Adobe

Chapter Five Working with Layers

Layers are integral to working in Photoshop. They allow you to keep image elements and adjustments separate from one another so that you can move them independently and enable or disable them at will. You can think of layers as sheets of clear transparent film stacked one on top of the other.

Here’s a quick example of how layers work: Say you have a single layer Photoshop document that contains an image, and you want to add text on top of the image. To do this, you choose the Type tool and click within the document window. This adds a type layer above the image. The result is a document that contains two layers: The bottom layer contains the image, and the top layer contains the type. Each of these ...