How to Use Layers in Photoshop Elements

Video Transcript

"I am going to show you how to use layers now in Photoshop. Layers are probably the most crucial part of Photoshop so it is very important that you learn the many many uses of them. Let's start a new file shall we and I'm going to grab a couple of the files we have used, just get our friend back and let's drag him in a new layer and drag him across altogether. I will show you how to do this real quick. Because it is a gif file it doesn't like to be edited so we are going to mode and convert him to an igb and that should make him editable for us and see now he is able to be transferred to our new image. We have our friend here in his own layer. We are going to duplicate that layer and now we can do a whole bunch of things. Once we have two layers open we have a whole bunch of layer effects we can now use. See we go through these different options and it effects the color of our original photos. If you want to you can a whole bunch of stuff really. You can make it look washed out. Now a nice effect if you want to smooth out someone's face let's say we got, you want to take out some of the lines on his face, gloss and blur the top layer, go up to about a 4.1 or whatever you like and now I am going to hold down control or command on a mac and I am going to click on add deck mask, actually let's get out of that and let's try, let's press control and save and go through the various options. It does some pretty weird looking things and it is reversing. Anyway there is plenty of things you can do using layers. So there you go that is pretty much how we use layers in Photoshop."