Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Working with Layers / Organizing Layers with Layer Groups
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Working with Layers / Organizing Layers with Layer Groups)
Pretty soon what you'll find inside your Photoshop files as you begin adding layer effects and adding more elements and throwing in text and maybe the odd Smart Object is you wind up with a ton of layers and some of the compositions that I have inside Photoshop wind up being so huge that I actually get a scrollbar here and I have to scroll up and down inside my Layers Palette. It's crazy. What you can do is you can actually start to organize your layers into groups. In other words, literally what you get is a folder, a file folder inside the Layers Palette that you can then move layers into and help keep things nice and organized and I use these all the time because again, my compositions, my layouts get pretty crazy in terms of the number of layers. So how does all this work? Well, what I'm going to do is way down at the bottom of the Layers Palette we have a Folder Icon which will allow us to create a Layer Group. So go ahead and click on that guy and we get Group1, a little folder there. Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to double click on Group 1 and that'll allow me to rename this guy. Maybe I'll rename this guy as Text and then I'll hit Enter and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my Stripe Layer and my Text Layer and move them into the Text Layer Group or the Text Folder. Now, you know, I could grab one and drag him in and grab the second and drag him in one at a time but what I can also do is I can select multiple layers inside Photoshop simply by selecting one, holding down Control or Command and clicking on the other one. Now I have two layers selected and then drag and drop them into that layer group just like that. So now these two guys are a part of my Text Folder or my Text Group. So in other words, that's the layer that has the Medieval Dinner Text and also the layer that has the white stripe and then I can collapse these guys down. That's all there is to it. It's really, really simple. But you know, as simple as it is, let me show you an even faster way to work. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to expand my Text Layer Group. I'll select both of my layers that are inside there, so the Text and the Stripe and I just held down Command there and selected the second guy or of course Control on the Windows Side. I'll grab these two guys and drag them above the Text Layer Group to actually pull them out of the group just like that and now there's nothing inside the Text Layer Group and I'm going to get rid of this group here just by dragging them down to the Trashcan Icon down at the bottom. So now I don't have any layer groups and then check this out. This is a trick that I love. I do this all the time. Select the Text Layer, hold down Control or Command, grab the Stripe Layer and you know, any other layer that you want to be a part of the same Layer Group, select them all up there and then try this; Command G on the Mac or Control G on the Windows side. Boom! You got a group. Expand them open and you'll find your layers. How do you like that? Pretty awesome. Of course, double click on that guy to rename him if you like and that is all there is to it. So you should see some of my actual real-world files. It's mostly folders now inside the Layers Panel and I expand them open and each folder has you know, five or ten layers inside it. Just me trying to keep all of my work organized with Layer Groups.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
| Author: | Geoff Blake |
| SKU: | 34150 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-46-1 |
| Release Date: | 2010-08-06 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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