Layers in Photoshop – Ultimate Guide for Beginners

hello people this is going to be the ultimate tutorial in layers in photoshop all right we're going to go right in depth into layers and what they can do it's a very very confusing part of photoshop but they are one of the most powerful features that photoshop has and if you haven't grasped them then you're really kind of holding yourself back in the full use of photoshop so we're going to start off with the basics or i'm just going to look at layers how to move them around how to resize them twist them and all of that kind of stuff then we're going to move up into looking at layer styles then we're going to look at using layers as smart objects this is a really confusing area area for people so we're going to look at using smart objects we're then going to look at layer masking again something that is really powerful in photoshop and if you're using layer masking properly you're definitely going to improve your photography and then we are going to look at the power of using adjustment layers for your photography plus on top of this i'm going to give you all of the images that i use in this tutorial for free they're in a link in the description of this video you can download them and you can basically work along with me through this tutorial when that's really really going to help you grasp and understand the use of layers in photoshop so grab yourself a coffee or a tea or a beer if you want to have a beer download them pictures and strap yourself in for the ultimate tutorial in using layers in photoshop [Music] so let's start from the very basics let's look at what layers are what they do and whereabouts you find them in photoshop all right now i'm going to show you that using this illustration here so here you can see a picture that's been separated into layers there via that graphic and you can see what's called the layers panel which is showing you them layers as they look in photoshop all right so just in its basic terms layers allows you to work on one part of the image without affecting any other parts you need to think of it like um clear acetate sheets that you lay on top of one hour so a clear plastic sheet and where you've got an image you can see that image on the layer and where there isn't an image or anything that you can see it's clear and you can see through it to the layer underneath so let's compare that with you know another program like let's just say microsoft word all right when you put two pictures on microsoft word they kind of butt up against each other and one flicks above the other one and and all sorts like that well on photoshop layers that it doesn't do that on photoshop you know layers allows you to drag one picture put it on top of the other put some text on top of that move them around independently and so on all right so that in its basic terms is what layers are in photoshop all right so let's now go into photoshop and have a look so here we are in photoshop and the first thing that you're obviously going to need is your layers palette to hand okay here is your layers palette if you can't see it all you do is you go windows you go down to layers and you click on layers now obviously i've just clicked on it and it's disappeared so i'm now going to go back to windows and i'm going to click on layers and there it is there it pops up and that's exactly what you want do not worry if your photoshop workspace which is this what we're looking at now do not worry if that does not look exactly the same as what i'm looking at now all you're going to need for this tutorial if you're following along with me is your layers palette to hand here and it's as simple as that okay so the next thing i'm going to need to show you all about layers or the basics of layers is basically a background or a blank piece of paper to do that i'm going to go file new i'm going to click on the print tab at the top here and i'm quite simply going to select a4 if you're in the us i i think that's called standard letter i'm not sure but anyway whatever your standard letter size is in the us just click that all right so for us over in the uk it's a4 select a4 all of this should look like this it should be like this by default if it's not you just make sure that you're on a white background and that's basically it really i'm going to click create so here we have a blank piece of paper for argument's sake the first thing i want to show you is how to create a new layer so down the bottom here in the layers palette you have this symbol here and that is your create a new layer icon we're going to click on that and as you can see it creates a new layer you can name your layers and i very much recommend that you name your layers as you go because it you eventually you could have you know tens or hundreds even of layers and you will get confused so for this one i'm just going to double click on it and i'm just going to type brush and press enter because what i'm going to do is do some brushing on it all right so i'm going to come over to my toolbox i'm going to select the brush tool here and just for argument's sake i'm going to click on this symbol here which brings your foreground and background colors back to default at the top here i'm going to turn my opacity to 100 and my flow to 100 just so that i've got a nice strong brush all right and then quite simply i am going to brush over my image like that now what i've got here is them brush strokes on a separate layer and here you can see it here so i can click this eye symbol and that will hide that layer i can click this eye symbol and that will bring back that layer so there you go a very simple explanation of layers so far we've just created a background we've added a new layer and we've brushed on that layer and it's separate it's separate to the background which means i can work on it independently and of course you can keep adding layers as many as you want to all right now i'm going to add a new layer by dragging and dropping a picture on top of this background so i've got my pictures uh nice and saved and hopefully you have as well if you could use any pictures that you have to use mine they're just there for ease of use i suppose um any picture will do the job but here we go i've got my pictures and i'm just going to literally drag from the folder and drop on top of this background and let go so as you can see it's now put the image on top of the background and i've got the option to actually resize it now and twist it around now if i want to all right but for now i'm going to press ctrl and z to bring it back straight and i'm just going to resize it to the size of this background and that's because i'm going to show you how to resize them a bit later all right but so just firstly understand that when you drag and drop pictures into a background or another picture in fact you're going to create a new layer automatically you can resize it and move it around and then you click the tick at the top here and that will tell photoshop that you're happy that you've got it in place and you're ready to move forward so let's come down to our layers palette again and as you can see now i've got two layers one is called brush and one is the actual image here by default photoshop has created a smart object out of this layer i will talk about that later on in this tutorial right but for now just understand that that's that symbol there it's a smart object we'll talk about that a bit later on now the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to put some text over the top and again automatically when you add text to your document to a photograph to a background whatever photoshop will create a new layer for you all right so i'm going to come over to my toolbox i'm going to select the text tool here i'm going to come over to my background and i'm going to click on it and i'm going to quite simply type some text in let's type in tsop simple as that all right and then i can move this text before i apply it so if i can't watch my cursor here so currently it is working within the text so i can select the text and do what i want but if i bring my cursor down it creates an arrow shape and once it's created that arrow shape it means i can move this around to wherever i want it to be so that will do the job and i'm just going to click tick at the top here to apply it so now what we've got is a bunch of layers really in our layers palette let's go through them we've got the brush that i did we've got an image and we've got some text so again i can hide these independently from each other and then i'm back to a blank screen and of course i can reveal them just like that the next thing i can do is rearrange the layer order so if i want that brush to be on the top all i do is i click on the layer to select it and then i click and hold again and then i drag it right the way to the top and now what we see is we've got the brush over the top of everything else and again i can do the same with the picture here just select it click and hold drag it all the way to the top again and again that now becomes the top layer so very easy to rearrange your layers within your layers palette here the other thing is if you did something wrong it's also very easy to delete a layer one of the benefits of using layers is that very fact okay so again let's add a new layer by clicking the create new layer icon here double click on it let's call it a brush two press enter let's grab the brush tool again and then let's brush it all over here like that okay so for argument's sake i've done some brushing and it's gone wrong i don't like it all i do is i grab this layer click and hold drag it into this little bin symbol at the bottom release and the layer disappears so very easy to create new layers and very easy to delete them now what if i want to move layers around and resize them and all of that kind of stuff let's go and look at that now so the first thing is if you want to move layers you use the move tool very very simple the move tool is right at the top of your toolbox there and if you hover over the symbol you can see that it brings up the name move tool right so i'm going to click on that now the next thing that's important is that you select the layer that you want to work on this is where lots of confusion lots of frustration lots of people throwing things at their screen this is where it comes from you have to make sure that you are selected on the layer that you want to work on now there is this little thing at the top here called auto select i'm going to tick it i don't like using auto select it absolutely does my heading now auto select is quite simply uh photoshop will determine where your mouse clicks and then it will move the image that you've actually clicked on so there i've clicked on the image and obviously moved it now i've clicked on the brush tool and i can obviously move it around and then i'll come up to the top here click on the text tool tsop and i can move it around down the bottom here you would have seen that photoshop automatically selected the layers okay so let's just do it again let's click on the image it selects the image let's click on the brush tool it selects that and again obviously click on the text and it selects that now that all seems good and well but the fact is that when you've got you know 20 layers there and your grouping layers we're going to look at that later on things can get really confusing with auto select so i tend to turn it off but this will be a preference thing for you but my advice is if you are starting in photoshop turn auto select off slow yourself down a bit and select layers independently in your layers palette just like what i'm going to show you now all right so firstly let's just show you a bit what i mean okay so let's take this text over the brush here and now i can click and now i've clicked in the text there and as you can see quite clearly the brush has moved let's try and select the text i can't select the text right i'm trying again and well you can clearly see there we go now i've got it now you can clearly see what the problem is there with auto select and it absolutely frustrates me so i turn off auto select and i do it this way okay so we're going to turn off of auto select and the simplest way and the best way when you're learning is to select them in your layers palettes select the one that you want to work on if you start there when you're learning it's really going to help help it sink in and then as you become quicker and more advanced then of course you can use more advanced tools but for now when you're learning select the one that you want to work on so let's select the brush layer make sure that we're on the move tool and then i'm obviously moving the brush layer okay let's select the text layer come over here and now obviously i'm working on the text tool and so on and so forth all right so that's the recommended way for a beginner as you because once you've done it for like a few hours actually you'll probably want to you're probably going to want to be a bit quicker and there is a quicker way and it's to right click okay so firstly let's move this tsop over here so effectively what i've got is three layers on top of each other if i right click on my screen it gives me the list of layers that are underneath my mouse okay so i can select the image move the image around if i right click i can select the text and now i'm moving on the text and you can see it over in your layers palette also selecting the layers if i right click again i can select the brush and now i'm working on the brush right click again i can select tsop again and i can move that over there and so on and so forth all right so that's my preferred way to work with selecting and moving layers around right click select the layer i don't like using auto select that's going to be up to you long term but certainly as you're learning i would avoid it now what if i want to resize some layers some of you would have typed that text in and it would have been really tiny and some of you would have typed that text in and it would have been massive alright it just depends on what you was doing before you've done this tutorial to resize any layout that's text images brush or whatever it's very easy you use what's called free transform to get to free transform you can go edit free transform or you can use the the shortcut key which is control or command plus t for now i'm just going to select it here and as you can see it's put a free transform box around the layer that i was selected on which is this text layer and i can quite simply grab a corner and make it bigger or smaller i can come over to the corner until it curves and then i can click and hold and twist it around i can click in the middle and move it around let's just move it up there for now and if i hold down the shift key and click on one of the edges i can stretch and obscure it and it's the same if i hold the shift key and click on you know any of these points to be honest all right so let's just leave it there for now and you have to tell photoshop when you have finished adjusting the layer and you can do that quite simply by clicking the tick at the top or you can press enter again i like doing it the slow way as i'm teaching and i recommend that learners do it the slow way as well and the slow way is actually to click the tick at the top the quicker you get then you're just going to hit the enter key all right so now we are going to look at what's called layer styles and it's quite simply what it says on the tin it can add a style to a layer it works particularly well with text so that's what we're going to do we're going to do it on this tsop text here so the first thing i'm going to do as a matter of fact is i'm going to hide this brush layer by clicking the eye symbol here and up here in my navigator i am going to zoom in so we can see the text a bit better maybe zoom out a little bit like that again if you haven't got your navigator showing and you want it you quite simply go to windows and you make sure that navigator is ticked there right to get your layer styles box up you quite simply double click on the layer so you double click on this layer here and it will bring up a layer style box let's just move it out the way so we can see now as you can see down here we've got lots of different options to add a style to this layer for now what i'm going to do is i'm going to tick on bevel and emboss and there you go you can see it gives it a bit of a bevel let's see what happens if i click contour not much at all as a matter of fact and let's come down to drop shadow here and tick on drop shadow and there you can see it gives a drop shadow now you can also adjust them effects uh independently so for instance if i want to change the drop shadow i'm going to click on the drop shadow here it brings up the drop shadow options and i can change the opacity of that drop shadow let's just put it up to about 90 odd i can change the distance if i want to and let's just put it to about there i can change the spread you know lots of different things i can change the color of the drop shadow if i want to etc and when you're happy with the style that you've added to your layer you just click ok so now if we come down to the layer you can see that it's got effects here and it's got a little eye symbol next to each effect so adding layer styles is actually non-destructive and what that means is that you can always take it away and change it later on as long as you save your pictures as a photoshop file or a dot psd you can open up this file in a year's time and change that layer style very very easily let's just put that to the test if i tick on effects it gets rid of all of them effects if i click on the eye symbol again it reveals them and again i can hide the separate effects independently by clicking the eye symbol so that's layer styles it's very very simple you don't just have to add it to text you can add it to images you can add it to the brush tool you can add it to anything that you want to as a matter of fact it's as simple as that now let's look at layers as smart objects okay this one is very confusing but it's very very important and most of the time you would want to work on smart objects let's go and have a look at them so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to press ctrl and 0 together which will full screen the picture for me i'm going to hide this tsop which just leaves me with this image here and like i said to you before it is a smart object it already is a smart object so by default when you drag and drop pictures into a background or another photograph automatically photoshop will create a smart object for you so a smart object or a layer is a smart object is a layer that preserves its original data okay so what that means is if your file is let's go and have a look at this file for instance okay so here it is here here's the picture let's just select it so if your file is 7.56 megabytes which is what this one here is the layer is going to preserve all of that original data so you can add takeaway uh put layer styles do whatever you want to this smart object and you can always go back and change it later on it you you'll be creating non-destructive moves on a smart object plus like i said it holds its original data which means that you can enlarge it and you can squash it down and it will keep the original pixels if you like and that's very good if you're dragging and dropping pictures in and resizing them because obviously you want to keep as much of the data in that picture as possible and that's what a smart object does let's go and put it to the test so firstly let's drag this picture into this background to create another picture i'm just going to click the tick at the top let's move one up to the top here and then obviously i've got to select the other layer here or right click and select it and then i'm going to drag that down to the bottom there like that so now what i've got effectively is two pictures on my background that are exactly the same they're both smart objects what i'm going to do now is i'm going to turn one of these into a non-smart object which basically is a normal picture and then work on them both separately so you can see the difference between a smart object and a non-smart object okay so firstly let's uh grab this layer here and because i don't want it to be confusing what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on it and drag it below this layer here so that i know that this one is now the top one and this one is now the bottom one it's just one of these things i have to do when i'm working in layers and i recommend that you do it just to keep your head organized all right now let's grab this layer let's make sure we selected it sorry i'm going to press ctrl and t for free transform and i'm going to make it smaller all right so i'm going to make it to about that size i'm going to click the tick at the top now currently it is still a smart object it has still got all of the original file all of the original data all the original pixels etc now i'm going to turn it into a non-smart object like a normal bitmap picture and to do that i'll right click on it and i go to rasterize layer so now you can see that there is no smart object symbol on this layer it is for argument's sake just a normal picture okay so now what i've done is i've effectively removed the original file data and it is now the size of this background so whatever amount of pixels there are from here to here that is the size of this picture whereas this one at the top here the smart object is still got all of the original pixels they had when i dragged it in there okay so now let's muck about with these two and see the difference between the two and the benefits of a smart object so firstly i'm going to resize this i'm going to press ctrl and t to free transform and i'm quite simply going to resize it that'll do i think something like that okay and i'm going to click the tick at the top to tell photoshop that i've finished resizing it and i'm happy to move on and the next thing i'm going to do is select the smart object version which is this one here i'm going to press ctrl and t and again i'm going to resize it to the same as the one underneath there like that okay so let's resize it to roughly about there click the tick at the top to apply it so effectively i've got the same picture roughly the same size on top of each other now let's look at the difference between the two i'm going to zoom in with my navigator to a 100 percent and if you want to view how you know sharp and crisp pictures are which is what we're going to do now always make sure that you're zoomed into 100 and not further than 100 if you go further than 100 percent here the picture will look soft anyway okay so at 100 if your picture is sharp and solid then that means the picture sharp and solid okay now currently on top we've got the smart object let's move down here like that and as you can see everything in this picture is nice and crisp and sharp and it's not pixelated if i now hide this layer and reveal the one underneath you can see that there is obviously a major difference this one is pixelated it's soft let's reveal the smart object again nice and crisp let's hide it and there is a soft pixelated image so that's the first thing to obviously understand when you are using smart objects as smart objects as layers they retain obviously the original file size which means you can stretch them and squash them down and move them around and they obviously won't pixelate as long as that original file has got enough data within it okay it's not just about resizing though it's also about adding effects so when you add effects to smart objects you can change them effects very easily and they are non-destructive again you could save the picture as you can add an effect save the picture as a psd a photoshop file open it up you know a year later and change the effects that that you've added let's just show you that now so the first thing to do is actually press control and 0 to full screen it i'm going to reveal this picture again which is the smart object i'm going to press ctrl and t and we're just going to resize it and move it back to the top where we was press enter or click the tick at the top and then i'm going to select this one and i'm going to do the same thing this is the non-smart object i'm going to press ctrl and t and i'm going to resize it to about there click the tick i'll press enter and now of course what i've got is two pictures that are looking roughly the same on screen which is perfect for what we want right so let's just say i want to blur these pictures if you blur a smart object you can go back and change that effect later on in life if you blur a non-smart object and you save the picture once you open it up again you can no longer change that blur so let's have a look at that now so here we're selected on the normal picture i'm going to go over to filter blur gordian blur and let's just drag that up to i don't know something like that about eight nine or something click okay like that so now obviously what i've got is a blurry picture let's now do the same to the smart object select the smart object this layer here go filter blur accordion blur and it's already got the settings from before 9.6 there and i'm going to click ok now the difference with these two layers as you can see is one's got smart filters on and one hasn't which means that i can go into this smart filters i can hide that effect and bring it back hide it and bring it back to see how i like the effect i can double click on gaussian blur i can change the effect here so that it's like less blurry if you like so let's go down to about three there and i'm going to click ok and i can also add more effects on top of this smart object and do the same thing again and again so i could add lighting effects i could add a bit of grain or a bit of noise into it if i wanted to etc etc and go back and change them effects now or later on once i've saved it and go back to it with the non-smart object here as you can see i cannot i cannot now change what i have just done unless i go back in my history palette or press ctrl and z about 100 times to remove that effect and start again okay so they are the main differences between using smart objects and non-smart objects as layers in photoshop there all right let's shuttle of this down and actually open up an example of where we've where i've used lots of different layers on an image okay okay so i'm just going to press the x here to close this down obviously i don't want to save it so i'm going to click no there and then i'm going to open up my example here just by dragging and dropping it into the workspace area here is my example and down here in the layers palette as you can see lots of different layers all right i'm going to hover my cursor in between the two layer groups here click i'm going to drag it up so that we can see more layers all right that'll do like that and as you can see we have tons of layers we've got a background here and then we've got images on top we've got text we've got graphics we've got lines and all sorts lots and lots of different layers all the layers are named to keep it all nice and neat and tidy for you but there is something else that you can do to keep yourself even more tidy with layers and that is group layers and i would highly recommend that you group layers together to keep yourself all nice and tidy and you can group them in any way that you want to it just depends on obviously the picture that you're working on so for instance let's take this group of layers here and group them together all right so i've got the white box here i've got supported by the school of photography there and i've got the tsop logo there if i click on one of the layers i hold down the control key or the command key if you're on a mac and click on the other layers it selects all of them layers for me then you press ctrl or command and g together and that will group the layers for you then of course you can double click on the name here and you can rename the group so for instance i'm just going to put in bottom and click enter then i can hide that whole group and obviously as you can see it hides all of them layers if i click this arrow it opens up the group and then i've got all of these layers individual within that group keeps it all nice and neat for me so there is the basics of layers and i know probably what you're thinking that that wasn't that basic there was quite a lot of in-depth stuff there but this is photoshop for you you know you have to sit down and learn them we've got plenty to go in this tutorial as well but for now if you need to grasp that a bit more then obviously rewind the video and watch it again because we are now going to move on to layer masks okay so if you need to rewind do that bit again if not continue with me i'm now going to go into photoshop i'm going to close all of this down i'm not going to save it and then we're going to open up the layers and mask images that we're going to use for this task so i'm going to open up that one for now and again don't forget that you have got these pictures if you want to work along with me it's in the description of this video download them and you can work along with me with layer masks okay also going to put timestamps as well in the description as well so you can flick backwards and forwards between different sections of this video right let's just explain what layer masks are layer marks are a separate thing if you like that you put onto your layer and it enables you to make that layer invisible now that is important you don't erase the layer with a layer mask you quite simply make it invisible or hide it okay you mask it out let's go and look at that on this picture first thing i'm going to do is press ctrl and 0 to full screen it now to add a layer mask you quite simply click the add layer mask icon which is in your layers palette here okay so firstly i'm just going to drag this layers palette down to where it was before roughly about there and your layer mask icon is this one down here in the bottom of your layers palette all you do is you click on that and as you can see it puts a mask next to the actual layer now the first thing to note and the first thing that really confuses people is if you're working on the mask you need to be working on the mask right now that sounds really simple but the amount of people that you see that are working on the image which is this here rather than the mask which is this here is well a lot i can tell you and if you've been playing around with masks i bet you've probably already done it okay i just want to show you the difference so if you are selected on the image you will see this white box around the image if you're selected on the mask you see the white box around the mask okay so when you work on this mask you quite simply add black to hide the layer and white to reveal it simple as that really let's go and show you i'm just going to grab the brush tool here you need to make sure that you've got black as your foreground color so if you haven't got that you click on this symbol here and it brings it back to the default white and black and you can click these arrows here to flick between white and black so i've got a black brush uh my opacity of the brush is on a hundred percent my flow is on a hundred percent let's now just go over the picture and there you go it's got rid of the face all right it's not got rid of it it's actually just hid the face so that is what a mask does it's as simple as that a mask hides part of the image that you've painted on or in fact what you've added black onto let's come back to the image flick back to white and paint back over this so that it can come back to normal all right just like that because it's not just the brush tool that can add black and white you can do it with a selection you can do it with a gradient tool you know lots of different things anything that can add the color black is going to work on your mask so let's grab a selection this time let's uh click on the lasso tools up here and select the normal lasso tool and let's just draw around the eye like this and then i'm going to go edit fill and i'm going to fill it with the color black make sure my opacity is 100 click ok and there you go i'm going to press ctrl and d to deselect and as you can see i've now hidden that layer using black within a selection so you can do that with the gradient tool you know you could do it with anything like i said that you can add black if at any time you want to reset your layer mask it's very easy you just make sure that you're selected on the layer mask and you go edit fill the shortcut key is shift and five and you fill the whole layer with white click ok and there you go all right so that will always bring the uh the layer mask back to white the other thing that you can do if you get it totally wrong and you've had enough you can delete the layer just by simply clicking on it and dragging it into the bin and it will bring up this box which asks you to apply the layer or delete it in this case we just want to delete it click delete and it's gone and if i want another one i quite simply click the layer mask icon down the bottom here and it brings a new one back for me so there's a mask add black to it and it will hide the image that it's attached to now you can also add black to the image in different opacities and different strengths let's have a look at that just come over here click the brush tool again make sure that i'm on black so again you click that arrow or you can hit the x key as a shortcut and that flicks from black to white and let's come over to my image again and let's just paint a nice line like that and there you go i've got 100 opacity 100 flow it hides that whole section it's as simple as that the other thing that what you would have noticed is i've got a soft edge to the brush if you want a soft or a hard edge to the brush there's a few different ways of doing it but as you're learning a nice simple way is to right click it brings up this box you've got your hardness slider so that was on zero let's go up to 100 press enter and now let's do a line and as you can see it's got a nice sharp edge to it now now for a task like this we're going to need a soft brush so quite simply i'm going to right click again i'm going to take my hardness down to zero and press enter if you want to resize your brush you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard and that will make it smaller and bigger just like that and again there are other ways to resize your brush and to make your brushes softer but as you're learning that's probably the best way to start it will just help you really just get help you get your head around brush sizes and brush softness now the next thing to look at here is the opacity so if i'm on 100 what that basically means is that it's a solid a solid black paintbrush it's as simple as that if i take it down to 50 then what i've got is 50 transparency within that black paint so now let's paint on top of the picture now and there you go you can see it's not a see-through as this brush stroke here and that's really good when you're using masks because it helps you hide things and reveal things very very softly okay now the flow at the top here is like the flow of the ink if you like so if you've got a fountain pen if you remember a fountain pen you with ink you push it down hard the ink flows out quite fast if you push your fountain pen down very softly the ink flows out well very softly not not much ink comes out and that's like the flow in photoshop all right now you will be experimenting over your photoshop learning uh career if you like you'll be experimenting with them too you know i've got a whole tutorial on flow and opacity and using the brush tool and it does take a bit of practice i suggest that you go and watch that maybe after this to um to know practice it some more but for now what we're going to do is we're going to just leave the flow on 100 and we're going to practice using the opacity it just makes it nice and simple and easy while you are learning okay right we're going to now reset this mask and we're going to add the other picture in and we're going to do a little task all right okay so i'm just going to make sure that i'm selected on the mask i'm going to click and hold i'm going to drag it into the bin and i'm going to delete it so here you go for argument's sake i've just quite simply got the picture again now we are going to practice using layer masks and i'm taking influence from a brilliant film called pan's labyrinth love the film and that's what that's where the influence came for this task obviously if you've downloaded the pictures you can do it with me or if you want to have your own fun you can take your own pictures and do it all right so let's go into photoshop and do it okay so let's open up the folder where the pictures are and then quite simply it's this picture here that i want i'm going to drag i'm going to drop it on top of the other picture like that now by default it will snap into place and i am just going to click the tick at the top here to apply it now the first thing that i need to do is line these pictures up now that's really easy when you're using layers because you can change the opacity of the layer and you do that quite simply by coming down to opacity here in the layers palette clicking on this arrow and pulling it down like that to about roughly 50 percent and then i'm gonna make sure i'm on the move tool at the top here and i'm basically going to move and get these no this nose lined up okay what i'm going to do is press control on the plus key to zoom in and get it properly lined up just like that then i'm going to press ctrl and 0 to zoom back out again to show you so as you can see now it's overlaid very nicely and i'm going to bring the opacity of this layer back to 100 now don't worry about all of this where it's not lined up here we'll just crop it at the end so now i need to add a mask to this image because effectively all i'm going to do is hide these areas of the hand to reveal the eye underneath simple as that really so let's come down to the add layer mask icon here and click on it make sure that the mask is selected obviously come over to the brush tool make sure i've got black as my color selected take the opacity down yeah that'll do right click on the screen make sure your hardness is down to zero press enter and then quite simply paint over the hands where you want the eyes to shine through it's as simple as that really now i'm going to press the control and the plus key to zoom in that's command if you're on a mac let's zoom out a little bit that will help me refine it a little bit further now the beauty of this task is that your hand the palm of your hand indents the eye socket also indents so if you can kind of match them shadows up you've kind of won all right so that's what i'm going to try and do i'm going to bring these shadows of the eye socket into the hand so that they match up as best as i can okay now when you get to that point you might want to refine it now don't forget all you've done is hide the image you haven't erased it you've hid it so if i now flick back to the color white by clicking these arrows here or quite simply pressing the x i can then come back to the image i can paint on it again which will reveal that the hand image here and give me a bit more control like that so it looks a little bit better so again i can use my arrow keys and there you go just take a little bit back over here that will do and i think that a little bit more over here actually press the x key and bring that back a little bit there we go okay you get the point we can refine that as much as we want to but that's about right i'm going to press ctrl and 0 to full screen it again i'm going to grab the crop tool which is over in your toolbox and i'm going to drag the top down like that the bottom up like this i'm going to pull these in and i'm going to click the tick to apply it press ctrl and 0 to full screen it and there you go it's as simple as that you know it's a really really simple task to do if you don't know about the film pans labyrinth and there's a monster in there basically and his eyes are in his hands that's where it comes from fantastic film go and watch it right now the next thing that we're going to look at is adjustment layers now adjustment layers are a powerful powerful tool in photoshop and they will make your photography 10 times better i absolutely guarantee it so we are going to shut all of this down and we're going to look at adjustment layers in a second but before i do if you are interested in learning photoshop properly and in depth and learning much much more than what we've done here then we have got a whole online course in photoshop it's five star rated it's structured by professional fully qualified teacher and it will take the beginner to an absolute advanced level in no time i can absolutely promise you so if you are interested in learning photoshop properly and i mean properly not just youtube video properly i mean really properly then come over and see us over at theschoolofphotography.com where we will teach you photoshop so you learn it retain it improve your photography now and forever right let's now go and look at using adjustment layer masks to really improve your photography so the first thing to do is to shut all of this down i don't want to save it and we're going to open up the picture that we're going to use for the adjustment layer task okay so i'm just going to drag and drop that and open it up here like this now again you have got this picture to work on link in the description download it you can work along with me so firstly let's press ctrl and zero to full screen it i'm going to click the move tool at the top here to get rid of the crop box and i'm going to open up this layers group here and reveal all of these adjustment layers okay so if i hide this group that's the normal picture that's the raw file if you like that's the normal raw file and then i have added into this picture all of these adjustment layers here so let's go through them one by one quickly the first one was this bright background to darken this and i put a green curve in i'm going to explain all of this in a minute then i put an rgb curve in and then i put a black and white adjustment layer over the top let's hide that that's normal and let's bring it back and that is with all of them adjustment layers and like i said to you uh just the start here it is the power of adjustment layers that i want to teach you here because they are fantastic they can transform your photography you know 10 times okay let's first of all describe what an adjustment layer is basically it's a layer that you put over the top of your picture which will adjust it okay i know it sounds simple but for instance if you put a black and white adjustment layer above your normal layer your normal picture it will turn it black and white and it will turn every layer underneath it black and white at all now the beauty of using adjustment layers is that you can then adjust that black and white effect so you can turn a picture black and white normally you can just desaturate it but if you use a black and white adjustment layer or a huge saturation adjustment layer you can control that black and whiteness okay you can make it more or less stronger you can change the effect of it you can mask sections off and all things like that so they they really give you a lot of control over the adjustments of your image and photoshop that's one of its strengths is these adjustment layers let's go and physically have a look at that now okay so firstly let's close this group down and let's hide it then i'm going to select the original picture here and and that's quite important actually you the adjustment layer will go above whatever layer that you are selected on so if i was selected here for instance and adding an adjustment layer it will go above that group well i don't want that to happen i want it to just go above this picture so i need to select that and then to add an adjustment layer you choose the adjustment layer icon down the bottom in your layers palette here you click on it and there's lots of different versions of adjustment layers now we're not going to have time to go through them all in this video it is in the photoshop course but we will go through some really cool ones right now firstly let's just show you what i mean about adjustment layers so if i added that black and white adjustment layer here as you can see it's added it above this layer and it's turned my whole picture black and white at the top here in the properties box of your black and white adjustment layer it gives you lots of different options to change that black and white effect so for instance i could add a blue filter effect or i can go maximum black or if i really want to i can adjust them you know independently via these sliders all right and once you've got that black and white effect that you want you can also tone it down using the opacity of the layer itself by clicking on this arrow here so i can take it down so for instance i can add a 20 black and white or a 50 black and white etc let's bring it right the way back up to 100 and the other thing that you can do with an adjustment layer is work on the mask like we've just looked at so i can select the mask here i can grab the brush tool make sure that i'm on black so that i can hide the effect so a mask can be on a picture and you're hiding that picture but a mask can also be on an effect like a black and white effect and you can mask that effect instead so let's just for argument say i'm going to grab the opacity right and put it right up to 100 and then i'm gonna just paint over the model all right so you know you can have a color model and a black and white background and that's just as quick as i'm gonna go for now okay you get the point i'm trying to make so there is an adjustment layer and another good thing is that you could save this picture come back to it a week later and think i don't like that effect and then you can change and adjust it again you know that is the beauty of adjustment layers right so that was just to show you i don't actually want it so i'm going to grab the black and white adjustment layer and i'm going to drag it into the bin and i'm going to click the arrows on the properties box here just to hide it to keep my screen nice and neat so the first thing that i want to do is i want to darken down this strip here this strip of light in the background it's just a bit too bright going through the frame um so i want to darken it down so you can use there's actually a few different adjustment layers that you can use but there is one quite simply called brightness and contrast so that's the one we're going to use okay so to add a brightness and contrast adjustment layer we're going to click the adjustment layer icon here and we're going to go up to brightness and contrast here if i come up to the brightness slider i can bring it right the way down like that and as you can see it is darkening that strip in the background so let's put it to about there so you probably noticed that it's darkened that strip of light down but it's also darkened everything else down as well well this is where you can use a mask aren't you um so that you only use this effect on that strip of light in the background so to do that i am going to use the quick selection tool over the years photoshop has got really really good with their quick selection tool so it's the quickest and the best way to do it now so i'm going to come back over to my screen here i'm going to hide this properties box i'm going to come over to my tool box i'm going to click and hold on this tool here and it brings up my selection tools okay so i want the quick selection tool here come down to the screen that brush size is probably okay but again if you need a bigger or smaller brush you can just use the bracket keys and it will make it bigger and smaller all right so quite simply i'm going to click in this bright area and and as you can see photoshop does a great job at stopping where it should stop and there we go and there you go uh i told you photoshop was good at it and there you go you can see it's very very good at it all right the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to soften the edges of this selection and to do that i'm going to click select and mask at the top here going to grab my feather slider and drag it across until i get a nice soft edge on that red there you can see that there like that if you're not seeing red as your mask here up the top where it says view you can click on this drop down arrow and you can select overlay okay now down the bottom here it gives you an option to output this too so i can output it back to the selection or i can output it to the layer mask and that's what i want to do i want to output this softened selection that i've just made to a layer mask so i'm going to click on layer mask i'm going to click ok and there you go it has masked off that brightness and contrast adjustment from the rest of the image and kept it on that bright strip now that obviously we're going into other things like select a mask now again that's all covered in the photoshop course but just for now you can see if i hide that layer it's bright as it originally was and if i reveal it it's darkened down that strip very very nicely for me now the next adjustment that i want to make to this image is i want to make uh these lights greener so this is in our car park all right now they've they've got them strip lights and them strip lights they've got that horrible green light well it didn't pick it up in this particular picture but i can add it in in post-processing ie photoshop so what i'm going to try and do is put some greens into the highlights here and complement them greens with some magentas all right to do that the best adjustment layer i think is a curves adjustment layer so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to come down to my adjustment layer icon here click on it and i'm going to select curves if you want to know about curves in photoshop i've got a whole tutorial on that as well but for now i'm just going to briefly explain what it is curves controls highlights and shadows you can do it across the whole image or you can select certain colors and boost the highlights within certain colors all right and that's what we're going to do now so from this drop down box i'm going to select green and like i said i'm going to add greens into the highlights okay so just watch these lights here if i push that up you can see it's adding greens into it all right it's adding greens across the whole picture as well but all i do is i grab the curve here bring it down and it removes the greens from the shadows so effectively i have now got greens in the highlights and obviously i can push that right up if i want to i won't but i could do so nice lot of greens there in the highlights and by pulling this down you're adding like magenta into the shadows and you know it looks quite cool as a matter of fact so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to bring that down like that and that will do for now i'm going to click the arrow here to get rid of the properties box keep my screen nice and neat the next thing i'm going to do is add another curves adjustment layer but this time i am going to apply it across the whole image here the rgb i'll show you what i mean so i'm going to click on this adjustment layer icon i'm going to select curves and here i've got rgb so let's click on this drop down arrow so like you know i can select the reds the greens or the blues or i can select all the colors within my scene and that's what i'm going to do here i'm going to put a nice s curve into this picture which will boost the contrast but i'm also going to pull up this curve here which will give me a matte finish so you can see that there it's like that instagram look that you get with them filters but if i pull this curve up in the blacks it's now giving me that matte gray look and for this picture actually i'm going to come down here maybe not that much in the highlights and a bit more in the shadows there like that that's it and for this picture i think it will suit it you know it will give it that murky kind of look so that will do for that adjustment layer i'm going to hide that and again let's come back to the beauty of adjustment layers is i don't have to be too fiddly now because i can add these adjustment layers in and then come back to it tomorrow i'll come back to it next week with fresh eyes and then you can start refining it further so you know again another beautiful thing with adjustment layers and the next adjustment layer that i'm going to use is a black and white adjustment layer because at the moment i think uh the colors are nice but they're a bit too punchy if i had a black and white adjustment layer change the opacity of that adjustment layer it will mute the whole thing for me so i'm going to click on the adjustment layer icon down the bottom here go to black and white and i think i'll just leave it on its default actually it's a bit to be honest with you photoshop's black and white adjustment layer on default works pretty much most of the time so i'm going to click the arrows here to get rid of that come down to the opacity slider drag it down and i'm thinking something about there let's hide that layer and bring it back yeah you see it just it's very slight very very slight but it it's them slight adjustments which makes the photo you know normal to being really good and that slight adjustment is is really enhancing this feeling of being a murky you know dark horrible car park so now let's group all of these layers so i'm going to come down to the bottom layer i'm going to hold down the shift key i'm going to click on it and that selects all the layers in between there press control and g to group the layer double click on it and this time we'll call it version 3 okay press enter and of course you can keep going like that you can add version 4 version 5 version 6 etc and again it's the beauty of using adjustment layers so let's hide and reveal some of these effects so let's hide that that's the original picture let's bring it back that's literally what i've just shown you just then so let's hide that and let's go up to version one here and that's what i did before and then i've got version two so let's reveal that and hide it reveal it and hide it so effectively what i've created here is one kind of muted murky look and in another quite cool and punchy kind of look so let's have a look at the difference so that's the one that i created before and then that's the look i created in version two so you can see that with the first original picture which is this here i've got two totally different effects using just adjustment layers now i know that this is a long tutorial and if i'm going to be honest there is still more things there in layers that i haven't shown you but i do hope that this tutorial is that much in depth that it's going to really help you out because there's no point flicking all over the internet you know picking up this that and the other i've made this tutorial because it is in depth you know it's the ultimate tutorial on layers in photoshop and all you need to do is go back in the video download them pictures and go through it again a couple of times and you're going to get a really good understanding of layers in photoshop if you do and you have then please help us out you've got to like the video you've got to give us a comment tell me what you think in the comments below love to hear from you share this with your friends let them benefit from it and don't forget to subscribe to our channel and you have to hit that bell button if you don't hit that bell button you won't know about our future videos that we're going to release don't forget also to come over to the school of photography.com check out our online photoshop course and other courses and you can join our lovely online learning community if you want to thanks for watching and remember learn more at the school of photography [Music] you

Channel: The School of Photography

Views: 93,573

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Id: zj9fxeJvpjo

Length: 64min 47sec (3887 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021