Understanding Layers in Photoshop

Series Summary

Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current and primary market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems. Photoshop revolves around editing pixels, unlike Adobe Illustrator, which uses vectors. When an image is rendered into Photoshop, it is compiled by millions of single-colored pixels. At its core, Photoshop works by manipulating each individual pixel according to the tool being used. In this free video series, a portrait photographer demonstrates how to use Adobe Photoshop for graphics editing and image manipulation. Discover how to do scrapbooking with Photoshop CS3, how to stretch a picture and how to fill a shape in with another pattern. Further tips include how to airbrush photos, how to add text to pictures and how to add a border to a picture in Photoshop. With these tips, the initial pictures are only the beginning of a photographer's creativity.

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe systems incorporated. I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Hi I'm Steve Anthony, I'm a photographer and digital retouching artist here in New York City. In this clip we are going to talk about understanding layers in Photoshop. Now in this case I've opened a picture of myself. And as you can see in the layers windows it says background. Well that will always be locked. Now if you want to create a layer that is adjustable you can change the name of that layer but I prefer to simply duplicate the layer. And then just leave this layer alone. That way any changes that you make to the layer above it can be undone. Lets say for example, now see I've just made the lower layer invisible. Lets say I go into this layer and I want to put a filter on it and I go say brush strokes, cross hatch and see how that's how about sprayed strokes, that's the effect that I want. Lets say. And I apply that to the picture and I look at it and I say boy that doesn't look at all like I wanted to, what am I going to do now. The nice thing with layers is that you can, you can revert to the layer underneath it at anytime. You see now this was the, what I didn't like and this is what I did like. Now you can always go undo for anything that you've done, and there it's gone. But lets say I'm doing some, I'm drawing something on this layer in multiple steps and darkening the mustache perhaps, you know having a little fun with myself. Now I've just done many, many steps that I can't just go in and click and undo. So in this case I can just delete the layer if I like. Now the way that layers are useful is that by keeping everything on a separate layer then you can adjust the intensity and opacity of each layer. So lets say maybe I like that but it's too dark, then I can just simply change that. But if I were to do some editing, now I'm going to go ahead and get rid of that layer. And I'm going to create another layer from that layer. And I'm going to do a little editing. I'm going to select a certain area of this picture and I'm going to copy it and paste it. Now I've just created a third layer as you can see of just the area that I selected. Now I can take that and adjust say the color balance just of that particular part of the picture. Now I'm just doing an extreme thing here, there's no reason that you would necessarily want to do that, but you can see now by having everything on a different layer you can have a lot of adjustability. That's why it's important that any changes that you make in any image that you are working with in Photoshop be sure to always have a background layer and you copy it to have a working layer and anything else that you want to change on top of that select it, and copy and paste it into another layer. That way any change you make doesn't effect the previous layer. Very powerful tool, take full advantage of layers in Photoshop. This is Steve Anthony and this has been understanding layers in Photoshop."