Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 Studio Techniques

Merging Layers

When you create a complicated image that contains dozens of layers, your project can start hogging memory, which in turn makes it difficult to manage all the layers. Every time you create a new layer and add something to it, Photoshop gobbles up more memory. Photoshop not only has to think about what's on that layer, but also has to remember what's below the layer (even if that information is completely covered by the information on the layers above).

Once you've merged two layers, it's awfully hard to get them apart—the only way to do so is to use the History palette. However, even with the History palette, you might lose all the ...