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[Learn] [The How To series from Adobe] [video2brain] [World-Class Training] [This video is part of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9: Learn by Video] [Available on learnbyvideo.com and video2brain.com] The Layers panel is an essential tool when editing images and creating photo projects in Elements. Many of the automated features for applying adjustments and creating projects are executed behind the scenes using layers. And you can use these layers to edit your projects even further in the Full Edit mode. Therefore, in order to make the most of Elements, it helps to understand how to work with layers. So with this movie, I'd like to show you how to add, name, select, reposition and delete layers. I'm currently in the Organizer application, and what I'd like to do is select an image to work with in the editor. Here in the photo browser, off to the left I have a version set. If I click on the right-facing arrow, we can see we have the original image on the right and a cropped version of that image on the left. And then the cropped version is the one I'd actually like to work with in the editor. So, I'll click on its thumbnail to select it, and then over here in the Fix panel, we'll click where it says "Fix," display that panel. We also have a list that we can access by clicking the down-facing arrow and choosing "Full Photo Edit." So, that's another way that you can select an image in the Organizer and open it up inside of the Editor application. And here it is. It's defaulting to Full Edit mode. And there's a couple of things that I'd like to turn off up here in the Options panel before we get started, and that is "Show Bounding Box." I'm going to turn that off and "Show Highlight on Rollover." I find that those things tend to get in the way as I'm working in Elements, and I usually turn those off. All right, so we don't have any distractions here in our content area as we are applying our adjustments and working with layers, which are down here in the bottom right corner. This is the Layers panel, right here where it says "Layers." Okay, any time you open up an image for the first time in the Full Edit mode, you're going to see this in the Layers panel, a background layer. Every image has one. It's always visible, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing anything over here. And it's always locked, okay, so there are some limitations to working with the background layer. For now, we're going to leave the background as it is, and we're going to work with additional layers on top of it. Now, the whole idea of working with layers is that you can apply adjustments, you can add different layers of image area, image content, add pixels to your image, and you can do so non-destructively. You can also use layers to blend images together, blend layers together, and create composites. You can use layers to try out a lot of your creative ideas and store them all in the same file. And you can do so without damaging any pixels on the background layer, which is your original image. All right, so let's take a look at how we can do this. Notice down here we have some controls at the bottom of the Layers panel. "Create New Layer" is the first one that I want to focus on here. We'll click on "Create New Layer," and that always applies the new layer above the background. So, now we have a new layer positioned here. It's named by default "Layer 1," and it is a transparent layer. That's why we're seeing this grid in here. This is the transparent grid in the Layer thumbnail. That is Elements way of telling us that this is a transparent layer, unlike the background, okay? Free-floating pixel layer in here and it's not locked, so that means that we can move this guy around, and we can add pixels inside of this blank layer. Notice there's a visibility icon. If I turn that off, nothing happens. That's because there's nothing in this layer. We created a new blank layer, completely transparent. We need to put some opaque pixels in here that we can add to our image, which is down here in the background. So, with this layer selected, what I want to do is make a selection within the image area to tell Photoshop Elements where we want to add these pixels on our layer. So, let's choose "Select All." "Command A" on the Mac, "Control A" on Windows. There we can see our selection marquee, the marching ants as they're called, marching around the entire image area. The next thing I want to do is contract this selection inward by about 75 pixels. We can do that by choosing "Select, Modify, Contract." That brings up a dialog box where you can enter the pixel value in here. I'm typing in "75." Click "Okay." Wait a few seconds for Elements to make this calculation and change the selection. There's our new selection contracted inward by 75 pixels, so now we have all of this area inside selected, and the area outside of the marquee is not. But I want to inverse that because what I really want to do here is create a type of border affect, so under "Select," we're going to choose "Inverse." Now we have the inverse of that selected. The center portion of the image is no longer selected. What that means is we can fill this selected area with a color in order to create a border effect on a separate layer above the background. Let's take a look at how we can do that. We can choose a color by clicking on the foreground color swatch at the bottom of the Tools panel on the left. Click on that to access the color picker. This is the color picker. Now, one of the great things about the color picker is not only can you click in here and choose colors and drag up and down here within the spectrum, choose colors from within here, you can also hover the cursor over the image and click where you'd like to sample a color and use it as your foreground. Let's go ahead and click here, and we've now chosen this pink color. We'll click "Okay." That is now our foreground color. So, the next thing we can do is fill our selection on Layer 1 with that color. Let's go under Edit, Fill Selection, and we'll choose "Foreground Color." We're not going to worry about these blending options. We'll talk about those in a separate movie. For now, we're just going to choose "Foreground Color" and click "Okay." All right, and there we have it. Let's go ahead and deselect by choosing "Select, Deselect." Take a look without those marching ants in our way. So now, we have--Layer 1 has a pink border on it, and the background has all of our image area. That means if we hide Layer 1, you can see we haven't damaged any of the pixels in the background layer. Everything that we added was on this separate layer, and we can control its visibility from within the Layers panel. You can also rename the layer by double-clicking on where it says "Layer 1." And we'll type in "pink border," press "Return" or "Enter." All right, so we've created a border non-destructively using a separate layer in the Layers panel. That's the beauty of working with layers. Now, we can take this even further by creating more layers like this and trying out as many different colors as we want in this image. We can try as many different color borders as we want and save every idea here inside of the Layers panel. We don't have to create separate versions of this particular image with different borders. We don't have to have separate files. It can all be saved in the same file, and that's another great thing about working with layers. So, let's go ahead and make a duplicate of this layer. I'll show you how to do that. The quickest and easiest way to do that is with the layer selected in the panel, drag it down over that Create New Layer icon again. So now it says "pink border copy," and it placed it above the original pink border. So, it's exactly the same. If we turn off its visibility, you can see nothing changes in the image area, no differences, but I want to change something about it, and I want to change the color of the border, which means I have to select it again. And the quickest and easiest way to base a selection off of the pixels that are in a specific layer is to "Command, click" on the Mac or "Control, click" on the Layer thumbnail in the Layers Panel. When we do that, you'll see it brought up that selection again. That's a really great, handy keyboard shortcut, because it means we can reuse our selections based on content within each layer. We don't necessarily have to save them as saved selections. Great way to work. With this selection now reloaded, I want to apply a different color to this border on this separate layer, and this time I want to use the background color, which is white. So again, we can go under "Edit, Fill Selection." This time we'll choose "Background Color." Click "Okay," and there it is. All right, let's deselect one more time. And let's hide our visibility. There's the pink border. There's no border. So now we have 2 different border options, pink and white. Let's go ahead and rename this. Double-click. Both saved inside of this particular file. We didn't have to create separate versions in order to try out this technique, these different borders. And we can continue to do this, creating as many layers as we want here inside of the file. Now, let's say after we're working for a while, we decide we don't want to work with the pink border. We like the white border, but there's no point in keeping the pink border because we're never going to use it in a project. Let's just go ahead and delete it. You can select the layer by clicking on it in the Layers panel and then click the trash can icon, or you can drag it over it and then let up to delete the layer, and now it's gone. Okay, so that's how you can delete layers. Okay. Now, when you're finished with your project, you'll want to save it as either a Photoshop PSD, in that file format, or in the Photoshop PDF file format, or the layered TIFF format. All of those allow you to maintain layers inside of the saved file. You can't save this as a JPEG because it doesn't allow you to keep the layers inside of the file, only TIFFs, PDFs, Photoshop PDFs, and PSDs. Generally, PSD is the most commonly used for retaining layers inside of a saved file, so I recommend doing that. Let's take a look real quick. File, Save As, and we can save this wherever we want. We'll just save it in the same folder where it originally was that says edited -1.psd. Notice that Layers is checked. Photoshop is the format. Again, you can also choose the TIFF format if you want to preserve layers, or you can choose Photoshop PDF, but we'll stick with the most common, which is Photoshop. I'm going to go ahead and save this in the version set with the original, and we'll click "Save." Okay, so now we've saved our layered file as a PSD. That's a very important last step when you're working with layers. Okay, so what did we learn here? We learned that with layers, you can work non-destructively. You can try out and save all of your ideas within the Layers panel. We learned how we can create layers. We learned how we can name layers. We learned that we can reposition them within the panel. We also learned that we can delete layers if we ever decide we don't want to use them, and we learned that when you are finished with a project, at least for the time being, in order to retain those layers in the file, you need to save it as either a Photoshop document, which is the PSD format, Photoshop PDF, or as a layered TIFF.
