to the other document dragged down, and I'm now telling it, where should I put that tip where I've initially clicked? I'll put it right here, you see where my mouse is, so look at what appears there when I let go that's right where the tip of the building is, so you see how that works, but you can't just drag on top of the tab in like, oh, you have to have your mouse with in that document in order to get it over there, and that messed me up a lot when they first added tabs, I dragged the other document let go on go one and they show up there and then I just learned you have to drag down. So now what we have is a stack of layers these were put there by either copying and pasting or dragging over from one document to another using the move tool. All right, so now I need more space in this document, I either need to scale these down so they fit within this document or I just need the document to be bigger, to make space for it's up to me and all the pens don't need a huge file if so, I can move them around and make the document larger or if this files exactly the size I wanted that I'd be scaling these down instead so what's looking both instances so I want to scale these down to scale a layer there a couple different places you can go to where we'll talk about scaling one of them is the image menu in the image menu there's a choice where we have image size we've used that that affects your entire document ok, that means all the layers within it everything would change if you want to rotate something here's image rotation this affects your entire document in every layer within it it's just saying, hey, your document you want to rotate the whole thing and everything that's contained in there, so I'm not going to go to the image menu to do this I'm gonna go instead to the edit menu in the edit menu is a choice called free transform what it should be called is scaling rotate because that's what you use it for scale and rotate it can do a lot more, but most people don't access they a lot more that you could do uh but free transform it's what I usually go to in by going to free transform you can actually access all the choices that are found in this sub menu. These are all the things you can do when you use free, transform and as an alternative you could choose from the sub menu to limit what you can do to say I only want to be able to scale I only want to be able to rotate I don't want to able to do all these things so free transform means all these choices if you know how to access that stuff otherwise you go to the side then you say I don't know use free transformed yet I'm going to just scale rotate that kind of stuff so I'm going to dio free transform it puts little handles to show me hey, how far out does that document or that layer extend? How much does it contain information and I'm just going to grab the corner and pull it down to make it smaller the only promise if you grab the corner corner and pull it down you can easily distort the image like this so you what you want to do is any time you grabbed the corner hold shift one of the functions of shift is it constrains things and in this case it will constrain it to keep the same proportions that we used to have when I'm done I can press returner enter or there's a check box right up here to say, hey, I'm done does matter which one you choose, so then I'm just going to click on a different layer because it's got to know which one to work on. Click on the next layer, go back to the edit menu, choose free transform and I'll see how far that one extends beyond this document grab its corner hold shift and that if you get away from the corner, just click on the picture you can move it while you're transforming it their press returner enter or click the checkbox in the upper right they all do the same thing go to the next one now I used freak transforms so often I never go to the menu I just type command t it tells you right there control team windows so I can type command t here scale is down real quick move it over just hit return click on the next later command t and it becomes pretty quick to do this if you just change which layer is active type command teach time get him down in size to whatever size I want bottom layer is a little different background it's not a layer you can't have empty space around it remember you can't have an empty part so I go down there and I try to type command t well it's great out because you can't make it smaller and get empty space around it I could try to do this select all and then this would be available but if I used it you see the white stuff in there that's part of that letter I'll call the layer is part of the background because it can't have a part that's transparent so sometimes it's inconvenient to have a background and so if it's ever inconvenient, just double click on its name and change it and now it's like any other layer you've ever worked with all limitations have now been lifted and now I can type command t to transform it, scale it down. Now, if I needed a huge poster instead of just a image of this size, what I would have done instead of scaling all of these down is I would have used canvas size to make the document itself have more empty space around it, and then I could rearrange the photos within that new empty space. You can also do the same thing by using the crop tool with the crop tool just drag it beyond where it was before toh ad space, so I could have done that the same let's add a whole bunch of extra space around what we had and just rearrange the images instead of scaling them down. But I didn't need a massive image, I mean, that would have been a big image. So now, with the move tool active, I just need to tell it, what should I move? Because just because I have my mouse on top of this doesn't mean photo shops thinking about that? Imagine there's a huge sheet of glass attached to each one of these layers, and when I click right here, it's just looking at whatever layer is active right now and it's going to move it, even though my mouse might not be anywhere near the contents of that letter, it doesn't care there is a setting though you can change if you're in the move tool at the top of your screen is a setting called auto select if that's on then it's different every time I click the mouse. But now with the move tool the first thing it does is it looks straight down under my mouse and says what's the first thing that actually contains something there so if I click right here, watch my layers panel when I click you see it change which layer by click over here you see it every time I clicks and now I can just do this because with auto select layer turned on what it ends up doing is it looks at what is the top most layer that contains something right where you're clicking but it's always the top most so if I click right here the top most image is not the one that contains a bunch of darker greens it's the one with the sunset that's there so it's this one if I need to get to this one, I need to make sure that that is the top most thing that's under my mouse and then I could target that move these around but these air just like sheets of paper on table here, the on ly difference being with sheets of paper I could have two sheets on the same level you could say whereas with layers one is always above the other above the other it's a ziff they're sitting on big sheets of glass there's no, the only way you can get him on the same level is to merge them into the same layer but it's a ziff they're sitting like this with space between them and you're just moving arm around like this even though they might not be overlapping there still is a stacking order involved, so if I ever move this one over here, it's certain where it should appear shouldn't be up here should be down here that's your layers stack the order of the layers so if I get some of these two overlap a bit like this, the stacking order that shows up in my layers panel is what controls which ones on top. So if I want this one with the green stuff in it to be on top, I need to figure out what layer it's on it looks like it's this one and I click on its name and just drag up just keep going up until I get high enough in my layer stack that it's on top of the others does that make some basic sense? Just remember auto select layer that's going to say automatically make whatever layers under my mouth, my mouth, my mouse active the moment I click with the move tool for me personally, I don't like that setting because sometimes I can't find the little bitty part that might have that layer visible to easily click on and so every single time I click it seems to change which layer is active so here's what I do instead there's a key you can hold down in your keyboard that automatically toggles that temporarily on or off all it does is change the state of it so if by default you have it on all the time holding on this key would temporally turned off I usually have it off by default and so therefore when I hold down the key it's just going to turn on for the length of time a hold the key down just gives me the opposite of what is currently set to that key is when you're in the move tool hold on the command key that's controlled with us so therefore if I don't have the command key held down, it works in whatever setting that that is currently at the check box on her off whatever it is. But if I hold on command it's is if I change the state of that to the opposite of what it's currently at and therefore I can target these layers and move them around I just find it to be more convenient to have to hold on the command key when I wanted to change the layers so it doesn't constantly change layers on me. And some has messed me up. So holding down command is a shortcut when you're in the move tool for changing that setting.