Merge layers

- [Instructor] This movie is all about merging layers.…Here goes.…Well, here you can see I have…the finished version of this photograph…and I want to show you the before.…To do that, I'll go over to the Layers panel.…I only want to show my background layer.…So I hold down Option on a Mac, Alt on Windows…and click on that eye icon and this shows me…the original without all of the work.…And then if I Option or Alt click that again,…we can see the after.…Now, in this particular file, I've done a lot of work,…kind of got carried away, but if I open up this group here,…you can see all these different layers…with retouching or work on color and tone…to try and craft a look for this image.…

Now let's say that what I want to do is…merge some of these layers together.…And I'm going to do this maybe one,…for organizational purposes, and number two,…because I want to apply an effect to the entire image,…but there's just too many layers, so I can't apply it…to each little layer, I need to merge it…to the top to apply the effect there.…