From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Introducing the Layers panel - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Introducing the Layers panel

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- We're going to start things off with a quick introduction to the layers panel. So, if you're new to Photoshop or the layers panel for that matter, I'm going to be hitting you with an awful lot of information here. However, rest assured this is the kind of stuff we'll review over and over again. All right. So one of the best way to learn how to use the layers panel, is to rummage through a layered composition which is what we're going to do right now. And so this is a composition by the way that you and I will be creating from scratch. The only things I'm providing are the base photographic image and a vector-based path outline in the shape of this shark. All right. So the first step is to make sure that the layers panel is up on the screen. If it's not, you can go up to the window menu and choose the layers command. But don't choose any one of these commands if it has a check mark in front of it because that will actually hide the panel along with all the other panels inside that group. Fortunately, you can bring it right back by returning to the window menu and once again choosing layers, and by the way if the color panel is taking up too much room on screen then you can drag this horizontal bar to make it smaller so that you can see every single one of these five layers. And I noticed that each one of the layers has an eyeball in front of it. If you click on the eye, you're going to go ahead and turn that layer off, which in our case represents the screws right there inside the shark, so you can see if I click inside that square where the eyeball used to be then I'll go ahead and bring those screws back like so. And so in addition to hiding or showing a single layer, you can hide and show all other layers. And to show you that, I'll just go ahead and zoom out by pressing control zero or commands zero on the Mac, and then you press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and you click an eyeball and notice because I click the eye in front of that base image layer right there. I went ahead and turned all the layers in front of it off. So this is the actual unmodified photographic image. And then if you want to bring all those layers back, you once again press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click on the eyeball. And it's worth knowing when you're working inside Photoshop that the alt key on the PC, the option key on the Mac, often reverses the behavior of an option. And so, as opposed to in our case turning the layer off, when I click that eyeball. And then bringing it back when I click again, alter option clicking keeps that layer visible and makes everything else invisible. All right. I'll go ahead and alter option click on that. I, once again, in order to make it active, notice that I've kind of had a named all of my layers in advance. So there's a layer right here called sweat, this one's called cliff. If a layer name is truncated because there's not room for it, you're going to see a little dot, dot, dot like so. In which case you can hover over that layer name to see the full name in this case shark, or in this case screws. If you want to rename a layer then just go ahead and double click on its name like so and I'll call this guy texture because that's actually what it is. It's the texture inside of the shark, and I'm just going to go ahead and zoom in here so you can see what I'm talking about. I'll turn that texture layer off and you can see that we have a flat black shark now and then I'll turn it back on and we've got texture. All right, notice that these layers are inset and they have these little arrows that are going to the left and then down to the left of the thumbnails. Those indicate that they are clipped layers, meaning that this texture layer is now enclosed inside the shark layer, and that is how we get the texture inside the shark without it leaking out. If it weren't clipped, if I was to select it and then go up to the fly out menu icon, up here in the top right corner of the layers panel and I were to choose release clipping mask, notice that the texture is no longer inset we no longer have that little arrow and the texture is pouring outside of the shark. I don't want that. So I'll go ahead and press control Z or command C on the Mac to undo that change, notice right here we've got a vector based shape layer and you can tell that's the case because we can see this little square with points on it, in the bottom right corner of the thumbnail. Next door, we have what's known as the layer mask. If you want to turn the layer mask off, then you can right click on it and choose disable layer mask don't choose delete, just choose disable. And that will put a red X over the layer mask and turn it off so that we can see how the shark is leaking out down into the right if you want to turn it back on, you can right click once again and choose enable layer mask. Or, if you're just in the shortcut, hit shift click. So you can shift click in order to turn a layer mask off, you can shift click to turn it back on. Now, everything I'm showing you by the way is saved along with the file. So you can have invisible layers or other elements inside of any layer composition. All right. Now down here we have what are known as layer effects. And so I'll go ahead and zoom in a little further on this shark right here, so that you can see the shaded edge right there. That's the result of this layer effect inner shadow. So if I were to turn it off, that shadow goes away. If I turn it on, it comes back. All right. So that's my brief introduction to the layers panel, if it went by a little quickly rest assured though we'll be talking about these options over and over again.

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