Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® & Photoshop® Workflow Bible

Chapter 14. Working with Layers

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding what layers are and how they are created

• Using Adjustment layers to make tonal and color adjustments nondestructive

• Using the Layers palette to manage layers

• Understanding the special properties of the Background layer

• Copying, moving, and flattening layers

• Using Layer opacity and blending to affect the way layers interact with layers beneath them

The use of layers is one of the most powerful concepts in Photoshop. Layers are so important that a comprehensive main menu and a full palette are dedicated to working with them. Even with all these controls, you must remember that working with layers is more than a set of commands and options: Using layers is a workflow methodology.

Layers in Photoshop allow you to build flexibility into your editing workflow so that you're able to keep your future options open. You do this by placing important image information on separate layers. Understanding how layers work in Photoshop will change the way you work with important images forever.

This chapter gets you up to speed with the whole concept of layers and how to work with them in Photoshop. It covers everything from creating layers in a variety of ways to different ways of merging multiple layers and flattening all layers. By the end of this chapter, you'll be ready to take advantage of some of the techniques shared in later chapters.

Because the use of layers is central to much of what you do later, this is one of the more important chapters ...