Layer Comps

An Alternative to Multiple Files

The Layer Comps panel is a wonderful yet woefully underutilized feature. With it, we can capture “snapshots” of nearly the entire state of the Layers panel and then return to them later. This provides us with a way to experiment with different compositions and settings without having to make multiple documents. UI and web designers use this feature to show different states of an app. Authors of Photoshop books use this to illustrate stages of a process. Anyone can use this feature to show a client different versions of any project.

In this example, I started with three text layers and two color ...

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