Create With Photoshop Layers!

What are the Photoshop layers? If you have ever seen a professional digital painter do his or her thing, you will know that the layers in Photoshop is a powerful tool.

It is nearly impossible for a digital painter to do detailed drawings off the bat! That is why this these Photoshop tutorials for beginners are here to help you understand the important of layers and how it will affect your ability to learn to draw properly.

One great thing about Photoshop layers is that it is an 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!

As a matter of fact, the layers in Photoshop is a tool that you will use throughout your lifetime as an artist that paints digitally.

Through it, you can create amazing effects, paintings, and professional visual effects that you sell to your potential clients to earn extra income.

1. Photoshop layers for artists

When you fire up the program, you will notice the layer box right away as it the largest option box. Here, we have a screen shot of what the layers will look like.

As you can see, you can group the layers up, create clipping masks, a layer mask, and layer effects. All these are tools to help benefit you as you edit your work in a quick and easy fashion that doesn't destroy your work.

On top of that, there are extra color options that could benefit your need to experiment. it is called the layer blend modes:

Normal Dissolve

Darken Multiply Color Burn Linear Burn

Lighten Screen Color Dodge Linear Dodge

Overlay Soft Light Hard Light Vivid Light Linear Light Pin Light Hard Mix

Difference Exclusion

Hue Saturation Color Luminosity

Let's say you are not happy with the colors of the overall composition or a part of composition.

Just by changing the blend modes, you can get a huge variety of color management that you can experiment on! This will save a lot of time repainting colors as well as helping you look for different combinations that you thought weren't possible!

2. Photoshop layers for painting

Perhaps one of the strongest and most powerful option that you can do while painting is to lock down a layer! In Photoshop, there are four ways to lock a layer down:

• Layer lock - you can paint within the confines of the object shape
• Paintbrush lock - you can't paint on the layer but you can move the objects around
• movement lock - you can't move anything in the layer
• Lock all - stops all editing on the layer!

In the screen shot, I've used the initial layer lock. As you can see, you can't paint outside of the shape when this is turned on. As the artist, you will find the ability to preserve the shape of the object one of the most fundamental tools that you can ever use!

Learn this well and you won't waste time worrying about distorting the shape while you work on shadows and lighting! For example, 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! It's amazing just how much coloring options you can do once you confine everything into its own shapes.

3. Photoshop layers for smart painting

Now that you understand the concept of locking down the shape of an object, what else can you do with it? Suppose you need to paint light and shadows but unsure of what is the best angle. That is where clipping masks come in!

To do that, create a new layer on top of your base layer. Then, hold on the ALT + left click when your mouse is hovering on the border between the two layers (look for the icon change from a pointer to a clipping mask arrow).

As a layer on its own, once it's been converted to a clipping mask, you can paint whatever you want on it and it will confine to the shape of the layer underneath!

Still not enough? You can apply layer styles underneath the base layer to further increase your non-destructive coloring options. Just double click on the layer to bring out the layers styles!

Use this to quickly experiment with different color combinations without painting anything at all! My personal favorite is the gradient overlay because it helps you look at how the colors change from light to dark.

4. Photoshop layers for pixels and color

Color adjustments on a global scale can be done relatively quickly with adjustment layers! In your layers box, look for a yin yang circle at the bottom. Anyone of these adjustments layer you choose will create the proper color or lighting effects.

For example, I used the gradient adjustment layer to show you how it will affect the solid shape. You can use a lot of variety of adjustment layers to experiment to get the right color settings!

Also notice that each adjustment layer creates a layer mask. That means you can edit the adjustment sections by hiding the pixels to create a shape that you feel looks right to the composition!

Furthermore, you can even change adjustment layers into clipping masks to affect specific base layers rather than the entire composition. The possibilities are endless!

As a budding professional artist, you should practice these features of the layers box as much as possible because it will not only save time, but give your editable professional work to wow your clients!

And since it is editable, you can create many color or compositional variations of the same piece of artwork. So let's all focus on mastering the Photoshop layers as much as possible. Trust me, it'll be worth it!

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