Adobe Photoshop CS3 Tutorials
Layers / Layer Options
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS3 / Layers / Layer Options)
Let's take a look at some of the layer options available to you. As you see here in our layers panel we have three layers. I have my background, I have layer one which is this green object here, and I also have this text. So what I can do with these guys is of course when you see the eyeball you can turn them off so you can hide and show what you want to work with. And of course a hidden layer cannot be manipulated which is good, so you can uh try to work on it but you won't be able to paint. So I f I grab my paint bucket tool or my brush tool for example or any tool you notice that I get this uh no symbol. So I can't manipulate it at all. Which is a great way to preserve the pixels. What I can also do is I can click and drag to rearrange the order of layers. And all you have to do is keep your eye on the black line and when it appears you let go of your mouse and you've rearranged the contents of those layers. Other options available to us are located right here on this pop up menu, we can easily create a new layer, we can duplicate a layer and we can delete a layer. Of course you don't need to do that with the menu, you can do the same thing by dragging a layer right to the new layer icon to duplicate it like so. And if you want to delete a layer simply drag it to the garbage or select a layer and click on it and it will go away. So once again we undo that and show you that you can also drag it right to the garbage to delete it as well. What we can also do with layers is we can create groups, and this is a handy way to organize your layers when things are getting a little un, unorganized and a little unruly. So I'm gonna hold down my shift key so I can grab these two layers here and now I'm gonna go to my pop up menu and I'm going to choose new group from layers. And I can name it whatever I like to, so I'll call it type and shape. I can also give it a color so I gave it a blue color. And I'll click OK. So now I know that this layer is type and shape and it's blue as you see by the eyeball here. I can twirl it down to see the contents of this group, let me undo that. What I can also do is I can change how I am looking at these icons. Right now I'm looking at everything at pretty much a small size so if I want to see everything larger, I can simply go to the palette options down here on the bottom then I can choose to look at a gigantic thumbnail if I so desire and I can really focus on what I'm working on. Likewise I can go back and change that to any size, medium, none, small. I can also look at something interesting here, lets take a look over here. You currently see this green shape in the same way it looks in the actual document. It's on this side but if I want to see the entire thing I turn on layer bounds. Now everything that's in a layer snaps to the entire shape of this layer here. Let me undo that or actually redo that and go back to my palette and change the options to entire document. Another thing I can do here in my layers is I can convert things to smart objects, I can also change my layer properties and give the layer a new name but of course you can simply double click on the layer name like so to rename it. Also I have the opportunity to create a clipping mask. I can also merge down, merge visibility and flatten the image. So lets talk about these here, if I want to merge down, what's going to happen is Photoshop is going to take the layers and compress them, its gonna merge them down. And what I can also do is grab these first of all and you see that the layers have been merged down which means that the shape and the text have been turned into one layer when it's merged down. Let me undo. What I can also do is I can choose to go to this list here and choose merge visible which will take all the visible layers that have the eyeball icon and do the same thing. So we give it a moment to do that. So everything that has a eyeball is merged because it is visible content, I'm gonna undo that and once again I'm gonna choose another option, this is called flattened image which is pretty much the same thing as merge visible but it's gonna flatten everything here for you and give you a pretty much flat object and what happens is if there are hidden elements in the document, let me go ahead and hide them for example and I choose the same option, flatten image, it's going to ask me whether I want to discard the hidden layers. So it will actually get rid of it. So I'm gonna cancel that and not uh perform that operation. So once again the layer options give you the ability to change not only how you work with layers but the order of those layers, the colors of those layers and whether your going to work with groups or not.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33782 |
| ISBN: | 1-933736-98-4 |
| Release Date: | 2007-08-02 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 161 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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