Understanding photoshop Layers - Learn Online

Understanding Layers v2

Lesson Details:
July 03, 2020

Video Transcription: So if you ever had problems with understanding how layers work well maybe this matter 'fl will help you this video is brought to you by Appy Pie's Academy so think of the layers as as your clothing now the the outer layer of your clothing would actually be the top layer in your layer layers panel and the outer layer of your clothing is actually the one that you and well you can see in the mirror or other people and can see on you right they can't see what's beneath now you are let's say your coat your jacket or your blouse but they but they can't see what's well they can see your outer layer of your clothing and it's the same with layers inside Photoshop let's consider this orange class project layer right here as your outer layer of your clothing and this is why it's being shown on top well right now it's not covering the whole image because it's smaller simply than then the layer that that's been beneath it at the background layer but as you can see it's being displayed on top of the layer that it's that is beneath but beneath it and it's covering covering the the underlying layer so it's just like our our code let's assume that the orange is our coat and the background layer it's is our t-shirt for instance so I hope that this matter for actually helps you that when you look at your layers maybe think about layers of your clothing you will think that that the top layer is actually kind of like your top layer of your clothing and it's actually the one that is being on top and that's being visible right now okay so let me just let me just delete this layer and by the way the quickest way to delete a layer is by pressing the backspace key like so and notice that whenever you open an image you will get this background layer with a padlock being displayed right here and it's just the photoshop's way of making sure that you won't accidentally damage your damage or your layer that's why it's been automatically now locked right here so I think that the first thing whenever you open whenever you open an image would be to duplicate your background layer and actually there's a few ways of doing that we could actually click and drag it to this little icon right here which would which is actually the new layer icon and by dragging a layer to this icon we're actually going to duplicate a layer just like so or which is even faster we could simply use the ctrl J or command J shortcut on our keyboard so if I'm just gonna press ctrl J you can see that I'm actually creating lots and lots and lots of and lots of copies of my background layer and by the way it's the same as going to the layer menu new layer via copy and you can see this shortcut being displayed right here but of course I don't need these many these many these many layers right here so the quickest way to to delete or to remove the multiple layers is simply by selecting the ones that you want to delete so you can either simply click on one and then maybe shift-click on the other one to select like group of layers or you can simply press one and then hold down the ctrl key or command if you're in a Mac and select only the layers that you want to delete but since I want to delete almost all of that I'm simply going to click on the background copy number 2 then on the background copy number 15 and press the backspace key just like so and by the way since we are talking about the layers I think it's a good it's a good time to quickly go back to the foreground and background colors right here.

So if you haven't had enough of shortcuts of handy shortcuts here are some more for you so let's say that we want to have now we want to fill the background with a solid color la olla and let's say that we want to fill it with black we could of course go to let me just go to the paint bucket tool that is sits right here or we could use some handy professional shortcuts which in this case would be the the alt backspace or option backspace or control or command backspace to either fill your layer with the foreground or background color so if I now just press the alt backspace on my keyboard well you can see that this layer thumbnail has changed and it's showing me just the black color but we can't see the background being black because our outer layer our top layer our code or our jacket is actually hiding what's beneath it's not showing our black t-shirt so if I just turn the visibility of this of this background copy layer you can see that we actually now we actually filled that well the entire layer with our foreground color and if I now just press ctrl or command if you run a Mac backspace I'm going to fill it with the background color which is the white in this case so if I now just change the color black color to maybe say this blue color and now press the alt backspace I'm going to fill my entire entire canvas entire layer with the foreground color just like so so it's ctrl backspace for foreground color the alt backspace for foreground color and ctrl backspace or command and for the background color so let me just print that background copy back just like so and now since we have our well our background copy we have the copy of our fish you can see that it's not being logged well we could lock it if you wanted to but now we can actually do some things about we can actually start transforming our images and this is something that we are going to be doing in the next video.

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