Layers for Beginners | Photoshop CC Tutorial

what's up everybody this is Spencer from pixel & bracket the tutorial video you're about to watch is actually a lesson that I cut from my upcoming Photoshop Skillshare course only because I

restructured how the course is laid out and so this is a Photoshop lesson truly geared towards beginners and it's all about layers every new Photoshop document starts off with a background

layer and that background layer by default is white and it's also locked which means when we try to do certain things like for instance with the move tool selected up here if we try to move

this layer it's gonna tell us no you can't do that it's the background layer you can't move it unless you unlock it or convert it to a normal layer well I'm just gonna cancel on that one all we have to do to unlock the background layer is click this little lock icon and that converts it to a normal layer and this normal layer is probably now a fill of white so if we move this white layer

notice how we get a little checkerboard the checkerboard layer means transparency that's something to remember that means that currently what's on this layer only covers this space here there's nothing over here the way layers work is that they stack on top of each other I'm gonna undo this really quick with command-z or control-z so they stack on top of each other and

anything that's on the top is the first visible thing for instance let's use some of the basic tools to create some automated layers and then we'll also maybe paint on some layers and I'll show you how things stacked up over here in the layers panel so I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and I can click and hold on this you'll see it down here at the bottom of your toolbar or tool panel

and if you click and hold there's actually some different options like the ellipse polygon line tool if I just grab the rectangle tool we'll make a square out here on our canvas the first thing I

can do is change what my fill and stroke  color is and all these different options the stroke color I'm just going to click the slash here which will simply have no stroke on there and then the fill

color let's do something like a yellow now all I need to do is click and drag on my canvas to begin creating a rectangle and if I hold shift it will actually lock it into a perfect square shape then when I let go it's going to create that shape well let's look over at our layers panel because the most important thing here is actually created a shape layer that's right a different type of layer there are different types of layers their shape layers text letters you can have an image on a layer you can have adjustment layers which actually aren't visible but instead they affect layers you can also have paint layers or just blank layers with pixels on them all sorts of different layers can be stacked on top here now the important thing as I've stressed before is that any layer on top is the first layer visible and we can do different things to it to show layers underneath but for now let's go ahead and create another layer so I'm going to click on my move tool so that that sort of D selects the shape there and we're gonna add some text to our canvas so I'm going to click on the type tool over here and then all I have to do is click on our canvas to add some text in that spot we're now green is our color let's change that to something like red I'm gonna hit OK on that to select that color and if I just type here something like text layer and then click on the move tool again I always go back to the move tool the shortcut key for that is V but if you're within a text layer you have to be careful because hitting V is actually going to type the letter V so to get out of a text layer hit the Escape key and then you can go to the move tool but I always go to the move tool just out of habit it helps me feel like I don't have anything selected that I don't mean to have selected so I have the text layer now notice it created a little type layer down here I also have the rectangle the text layer is on top of the rectangle which is on top of the background layer so all of these out of all of these the first visible would be  the text layer so if I use my move tool and move this text layer over on top of the shape layer notice how its first visible I see texts and then behind that is the rectangle and behind that is the white background well I can actually move these layers so I can move the text layer underneath the rectangle which you guessed it it's  going to make the rectangle first visible and then the text underneath that and then the background underneath that to actually show layers underneath and through other layers there are blending modes here notice where this normal is I can drop that down and select different blending modes like multiply they all sort of do different things this is hard to see but it does change the color a little bit where the yellow is over top of the text layer now what we're seeing here is not the text layer on top of the yellow we're seeing through the yellow and we blended it with the multiply blend mode now there's other blend modes I'm not sure which ones will actually show much of a difference here we can sort of click through some and find out well there's one there was the lighten blend mode now you cannot see the shape layer except for where the text layer is so different options here to blend layers together and another more basic option that we use all the time is opacity that's like your visibility level so right now it's 100% visible the rectangle that I have selected let's say I change that to 50 it's going to be 50% see through essentially 50% 50% visibility 50% transparency opacity whatever you want to call it you can see through it now a little bit to the bottom layer and we could set that down to 10% so you can barely see it on there or even 0% although there's not much reason to have it at 0% because notice how on the left of all of these different layers we have a little eyeball that's to show and hide layers so I could hide that layer from my canvas at any point in time I can hide and show layers so if you're working on something or trying to work on something that's underneath another like I wanted to edit this text well I can hide this top layer edit the text and then show it again and continue on with my project okay so one other important thing what if I wanted to paint on one of these layers well what I would do is add a new layer there's a little new layer tab down here and when I do that notice how there's this new layer that got added on top of everything else and you can see the checkerboard pattern which means that that layers actually transparent so there's nothing currently on it but what if I select my paintbrush over here and then I can select up in here remember all these other extra properties are up here I can select the size of the brush the type of brush the hardness and softness of it and then some other options but with that paintbrush selected and also a color selected so either down here the foreground color we can set or up here we can set the foreground color I'll keep it at this sort of really highlighted blue color notice I'm on this  layer so that's the layer I'm going to be painting on as I sort of draw and paint on top of everything check out this thumbnail over here if I hide everything below it I'll just click and drag to hide all those we've actually simply just painted a stroke on here so anywhere that that stroke is is where pixels basically exist and are on top of any of our other layers now I can obviously drag this layer like before underneath the rectangle now the rectangle is going to be on top so it's like the rectangle first then the paintbrush layer then the text layer like a drag it one more below that  so now we're below the text layer so it's the rectangle the text layer and then the paintbrush layer and so on and that's how these layers sort of behave everything stacks on top of the other layer let's switch gears a little bit and look at the selection tool now I currently have the paintbrush  layer selected and this actually the marquee selection tool if I click and hold this I have rectangular elliptical single row I also have some different options here underneath that I have a lasso tool which is another selection tool and to have like magic wand and quick selection we won't get into any of these too deep but I just wanted to show you how selections work so I have this layer selected with the paintbrush and I have the rectangular marquee selection if I click and drag out here it's going to draw a selected area and then I can that same selection tool still selected I can click and drag that around if I wanted to move where it's at with this area selected I can essentially affect the area of that selection I could grab the move tool when I hover over this selection notice the little scissors appear that means I can sort of cut and drag the pixels that are in this area around and only the ones that are on this layer so if I click and drag it notice how it actually selects what it sees there and I can move that around I can also do stuff like copy paste so I could go up to edit copy and then edit paste and that's gonna paste in there a new layer based on that selection and now I can move that new layer around separately from anything else we'll go ahead and undo that it also keeps things within the bounds of that selection so I'm still on this layer I could switch over to the paint tool and notice how the selection remains and as I paint it only allows me to paint within that selection so that's kind of a nice way to keep yourself from painting outside of the boundaries of where you would like to paint I'll just undo out of that and that's kind of a quick overview of how some of the selection tools work a little bit and what you can sort of do with them now I know we didn't get too deep into any one tool or anything but the main thing I wanted you to understand here was how layers work because as we go through this course we'll be working with different types of Photoshop documents that are open I'll be working with different files imagery and text and just the basic understanding of how things stack on top of each other and the fact that if you move something below you will see the rectangle first and then the layer underneath is in order of top to bottom front to back that's the  biggest thing I wanted you to take away from this if you liked this video make sure you like this video subscribe for more tips and tutorials and I'll see you next time.