Adobe Photoshop Layers – EXPLAINED

One of the greatest and most important components of Photoshop is its layers. If you are an aspiring designer, 99.9% of the projects you will be working on in Photoshop will incorporate the use of layers. They are pretty much the building blocks of Photoshop, and the program will seem useless if you never make use of them.

In Photoshop, the layer’s purpose is to allow the user to work with a certain part of an image without having any effect on the rest of the image. The image below is made up of several layers. The orange graphic is a single layer, the drink is a single layer that is positioned beneath the orange graphic, the text on the left is a single layer, etc. All of these layers are stacked on top of each other to make up a composite image, as you see below.

Layers are very useful because (for example) if I were in a case where I wanted to go in and edit just the orange part, I would click the orange layer and begin editing it. The rest of the image would not be affected because I am not editing those layers. I’m not going to get into every single aspect of Photoshop layers, but this information should be enough to help you understand the basics of layers.

Creating a Layer – So you’ve got the basic idea, and you want to go in and start testing it all out, yourself. Or maybe you don’t, but I’m going to assume you do. Go ahead and create a new document, and set the image size at about 500x500 pixels or something similar. With a new document created in Photoshop, we are going to look on the lower right part of the screen. You will see a box that has three tabs inside named Layers, Channels, and Paths. If the Layers tab is not visible, make it visible now. This is the box that contains all of your layers that exist in the document. Since you are working with a new document, you should just have one layer there by default called “Background.” This is the backdrop of your document, and it will be the lowest layer of your document.

Along the bottom of the layer pane, you will see something that resembles the picture below (minus the red circle).

I won’t get into the other buttons since we are just creating a layer for right now. The one that I have circled is the “Create a new layer” button. Obviously, any time that you are ready to create a new layer, you would click this button.

Now that I have explained this pane a little, go ahead and try creating a layer. Change the foreground color to red and draw something on your new layer. Remember: To draw on your new layer, you must select it first to make it active. Once it is selected, you are okay to draw on it. When you are finished, create another layer. Change the foreground color to blue and then select the next layer that you created. Draw something simple on it.

You now have successfully created two layers!

Moving Your Layers Around – Now that you’ve created your two layers, try making them invisible, and then making them visible again. To get a better understanding of what I mean, take a look at the picture below. 

The eyes next to the layers represent that they are visible. Try clicking the eye next to your blue layer, and watch what happens. It disappears, but your red layer is left still showing. Make the blue layer visible again by clicking the box again, and it will reappear. Try hiding the red layer now. This technique will come in handy in the future if you plan on avidly using Photoshop.

Next, try dragging the red layer on top of the blue layer. If you did this correctly, the red layer should now be on top of the blue layer.

Note: If you did not design your blue layer to overlap your red layer, you will not notice a change when rearranging the layers.

Renaming and Grouping Layers – In projects that contain a lot of layers, it can get confusing very quickly if you do not name your layers. Photoshop, by default, names layers, “Layer 1,” Layer 2,” Layer 3,” Layer 4” and so on. I’d recommend naming your layers as you create them to prevent any messy confusion. To rename a layer, you can double click the name of the layer (for example – Layer 8), and type your new name.

Grouping layers comes in handy if you have a long list of layers, and you want to organize layers that make up certain parts of your picture. For example, if you are designing an image that contains a lot of text, you can include all of the text layers together into one group. This does not merge your layers (flatten several layers into one image), so that is nothing to be concerned about. To make a group, hold down CTRL, click all of your desired layers, click the “Layer” tab at the top of the screen and choose “Group Layers.” If you are a fan of hotkeys, you can also press CTRL+G to group layers together. Try this technique with your red and blue layers you made.

Now that you’ve created your group, you have a folder that reads, “Group 1.” You can rename your group folder by double-clicking “Group 1” and then typing your desired name. To expand the folder, click the arrow next to the folder icon. To collapse, click the arrow again. You can also choose to hide the entire group as well which is very helpful.

To ungroup your layers, you can right click on your group folder and click “Ungroup Layers.”

Blending Options – Blending options are another wonderful component to layers in Photoshop. With blending options, you have to option to change loads of appearance settings such as opacity, overlays, glows, shadows, etc. about a particular layer. There are really endless possibilities with blending options. I’m not going to get too far into them, but if you have the time, play around with all of the settings and see what you can come up with. Don’t worry, you won’t hurt anything.