Lessons

Lesson Info

Photoshop: Layers

today we're going to be getting into us at the beginning of the day we're going to talk about layers so if you want to construct an image out of multiple pieces usually you're going to want to have them on layers so that their independent of each other they're not kind of squished together where you can't later make changes after that we're going to move on to retouching and so I'll show you how I think about the various retouching tools and photoshopped so you khun tackle most retouching jobs then we're going to progress into creative techniques so if you want to stylized your image named particular way to make it look a little bit more unique you'll know how to do so and then we'll wrap up the day by looking out a bunch of start to finish examples in talking about how I use all of these techniques together the workflow you might use a ce faras what order you would you do things in and anything we didn't have a chance to cover on the other days so that's kind of our plan for the day a...

t least my plan for the day and say we're to start off talking about layers so layers and photo shop if you happen to not be familiar with them it's just like having anything that's stacks just like here on my table I have two sheets of paper and I put one on top of the other and the top one might obscure my view of what's underneath same thing is true with layers is just a stack of images where the top most image might obscure your view of something that's underneath it and if you want to just get a little bit of a visual here on my screen I have something represents an image just kind of sitting there and I can stack other things on top of it to kind of construct an image out of multiple elements and it's almost a ziff these images are sitting on big sheets of glass because there's something that's really isolating them from what's underneath and if you actually think about that's what you would see in your layers panel is these little bitty thumbnail images of what's in various layers and you're really gonna have to views you're going to have your main image view here and then you'll have your layers panel over here to show what it's made out of and as you turn on the various layers you're going to see it in the layers panel where they're all separated but you're going to see it on the main screen where you see the composite the end result so you hear your senior and result you look over your layers panel to see what it's made out of in this area here that I'm showing as what looks like some rice paper or something that's the empty part of the layer and if we were to ever turn off enough of these layers where it would just be emptiness there's nothing filling in that area it will show oppa's a checkerboard the checkerboard always means there's just nothing there because if they ended up putting white in there you might assume there's literally white in that layer but a checkerboard is unique to indicate there's nothing here so let's just start working with layers and learning how they work and then start working on some projects and we'll see what we can do with them so first I'm just gonna open any old image I just double click on this image it's a jpeg file thes images were one sided shot in iceland and if you ever want to travel if you were going to europe consider going on icelandic air because you might be able to connect in iceland and then continue on for about the same price as just flying to europe and therefore you could stay over in explore iceland but I sense beautiful so anyway here's one image I'm going to open up my layers panel on the right side of my screen right now I have all my panel's collapsed down I don't know if you remember from the first day or not but you can collapse the panels down with this little double arrow icon and if I click that it will expand them to full size if I were to click it again they go back to just the icons when you just open a picture that hasn't been worked within layers yet you're going tohave one piece that's called the background the background is not actually considered to be a layer you notice there'll be a lock symbol on the right that means most of the things that you could do with layers he can't do it the background it's a special piece that's not quite a layer yet even though it shows up in the layers panel we can change that quality at any time if you double click on the name of the layer that's usually how you change the name and if I were to do that I'll do it here I can type it a new name and then if you watch in the layers panel you see the little bitty lock symbol that's there the moment I change the name from background to something else the lock symbol goes away and now that has become a full blown layer meaning that any limitations that it had previously have been removed and it's kind of a weird concept the background I wants wish they get rid of the concept that really has to do with back when file formats could not handle layers in general and they had to create something that was pure that said this has no layers so it's compatible with ease particular file formats nowadays we have so many file formats that can handle layers and transparency and other things that the concept of the background layer is kind of old and not as necessary but just know if you ever have a background layer and you find there's a limitation of what you could do with it double click on its name and change it to anything at all and then it's no longer special it's no longer that way you've unlocked it now just so you know just changing the name of the layer back to background is not going to put that lock symbol back on it you would actually have to go to the layer menu and there's a choice under the side menu called new and is called background from layer that's the only way where you can somehow say but those limitations back on this layer and it's really rare that I ever want to do that but just so you know a lot of people assume that if you just rename it back teo background that it would get back to the old state that's not the case I'm gonna go back to bridge and let's just grab another image remember all these air from iceland so if you just wondering now when I have more than one image open you know how they show up his tabs well I'm going to show you how you can get between two different tabs so I can have more than one image per document there's a couple different methods for doing that the first one is like a copy and paste but if I go to the edit menu were usually find copy you'll find it's great out to begin with and that's because photoshopped doesn't know what part of the image you want to copy you have to tell it by making a selection and so if I want to copy the entire image I go the select menu and choose all now it knows what part of the image I want to work on so if I go to the edit menu copy is available then I could switch to the other tab by simply clicking on the tab near the top of my screen go to the edit menu in choose paste and when I choose paste watch what happens over the layers panel when I choose pace we're going to get a brand new layer that contains that picture so that's one way of creating a layer there are other methods as well I'm gonna go back to that other tab and close the tab because we're done using it and let's go find another picture another method for doing this is in the upper left of my screen is the move tool and the move tool is what you used to reposition a layer I could click within this picture I just clicked the mouse in drag on top of the other tab it will bring that tab to the front and then before I let go I need to move my mouse down into this picture I don't I can't let go when I'm on top of the tab it would just ignore the fact that I dragged something they're my mouse needs to be within the picture itself and when I let go now we have a third layer so we can either drag and drop which is what I just did a copy and paste and get those layers the third way of creating a new layer is to just create an empty one because maybe you don't need a picture to be in it instead you want to paint on it and if that's the case at the bottom of the layers panel just to the left of the trash can is the new layer icon and if I click on it there you can see our new layer I can tell that it's empty because remember a checkerboard indicates that there's nothing there and that's why doesn't show his white or anything because you might actually have white in the layer but a checkerboard indicates empties sit down here I can see this layer at the bottom of it is empty so on to get rid of the layer I can just drag that layer down to the trash can on the bottom of my screen or if I just have the layer highlighted already just click on the trash can it's just like a button to trash it or my favorite technique is if you have the move to allow active units hit the delete key and it will delete the active layer so let's go get a couple more images and in this case I'm just going to open more than one image at a time select all those double click on one of the ones that are selected and I'll use the move tool clique within this drag I hope it's the tab on the far left and then dragged down then going close that one ah little tip is if you click within this image drag over to another files tab and back down usually it pays attention to exactly where did you click within the original image and then wherever you have your mouse indicates where that particular area will end up in this document so that if I do that again I'll click on the tip of the top of the church drag it over and then here our position the tip so it's right on the corner up here like oh you see that's exactly where it went so it's paying attention that but sometimes that's not what you're looking for because you're just kind of randomly dragging things over so here's a little tip goto one of my tabs clique within this document dragged to the other tab dragged down into this one and before I like oh I'm gonna hold on shift shift means center this so if I have shift held down at the moment I let go of the mouse button I do that and then I can release shift it's going to be centered so therefore if I did that each time I dragged things over it would have been centered on every single one one more image to drag over I'll hold shift when I let go to get their fact I think I have two copies of that image okay so if you look at my layers panel you can see all the layers that air there I do have two copies of one image so I'm going to get rid of the top most one I'm in the move tool at the moment and when you're in the move to like you just hit the delete key it will delete whichever layer is currently active and you can tell that by which one's highlighted in my layers panel they're all right now let's move these layers around see what we can do with him so the move tool is what you used to reposition a layer it's going to move whichever layers are currently active and you could have more than one layer active at a time so if you want to move five layers you could do so you select the layers the same way you would select images in bridge or in light room meaning I could hold down the shift key and click and it would select everything in between a layer that's already selected and where I click or I can hold down the command key which is controlling windows to just click on individual layers and toggle them to either make them selected or not now when I used to move toward just click on the image I can drag it around and if I could move something beyond the edge of the document it's still up there it's just as if we've cropped the picture to get rid of that stuff and it hasn't been deleted so if I were to re crop the image and ad space up there I would suddenly see that I am going to click on another layer here and move it and just get some of him off the edge of my screen if you want to be able to see that information that I've pushed beyond the edge of the actual document we have a bunch of different methods for doing so the first method issue could go to the crop tool in my tool panel this guy and that will give you a cropping rectangle if I grab the edge and paul the moment I start to pull it shows me if there's anything beyond the edge of what we had before and when I wasn't dragging it didn't show me that but the moment I grabbed the corner it's a revealed what was out there and I could drag this out to include that stuff I don't think I got all the stuff in the bottom left though there's still stuff going beyond the edge there's a couple other things I could do that let's use the move tool again click on a different layer to make it active and then I'll drag that layer down another thing I could do it if I want to see everything that's going beyond the edge of my actual document I can go to the image menu and there's a choice called reveal all reveal all means make my document larger just large enough to show me all the stuff that's beyond its edge so when I choose reveal all from the image menu watch what happens near the bottom of the image I'll zoom out here first so you can see a little better reveal all but it made the document taller so you could see that image that was going beyond the edge and I could do that at any time if it ever doesn't do anything it simply means you have nothing beyond the bounds of your document nothing's been pushed out that far yet now when it comes to switching layers usually have to click on the layer within your layers panel to do so I find that to be rather inconvenient sometimes because sometimes these thumbnails are so small that it's just hard to distinguish what layer is this particular image in you know just glancing over here answer there is a little tip for targeting layers when you're in the move tool at the top of your screen there's a check box called auto select if I turned that on now watch what happens when I click on this image this in the upper left watch my layers panel do you see it automatically targeted that particular layer when I move over here to the right and I click on this one it automatically targets the layer and that's because there's a check box turn on called auto select which means automatically grab whatever layer contains the stuff I'm clicking on and therefore eikenberry quickly move this kind of stuff around and reposition it whereas usually when you click if that's not turned on photo shop is not paying attention to where you're mouses it's just saying whatever layer is currently active you're going to move just because your mouse is sitting on top of ah visual area that's on a different layer doesn't mean it's gonna automatically grab that instead you'd have to glance over here to see what's active now for me personally I don't like having auto select turned on all the time because I find out accidentally click in some places or he'll be thinking about something else when I'm moving it and it's just grabbing things too often too often more often than I'd like it to so there is a way to temporarily turn on auto select just for that at that moment that you need it in what it is is if you hold down the command key that's controlling windows when you're in the move two will move tools what used for moving layers around usually if you don't hold the key down at all it's just going to move whatever layer is active in my layers panel and it's up to you to choose which one that should be but if I hold on the command key and click then it will target the layer I had my mouse on top of and it's only going to do that for the length of time that I'm holding down that command key if I let go of the command key then it stops changing what layers air activites sticks with whatever layer you manually set over here and regardless of where you click you'll be moving that one layer it's not going to be changing things up on you so I really like being able to hold on the command key and click to uh target layers but just know that if you have layers where one layer is obstructing your view of what's underneath it's always going to choose the top most layer that contains something right where your mouse is it's not gonna be able to drill down multiple layers underneath that so if I stack these up where this particular layer uh obstructs my view of another I can't get to that layer that's underneath but I just command clicking to say grab it it's always the top most layers it's going to get so we'd have to go to my layers panel over here and just notice that oh here's the one that's hidden underneath click on it to make it active then you could move it now so that's just targeting layers either click on their names within the layers panel or used move tool hold on the command can click or if you absolutely love auto select layer feel free to turn it on manually so it's on all the time then if you were to hold on the command key when this has turned on it would temporarily disable it all it does is it changes this from the op the opposite of what you're currently at when you hold on the command key so if you like to have it on all the time holding on the command key would temporally turn it off then all right with our layers sometimes it's useful to name them and if you want to change the names just double click on the name and then if you want to rename a lot of layers all you need to do is press the tab key and you go down to the next layer if you'd like to name it at the tab key again tab key tam and shift tab should go the other direction so if you started at the bottom of your layers you want to go up shift tab would do that it's actually the same thing as we had in bridge same thing works in light room if you're naming your files tab would go to the next one shift tab would go the other direction so it's something once you get used to it you can use it in multiple areas then sometimes when you're moving things around it's useful to get them to align with each other and you'll find that sometimes photoshopped helps you out with that so that if I come in here and I move this layer around when I get the corner of it toe line up with the corner of these other layers itjust seems toe kind of snapped there and it's hard to get it to not once you get close it just snaps into place and the reason for that is if I go up to the view menu there's a choice here called snap and it below that it says what should it snap to and one of the choices there's layers so therefore if you move one layer up and it gets to the top edge of the later you're working on gets the top edge of another layer it would snap to it if you find that to be annoying you could turn off right here also you have it snap to the documents bounds when you move it to the edge of your document instead of getting where it goes beyond the edge really easily if you're really close to the edge it would snap to the edge and you can pull out guides therefore you could line them up with guides so that could be rather nice ah one thing that I like to dio is up here under the show menu there's actually a choice called smart guides I just turned it on and now when I move things around you might some people find this to be annoying other people love it and what it is is it shows you what it's snapping too so if I move it over here the reason why it suddenly snapped is its lining up with the left edge of the layer that's above that makes any sense also it's hard to tell but this particular layer goes beyond the bounds of my document a little bit on the right side and so does the layer above they're the exact same with because it's showing me that the right and left edges are lining up and if you look at the line that's in the middle that means the centers are lined us well so if you want to see why is your documents snapping as you move it around cause sometimes it feels a little odd but you're not moving around in a smooth fashion those little ah smart guides will show you why is it snapping what is it snapping too that makes any sense and I got to that under the view menu there's a choice called show in they're smart guys now sometimes when I'm dragging things around I don't want it to snap in having it snap makes it really feel like I can't do what I want to so there is a technique you can use to temporarily turn off the snapping what that is after you've already clicked the mouse button and you're actively dragging it hold down the control key controlling mac or controlling windows and for the length of time you have control held down you're temporarily disabling snapping and that's true not on ly of moving a layer it's true of anything else if you usually use any particular tool and you notice it snapping to the edges of things is one example might be the crop tool if you're trying to crop out like a microscopic black line on the edge of your document with a crop full often want to snap to the edge of your document and so trying to crop out like a one pixel tall black line on the edge is impossible unless you have snapping turned off the one thing you need to be aware of when it comes to using the control key is you have to have already press the mouse button so it's while you're got the mouse held down that it works that way if you hold it down before you click the mouse button it's different so that's a little takes a while to get used to um to do right so I'm just gonna line up these images however I like space them out as if I'm doing a little layout maybe I'm going to do a brochure on iceland or something like that got him or there's a little bit of space under in between them and then sent some of them go beyond the edge of the bounce the document I'll go to the image menu and I'll choose reveal all so I can see all that now let's say this was going to be for a brochure or something else and right now I can see that there's a gap in between these images but what I would like is a similarly sized gap on the right side of the document the left side of the document top and bottom so if that's the case I have in many different ways of doing that one would be to use the crop tool if I go to the crop tool I could just pull out the crappy rectangle beyond the edge pull it out beyond the edge and then press returner enter I'm gonna choose on do the second thing that I could do is that you go to the image menu and choose canvas size campus size means don't change the size of my actual pictures change the size of the document that's containing them so if I choose campus eyes it tells me the width and height that we're currently at looks like a huge document seventy two inches and I can come in here in type in a new dimension so I could go over here and type in maybe seventy five inches by seventy inches and when I click okay that would also had the space but they're I'm typing in the amount so I could be precise all right let's do some stuff with layers because here is kind of boring to just move layers around here's the image that I shot this is a light painting this is molten steel wool uh and I'm actually inside that ball and if you can see me in there not you might see my hat I'm usually wearing a hat and you see so my skin tone in my arm but I want to make this look like there's a reflection at the bottom I did do this at the beach s o it was wet right by the surf s so I could get a little reflection but I wanted to look almost like there's that reflection going all the way down I can see the complete repeat of this so what aiken d'oh it is I'm going to duplicate this particular layer so if I go to the layer menu I can say I want a new layer via copy so just copy the layer and currently have active to create an exact duplicate of it if you watch my layers panel you'll see I got two identical ones the top one is yours obscuring your view of the one that's under it then if I want to change the size of that layer I can go to the edit menu and there's a choice called free transform and free transform would allow me to scale rotate or if I don't wanna have to do that manually by pulling on the corners of my image after I choose free transform I can go down here too just transform transformers really like a subset of this anything you could do with transform you could also do with free transform it's just this helps you a little bit where you don't have to figure out how to do it as much one of the choices in the side menu is flipped vertically and so that's only going to take the layer that's currently active in flip it vertically so if you watch in my layers panel you'll notice the bottom layer stays the same and the top layer just got flipped upside down now I can use my move tool to reposition this and I could just drag it down and I'll see if I can get the bottom of this I'm looking at the bottom of this where the steel wall is hitting the ground and I'll move it click right on that part where the still what was hitting the ground and I look on this one to see where was that happening and I'll get him close to the same position now that's extending beyond the edge of my documents so I want to see it I'll come over here and choose reveal all just like we did before so I got both and the problem is we can see this distinct line here where the edge of the photo is so all I'm going to do is on the left side of my screen I'll grab the eraser tool and with the eraser tool I'll use a soft edge brush and when I race it's only going to erase the layer that's currently active the layer that's underneath it's not highlighted so it's not going to be affected and I could come up here and just kind of a race this away to reveal what's under it sure I got most of it there and I'll get a little bit more of a look of a reflection then the only thing I'd like to do is if it was really a reflection in water water would usually distort the shape you know it's not gonna be a perfect lessons and absolutely still day usually is a little bit of rippling in the water that kind of stuff so the other thing I'll do is go to the filter menu I'll come down here and see if I can find something maybe under distort and here's a choice called ripple whenever you apply filter it only applies to one layer whatever layers currently active so the top most layer is active which is that reflected version when I choose ripple that's all it's going to be showing me within this filter and I can come up here and adjust the amount to control how rippled is that I just wanted a little bit click okay and if I choose on do you see the difference in the bottom I'm just typing command z controls and windows that's the shortcut for undo now the only problem with this is if I save this image and close it and open it a month later and decided deleted too much of that layer I'd have to remake the layer to get it back because that information has been thrown away permanently after I've closed and saved to the image I can still get it back right now just because photo shop remembers I think it's twenty on news twenty last steps I did and I could use the history panel or if I know how a keyboard shortcut from multiple undoes I could get it back right now but once I save and close it it no longer remembers how we got there it only keeps the pieces uh that I made it out of so um that's just a little quick blair technique let me know if you might has questions at any point here all right then let's open a bunch of images I want to put all these images together these air once a shot in africa and here's just the images so you get a sense for what we're about to put together I'm going to select all of those images first one's already selected I'll hold shift get the last one and instead of doing what we did before which was rather inefficient to have them all open a separate tabs and having a drag between documents or copy and paste if I'm in bridge I could go to the tools menu there's a choice called photo shop and there I'll find load files into photo shop layers light room has a similar choice just go up to the photo menu choose edit in and I think you'll find load files into photoshopped layers it would do the exact same thing so when I choose that we're going to get a brand new file and it's going to contain one layer for each of these images so it will do all the work that we did previously with those iceland images will do it for us now let's say I'm going to do a brochure and in that brochure I just want to show kind of ah ah fan of images almost like I had some just small prints on a table and I fan them out where they partially overlap each other it's just gonna be in the corner of the brochure just to show here's a variety of images that's what I'm looking for so the first thing I'm going to do is add some extra space to the document just to make room for the other images to be fanned out so I could do that many different ways you've already seen I could use canvas size if I wanted to do it numerically well I say add three inches or something like that or I could just use the crop tool to do it visually I'll use the crop tool and I'm just going to zoom out so I can see the space I mentioned on the first day that to zoom in and out I use command plus and minus I believe and so I'll just do that and he's going to grab the corner here and pull it out to make space for where I might make uh the other layers show up I'll press or turner entered same done now if you look in my layers panel all the layers perfectly lined up with each other so I can only see one of whom the top most one just like having a stack of books where the top most book makes it so you can't see any of them that air underneath and I need to decide what I like to dio I can turn off the eyeball icons here to hide layers and I might do that to begin with just train off the top a few layers so I just have two layers visible if you look in my layers panel you see just the bottom two layers that way I can manipulate this layer once I'm done with it I'll turn on the next layer up manipulate it and keep going toe work those images so what I'm going to do is go to the edit menu I'm going to choose transform it's actually free transform and when you're in free transform if you want to scale your image grab the corner and just pull on it you can scale it up or down the only problem with this is you can easily distort it you can pull it this way you can pull it that way and if you don't want to distort the proportions that you had originally hold shift when you're dragging the corner and that means scale it but keep the same proportions so I'm gonna make this a little bit smaller the other thing you can do when you're transforming things is if you get away from any of the little handles that air on your image and instead just being the empty area that is around them you could move your image and I'm going to move it so the lower left corner is kind of a line if you want to rotate this what you want to do is move away from these handles where you're not on top of the picture instead you're out here you don't have to be very far away though just move a little bit outside and look at your mouse you'll see that it changes into what indicates it's gonna rotate and you can rotate your picture the only problem with rotating your picture is I wanted to pivot it not from the center but from that lower left corner where lines up with the other picture so when I rotate noticed that it always seems to pivot around the middle and the only reason it's pivoting around the middle is because that little cross here sitting there you can click on that cross there and move it anywhere I'll move it out there now watch what happens when I rotate its just the pivot point so I'm going to move that so it's in the lower left corner so that now it pivots sit around that corner something about like that when I'm down transforming this I pressed the returner and turkey on my keyboard or at the top near the right of my screen there's just a check box that would do the same as returner enter and if I want to cancel I could hit the escape key or I can hit the no symbol that's up here so I'm gonna press return then I'm going to make the layer that's above it visible but not only do I need to make it visible I need to make it active maybe it's just because it's visual and I'm thinking about it doesn't mean that photo shop knows that it's just going to work on whatever layers active so I need to click up there and I'm gonna go back up here too free transform I'm going to move that little uh mark again down to the corner I'll scale the image by grabbing the corner remember when you scale you can easily squish so you gotta hold shift and then I'll move it away from the image to rotate and I'm just gonna do that again two more layers so turn on the next layer make it visible from over here to free transform notice free transform has a keyboard shortcut command t control team windows for transform I never go to the menu to get to it unless I'm teaching instead I just type command tea for transform so this time I'll do it with the keyboard truck it I'll click on the top most layer turn on its eyeball command t then I could move that center point that's really the pivot point I can scale this down just hold shift when you d'oh and then move away from the handles so you're out away from your picture to do the rotation and you could see how we could construct this but now we have all this empty space to the right and below that I don't need it's just making my file size larger and I'm not going to put anything out here so you do remember before we had a command that was called uh reveal all which made my document larger to show you everything that's there we also have another one that's going to make it smaller it's going to get rid of the empty parts and I'll show you that just one moment but before I d'oh let me show you how to transform more than one layer I don't want the bottom most layer that's here to be straight I want all of these pictures to rotate together so to do that all I need to do so my layers panel I have the top layer active ah hold shift and I'll click on the bottom layer to get them all then with them all selected all type command t that's the transform keyboard truck when I type command tea now I get a transformation of all of those breast returner enter when I'm done so now let's get rid of the empty space that is surrounding this to accomplish that I'll go to the image menu and instead of choosing reveal all which makes your document larger to show you stuff going beyond the bounds I'm gonna choose trim and trim is going to ask me what to trim because I don't always have transparent stuff out there instead let's say I signed a sheet of paper and just scanned it in or took a picture of it I might just have whiteness surrounding that's so here it says defaults to transparent pixels but it also has the choice of top left pixel color and bottom right and that's if you scan something or took a photo of something and you have an object on just a solid colored background and it says get rid of all the solid parts bringing in and crop the image until you hit something that's different then what's up in the absolute corner hit stop when you hit the first detail but transparent pixels is what I need here and it says kanai crop all four sides or not because sometimes you want to be fancy and only get rid of this stuff on the bottom that kind of stuff so you see how that just brought it in so now when I say that my file size would be smaller because we don't have so much stuff to keep track of question yeah um when you first started on this only the african sexually and you transferred it over I know said didn't default to background first one no it did not default to the background because it knew I was stacking more than one layer the time that you end up getting a background is when you open a picture uh that was saved in jpeg file format or another file format that doesn't support layers and that doesn't support transparency like empty parts then because of the limitations of that particular file format it comes in with the background and it's just saying this was in a format that didn't support all those fancy features and therefore we had to do something to it to get rid of that stuff and so if I were to save this mitch right now is a jpeg file and reopen it you would see it as one piece and it be called background but if I save it in a file format the supports layers when I opened it and looked just like this so usually when I have layers I saving either photoshopped file format where tiff they are the exact same quality it's just if there's a reason where you need to choose between the two but photoshopped file format a tiff is what I mainly use then it would open just like this but background layers will primarily come in if you have a picture that is in raw format or j peg for mount and you open it it just starts that way because both of those file formats and do not support transparency you know empty parts and they don't support parts of an image extending beyond the bounds of your document that's actually notice big data if you want to know the term port and so it is the way to get rid of those um pieces is to flatten your image and when you flatten an image you get a background that's your end result it's just means get rid of all the empty parts fill them in get rid of all the stuff that is extending beyond the bounds of my document that kind of stuff so you're not always going to have a background layer most of time when I have one if it gets in my way I just double click on it changes name