Become a Photoshop Expert in a Day by Mastering Layers

When you have pixels selected, you can create a new layer out of them a couple of different ways. When you do that, the original layer might or might not have a gaping hole in it. If it does, there are a few ways to fix it.

There are several ways of duplicating layers. You can use a button, a menu item, or a couple of keyboard shortcuts. In this video, we'll see a few examples of how and why you would do this.

Why would you create an empty layer?

You might want to draw on top of something or behind something, and do it without altering the original layer. Maybe it's for a temporary alteration, or you just want to try something out. This is another way that you can make non-destructive changes to your images.

Sometimes, you'll want to treat multiple layers as though they're one layer. It could be to make the image easier to edit or easier to move things around, or you might want to make a change permanent. You can group or link layers so they move together but retain their original identity, or you can flatten an image and combine all the layers into one.

In the Creative Cloud edition, Photoshop has pre-made adjustments you can apply with just one click. If you're in a hurry and don't have time to make adjustments manually, these might do what you need.

Changing brightness and contrast is a common adjustment. When you use the Brightness and Contrast adjustment layer, you adjust the tone of all the pixels in the entire image. This is the easiest and most basic adjustment available.

The Levels adjustment is usually a better way of adjusting brightness and contrast.Rather than change all the pixels all the same way, Levels lets you change shadows, midtones and highlights separately. It gives you a lot of control, but the Levels panel can look complicated when you first start using it. This video should make it easier to understand.

Why use Curves instead of Levels? The Curves adjustment is similar to Levels, but it gives you more control, and it can do things that Levels can't. The price is that it's more complex.

Changing the exposure of a picture after you take it: If you have a DSLR camera and take pictures in Camera Raw format, it's best to adjust the exposure on the Raw file or digital negative. (Beyond the scope of this course.) But what if you want to change the exposure on an image that's already been processed, like a JPG? That's what the Exposure adjustment is for.

Vibrance and Saturation: similar ways of changing intensity

The Vibrance adjustment layer has two similar controls: Vibrance and Saturation. Both adjustments can make an image look more (or less) intense, but when it comes to reds, these controls work a little differently.

There are several ways of removing color, but one method is better than all the others. Simply removing color or reducing the color saturation will both turn a color image into black and white. But the Black and White adjustment layer will let you control the grayscale tone of each individual color. This produces a much better result than the other methods.

Changing the levels of individual colors in an image

Whereas the Vibrance adjustment changes the intensity of all colors in an image, the Selective Color adjustment changes the intensity of the individual colors. And it does this for both CMYK and RGB images.

The new Adjustment brush in Photoshop lets you paint non-destructive adjustments on an image. It creates layer masks automatically, paints on them and uses AI for creating selections, making this task a lot more simple than doing it manually.

Text in Photoshop gets its own layers. When you add type to a document, it goes on its own layer, and you can have as many type layers as you want. And it remains editable. The Character and Paragraph panels provide a lot of formatting control.

How to fill text with pictures

Type masks are one of the coolest features of Photoshop. You can fill text with an image, and both the text and image remain editable. This effect works best when you use a thick bold font, so the image shows through.

It's easy to struggle with text boxes.

Why? Because after you get text looking just the way you want, it gets messed up as soon as you resize the box.

The good news is a new feature called Dynamic Text will let you resize text boxes while maintaining spacing and other formatting. (The feature is currently in beta, so it could work a little differently when it goes into Photoshop's full released version.)

Combine effects to create a custom style

At the bottom of the Layers panel is a button that brings up an effects menu. In this lesson, we'll create some effects, and combine them to create a custom style.

Once you create a style, you can use it over and over. The best part of creating custom styles is that you can reuse the styles as often as you like. And not just in the same document, but in other Photoshop documents, also.

Layer masks are one of Photoshop's best features. Every layer can have its own mask, and layer masks are one of the foundations of creating special effects and compositions. In this lesson, we'll see how a layer mask can make it look as though we're slipping one image inside another, almost as if it had depth.

Smart Objects are a way of embedding another file in your document. A typical reason for using a Smart Object is to take a drawing from Adobe Illustrator and embedding it in a Photoshop document. You can then edit the artwork inside Illustrator, and it will get updated in Photoshop immediately, and without any loss of quality.

You've seen images with rough or torn borders. That makes images more interesting, like they're popping off the page. There are several ways of doing it, and in this video, I'll show you the fastest and easiest way.

Even though Photoshop is for bitmaps, it can still create vector shapes. If you need a simple vector shape in a Photoshop document, you can draw one or use a ready-made symbol. The vector tools aren't meant as a substitute for a drawing program, but for basic squares, circles and arrows, the tools are more than adequate, and you can modify and combine them in interesting ways.

Using a smart object, you can apply a rough border to text and keep the text editable.

Fill layers are another way of applying color to a layer. Although you can manually create a blank layer and fill it with the foreground or background color (we did this earlier in the course), a Fill layer makes this process faster and more interactive. We'll see some examples of when you might use them.

There are several ways of getting video into Photoshop. You can open a video file just like you open an image file, you can create a new video layer in an existing file, and you can bring a video file into Photoshop from Adobe Bridge. We'll do each of these methods, rearrange the clips, and also adjust the timeline.

You control video clips on their own panel as well as the Layers panel. We'll see how to change the start and end points of a clip, change the volume and insert background music, fade in and fade out, apply transitions and filters, and more. Although Photoshop isn't a full-featured video editing program, you can use it for simple projects.

A simple use of blend modes is to apply a color tint. The Multiply mode is one of the most useful ones. A common practice is to multiply layers to add a solid color to blank areas without having to erase pixels, or to add a color tint. We will also use the Divide mode to create an intense, artificial brightness to dark colors.

Color interactions can have dramatic effects. Using the Vivid Light and Subtract modes, we can use an overlay to make certain colors change. We will apply these modes to text using a clipping group for a great special effect. Then we'll apply the Darker Color mode and reduced opacity to another clipping group to imprint a pattern onto a common object.

Blending modes, brushes and layer masks can produce dramatic lighting. We will combine several techniques in this lesson: the Soft Light blending mode, a layer mask, opacity adjustment and the Gradient tool. When we apply a gradient to a layer mask and apply Soft Light, some parts of an image will change from too bright and low contrast into very sharp relief, and another part of the image will stand out.

The Layers panel has several ways of letting you get organized. The more layers a document has, the more important it becomes to keep the layers organized so you can find what you’re looking for. It can be time-consuming and frustrating to have to keep scrolling up and down to select the layers you want to edit. That's where groups and colors come in. (The colors get applied only in the Layers panel, not to the image itself.)

Searching and filtering a document with many layers is a very helpful feature. When you have a file that has many layers, it can be hard to find the layer you want, even if you've grouped layers and applied colors. So starting with the CS6 version of Photoshop, you can sort and filter the layers. For example, you might want to find layers that have the word "cat" or maybe you want to see only adjustment layers, or only layers that have vector masks, or only layers that have the Overlay blend mode applied. This feature can save you a lot of time and frustration.

The Layer Comps panel lets you define sets of layer states (visible/hidden), so you can quickly show multiple design possibilities of a single document with just a mouse click.

It can be difficult to composite layers and make the result look real, especially with outdoor images, where you don't have control over lighting. The current beta version of Photoshop has a new feature called Harmonize, which uses AI to do it for you, saving you a lot of time and tedious work.

Thank you very much for taking this course! I had a lot of fun presenting it to you, and I hope you had fun taking it and will find the material useful. I'm always learning new things about Photoshop, and the more you use it, the more you'll learn new things, too. So I invite you to read my blog at flisser.com, and follow me on TikTok and Clapper @BobFlisser and on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/bobflisser. I frequently post helpful info, and if you find something interesting, be sure to let me know!