A beginner’s guide to using Layers

REently we took a look at how Photoshop’s Blend Modes work and the 10 best blends for photographers. Today we want to go even further back to basics with photo editing and look at the types of Photoshop layers and how to use them to get the effect you want.

It’s a given that layers are key to successful image editing in Photoshop but, for novices, layer lore can still seem like a black art. In this post we’re going to demonstrate how user-friendly and essential Photoshop layers are to you.

In a nutshell, layers enable you to work on one part of an image without affecting others. You can change the opacity of layers, so they’re opaque or barely visible. You can move layers, mask and subtly blend them.

You need to think of your Photoshop layers as sheets of acetate stacked on your background image. A layer can be filled with image pixels, or just have a small area of an image with other areas transparent.

You can also blend layers and hide parts via Layer Masks. On the third page of this post you’ll see a deconstruction of our featured image image, and how we used layers to achieve the result.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2012 at 10:00 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.