Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Working with Layers / Additional Layer Techniques
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Working with Layers / Additional Layer Techniques)
There's a few final techniques that I'd love to show you in terms of working with your layers and managing your layers inside Photoshop. Let's get started with something that's referred to as linking layers. So here's the example that I'm going to show you. I'm going to twist open my Text Layer Group there and of course I have the Text Layer and the Stripe Layer in there. Now let's say for example that down the road at some point I decide that I want to move this block, the white stripe and the text. Well, you know, if I drag on the stripe, of course the Medieval Dinner Text stays where it isright? So in other words, these two layers inside the Layers Palette are not connectedright? Check this out. What I'm going to do is I'm going to grab one of these guys, hold down Command or Control and select the other guy and essentially what I want to do is I want to link these guys together. So in other words, whatever happens to one layer is also going to happen to the other layer. So to do so, I'm going to head up to the Layers Palette Menu up at the top, pop that guy open and there's an option in there called Link Layers. Go ahead and choose that fellow there and you'll notice that as soon as you choose that command, we now have these little chain links that show up over on the right-hand side of the layer. So now when I select the Stripe Layer and I move him around inside the image, the text is going to go with him or if I grab the Text Layer and drag the text around, the white stripe is going to go with it. So who the heck knows? Maybe it'll wind up being across the top or maybe across the extreme bottom or, you know, who the heck knows? But just a neat little option that I thought I would at least mention to you there. So pretty cool. Alright, what else can we do here inside Photoshop. Well, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my two layers here, the Text and the Stripe and let's say I don't want them linked anymore. I'll go back to the Layer Palette Menu over on the top-right corner and I'll choose Unlink and instead what I can do is I could head back to that menu with the two layers still selected and I could choose Merge Layers. Now, what that means is that would mean that the Smart Object, the Medieval Dinner Text Layer and the white stripe would now all be compiled or flattened down onto a single layer, if that makes sense. I'm going to go ahead and choose the command to show you here. So now I only have one layer, whereas before I had two, which by the way now means that I can never separate the text from the white stripe. Well, not without a lot of hard work anyway. So something to keep in mind, although I don't often merge layers myself. I'm just going to Undo that, Command Z or Control Z and go back to where I was. There's another option here that I should mention as well just while I think of it and he's available from the Layers Palette Menu as well. I'm going to pop this guy open we have a command here called Flatten Image and if I choose Flatten Image, what happens is the entire Layers Palette is all crushed down, all the way down into one single background layer, which means my layer effects are gone, my Smart Objects are gone, my editability is completely gone, everything's goneright? Which I don't like so much obviously. So of course I'm going to Undo that as well. I very, very rarely use that command. It's nice to know that it's there but again, I rarely use it. OK, a few other quick things that I want to show you here. This next command that I'm going to show is kind of a, sort of a housecleaning command and it's new inside Photoshop CS5 by the way as well. Let's say as we're working along we wind up with a ton of extra layers, you know, these empty layers that sort of wind up cropping up every once in a while. So I just clicked on the New Layer Icon down at the bottom of the Layers Palette. I have a new layer there inside the Text Layer Group and you know, maybe I'll go and add in one or two more extra, empty layers. Now, how do you wind up with empty layers? Well, you know, as you're working along you're selecting stuff, you're deleting stuff, you're moving objects between files and sometimes you wind up with empty layers. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a command that looked for empty layers inside your file and automatically got rid of them? Well, that's exactly what I'm going to show you here and again, it's new inside Photoshop CS5. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to head all the way up to the File Menu, down to Scripts, down towards the bottom and there's our new command Delete All Empty Layers. Click on that guy and Photoshop does its job and clean up all of those empty layers. Very cool stuff. Alright, wonderful. Final thing that I want to show you here: saving this file. Way back when I had you open up two files: Statue.jpg and Clouds.jpg. So we started with JPEGsright? JPEG's don't support layers, if you'll recall. So if I choose Command S or Control S on the Windows side to save this guy, Photoshop wants to save this guy as a psd file, a Photoshop document. In other words, Photoshop wants you to try and maintain the editability of this file. If I just save this guy out as a JPEG, well, again, I'm going to get all of my layers flattened down to that background layer. Instead I want to keep this guy in an editable state, not an edible state, but an editable state so that I can come back to him, you know six months from now or two weeks from now and continue working on him, alright? So make sure you're saving your files as .psd documents. I'm going to save this guy up on my Desktop so I'll just navigate towards my Desktop on my Mac here. At least I'm going to call him Statue underscore Completed and then I'll go ahead and save this guy out. Alright, I'm going to get a compatibility warning here. I'll just go ahead and click on OK to take that. There you go. There's tons of info on working with layers inside Photoshop. I hope you had fun and as you can see again, it's one of these major issues, major topics inside Photoshop. You saw selections. That's a big deal. Resizing, that's a big deal. Layers obviously is a big deal and what we have next is also a big deal. So let's keep on going here.
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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