Organize Your Thoughts With Photoshop Layers!

If you have ever seen a professional canvas painter do his or her thing, you will know that they do it through layers. First, they make the color of background and the various shapes such as an outline of a stone. Then, they fill it in with the details like shadowing, texture, and light.

It is nearly impossible for a painter to do detailed drawings off the bat! He or she needs to have some form of organization such as layers.

The Photoshop layers are excellent for organizing your thoughts and composition. But unlike a real canvas, you have more than one chance to get it right. In fact, you have unlimited tries. That’s how flexible layers are in Photoshop!

1. Understanding the layers

When you fire up the program, you will notice the layer box right away as it the largest option box.

What you need to know about the background layer is that it is always locked. Hence, that’s why you see a lock on the right side of it. What this means is that only the opacity of the background layer is locked. In other words, you can still color on top of it, but you can’t change how transparent the layer is.

However, you can change that background layer into an ordinary layer with full manipulation functions! How? Just drag and drop the layer on the symbol that looks like a half flipped sheet of paper right beside the trash can. This will duplicate the layer into a manageable layer. After that, just delete the background layer by dragging it to the trashcan!

2. What can you do with the Photoshop layers?

Just think of layers like sheets of acetate. When you draw something on a layer, it only affects that one layer and doesn’t affect the other layers. Thus, you can manipulate individual layers to your liking.

As such, when you click on the eye to the left, it will reveal what is on that layer. If you click on the eye again, it will disappear, which will make every drawing on that layer disappear, and reveal what’s underneath that layer.

Another thing you can do is link Photoshop layers together. As soon as you highlight more than one layer with the shift key, you can right click and choose the option to link them. What this means that any manipulation done on one layer will also be done on the same layer. It saves quite a bit of time!

Of course, if you have too many Photoshop layers, you can always merge them together. You will probably do this when you want to save hard drive space as the size of your picture file increases dramatically with each new layer created.

Moreover, you can set the opacity of the Photoshop layers. For instance, if you drew mist on one layer and a warrior on the bottom layer, changing the opacity of the mist layer will decide how much of the warrior the mist will cover.

3. Benefits of locking a layer

What you should get the most familiar with is the checkered box. What this option does is that it locks the shape that’s drawn in the layer.

For example, you draw a perfect circle in the layer and you locked it with the checkered box. You can then paint on that circle without fear of coloring outside the circle! All colors will stay in the shape.

The benefit of this is that you can create perfect shadow and lighting that’s defined within the circular shape. You will find that you will use this option a lot when adding detail to a specific shape such as armor pieces, panels, mechanical creations, etc. The list goes on and on!

What about the other locking options? Well, you don’t really need them. The checkered box is really all you need. The paint brush just locks all ability to paint on that layer which means the only thing you can do is manipulate the shape itself. As for the lock box, well, that locks everything! Not much good if you ask me.

4. Things you don’t need to know early on

If you double click on a layer twice, it will bring up something called a layer style. This is a set of predefined settings such as outer shadow, inner shadow, gradient fills, etc, that you can use to affect all the shapes drawn in a layer.

It’s good if you want a quick effect. However, you need to realize that it’s a mathematical equation done to the whole layer. This means that it’ll make the picture look simulated, which is what we want to get away from! You only need it for designs rather than realistic digital painting.

Another thing that you don’t need early on is the various blend modes you can do to a layer. Similar to the brush tool, the blend modes available are:

Again, these are not necessary to your developing skills as a digital artist. You will use them in due time afterwards. But learning them at this moment is taking away learning opportunities to understand realism.

You wouldn’t want to depend on a computer program to do your work, right? Of course not! So for now, forget blend modes, channels, and paths (which are also available on the layers box).

Let’s not learn any shortcuts. Instead, let’s all focus on learning how to create composition through Photoshop layers. Trust me, it’ll be worth it.

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