Photoshop Layers Tutorial

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated, and I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Okay, so this tutorial's about layers. This is going to be a basic tutorial about layers. What I'm going to be talking about is the different type of tools there is in your layers box. Now your layers box is over here on your right hand corner. Now, if you don't see it there, you want to go down the Windows, workspace, reset palette location, that's what it says right there. And it should automatically reset your layers tool box down over here on your right hand size. Okay, as you can see on my layers box, there is a lots of different layers I have going on here. I have probably around twenty layers. When you start off with a new document, you're only going to have one layer, but as you build to do something like I have built right here, which is a small little markup ad, I actually just build layer after layer after layer after layer. If you'll want to make a new layer, what you want to do is you want to go down over here to this create a new layer tool, which is right there. You want to click it, and it automatically brings a new layer for you right there. If you want to delete that layer, you click and drag it all the way down to the trash can, and it automatically deletes. This right here is to create a group. This is going to group and house different type of layers into one single group. Say for instance I wanted to make these four layers into a group, all I would do would be shift, hold them all down, and then drag and drop them into the group, and now they are hidden away into that group, and that's very helpful when you're working with many layer stuff I am here. For now though, I'm going to throw away that, in fact actually, I'm just going to go back and get rid of the group and leave it the way it is. Okay, so before I move on, I'm going to show you guys to create a new fill or adjustment layer. This is going to give you, say for instance, I want to change the saturation on something--single, I want to single out something and not change the saturation to the whole thing, I click on that and it's going to bring me an adjustment layer on my--and it's going to bring up a dialogue box as well, and that way you can single stuff out without having to change everything. You also have the masking tool, which is very effective. You click on that and it brings a mask on here, and this is more for advanced stuff, and I'll show you that in later tutorials. You click and drag, and you'll delete the layer mask. The next one is the effects tool, which is the blending options, that's just like drop shadow, and bevel and emboss, and all that cool stuff, and that's cool for text and all sorts of cool things. Also, you have all these eyes right here--eyeballs--if you don't want to see something, you just click it and you can't see it anymore. You click it again and the layer will come back. Also you have the blending modes up here, which are darken, multiply, color burn, and this options are really cool for more advanced stuff. Opacity, once again, you can click and drag to drop the opacity of the layer that is singled out. Also, you've got the fill, which is kind of like opacity, but basically this is it for layers. I mean, if you have many layers like I have here, it's easy to see that they can get really confusing, so what I like to do is name them. The way you name them, is you double click on the actual name--sometimes that comes up because you're not actually double clicking the name, you're double clicking the box. Actually go on the name and double click, and you can rename it whatever you want, so we can just put it like me, and as you can see, I renamed it. And it's always a good idea to name your layers because sometimes it can get very confusing on what's what. This is the basic overview of layers, so if you any questions, you can always email me or call me, but this is it for our basic layers tutorial. "