| A Very Basic LAYERS Tutorial |
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| Written by Cyrus Khamak | |
| Thursday, 21 June 2007 | |
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If you have a design which has three different colors in it, you can make this design on one sheet of paper and you are done. You can also make this design on three different sheets of transparent plastic or acetate, where every color is on a different sheet. Once you overlay these three transparent sheets, you will once again have the complete design. The difference between the two approach is that in doing it on separate sheets of acetate, you can remove one sheet to eliminate that part of the design or you can modify that part easily and independently of other parts of the design. What you have done with the acetate approach, you have made your design in LAYERS The concept of Photodhop layers is not any different than that. For instance, you can duplicate your image in a different layer, make changes to a specific part of the image and combine or add ONLY those specific changes, to the original image. . You can take this concept a little bit further by using what is called an Adjustment Layer Adjustment layers work in the same fashion. When you boost the contrast on your photo for instance, you make a permanent change that you may not be able to undo. BUT, if you make the contrast boost in an adjustment layer, you can always, at any stage, undo it just by making the layer inactive. To be able to work in layers, you have to activate your layers palette on your photoshop work space. to do this, simply click on "windows" on the top menu bar and check "layers" and you have the layers palette on your screen, actually, there are four functions in Photoshop that I use most and I have all these four palettes open on my screen at all times. These palettes are, "channels", "history", "layers" and "action". To open these palettes, again, click on windows and check the them off. After doing so, and if you have checked your "tools" palette as well, you will have your screen which will look like the following: .  . As you can see, these palettes are taking too much of your valuable work space. The tools palette has to stay on it's own but here's what you could do with the other four:: Simply grab one palette on the top, where it's name is and drop it into another palette. You can drop the other three palettes into one and have one window for all four palettes such as the following. .  Now, all you have to do to use a specific palette, just click on it's name in the combined window. . What are the other palettes for? . History Every time you make a change to your image, Photoshop will save that change you have made. The history palette saves up to 20 changes you have made to your image, in it's default mode plus the very original version when you opened the file. You can trace back to all the changes you have made by simply clicking on that stage, shown on the palette. With a more advanced use of history, you can literally trace back to every single change you have made during your image processing. You can also use your History Brush to recover and retrieve part of your earlier version of the image to the present one. Be careful though, history eats up a lot of RAM memory on your computer. With a 10 Mega Byte image, you will be using 200 Mega Byte of RAM in maintaining history. . Actions. Actions are a set of instructions which either comes with your software, you can download them from the nest or simply and easily create them. When you use an action, you don't have to do all those steps one by one and again. You can click on the action name in the action palette and click on play button and all the steps will be taken for you by a click of the mouse. . Channels . The channel window will show you all the channels in your image depending on which mode your image is opened in Photoshop. For an RGB image for instance, you have four channels, The RGB channel which is your image in it's full colors, the RED channel, BLUE channel and GREEN channel. You may need to edit anyone of these channels separately and you can select it just by clicking on the channel's name. If you'd like to see how the channel palette looks when your photo is in a different color mode, just click on "image" on the top menu bar and select mode and chose the color mode you like. . This concludes our first basic layers tutorial. layers 
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