Working With Layers in Photoshop

Working With Layers in Photoshop. This is the place to be. Thus far, if you have been traveling through my videos one by one, we have done many things thus far. We’ve merged images, cropped images, set DPI, transformed images and managed how to organize and view our images in Adobe Bridge. Now it’s time to take Adobe Photoshop to a brand new level of understanding. It is time to present the magic in this video, “ Working With Layers in Photoshop.”

Working with “Layers” takes Photoshop into a brand new realm. Many people when first introduced to layers become very confused, but the concept and process of using them is magical and pretty straight forward.

The concept of Photoshop layers comes from the animation process from decades ago, from the original animators of very old cartoons. If you think about an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, try to remember what you were seeing. You would see Bugs Bunny, perhaps running through a field, being chased by Elmer Fudd, and maybe the chase had a couple of hunting dogs following Elmer.

All of this happened using what they called an Animation Box.

Imagine a box about 4 foot tall. Then image that there are six sheets of glass stacked about 5 inched above one another in the box. On top of the box is a camera facing directly down into the “layers” of glass.

Think of the camera’s view and what this camera sees. The background, the field that Bugs is running through is on the bottom layer of glass. Above that is a layer with Bugs. Above that is the layer with Elmer Fudd. With Bugs on a layer all by himself with a transparent background, we can see through the transparency to the image of the field in the bottom glass layer. By adding more art to each layer, objects appear to be in front of or behind one another.

This is the basic concept of Photoshop layers.

Computers take layers to a whole different level. Almost all graphics, animation and video editing applications use layers and in these layers we can control staking order, opacity, object size colorization and thousands of other aspects of anything on one particular layer.

I’ve seen projects with single images made up of more than 200 layers. Imagine having 199 layers of different image with no backgrounds. Sky, flowers, birds, cars, people, rain drops, all on separate controllable layers.

Enjoy your new world of control with this video, “Adobe Photoshop CC Layers Video Tutorials.”