Digital Art Photography For Dummies®

Chapter 14. Using Layers to Create a Theme

In This Chapter

• Seeing how layers work

• Making a layered picture with a theme

Layering images is one of the most powerful features of Photoshop. Remember working with an x-y axis in algebra? You can think of your image in terms of that plane. In more advanced math, you also have a z axis, which is a kind of space that moves up and down. You can think of other images that you lay over your original as being in that plane. A layer is just a picture file that Photoshop uses to make an image. Photoshop can merge many pictures together in a kind-of-third dimension called a layer.

For the purposes of this book, I leave heavy rendering of dozens of images to graphic designers. From a photographer's perspective (more specifically, this art photographer), if a photographic image is overdone with Photoshop, you move it into a different category of art — more toward graphics. For now, digital photography graphic designs have not sold widely as prints without the aid of mass production. In other words, designs do sell but mostly if they're part of a poster produced as part of an event, a gallery opening, movie premiere, or stage production. But, in the art world, you never know when this will catch on.

This chapter discusses how you can make interesting photo montages using Photoshop layers.

Using Layers in Photoshop

When working with layers in Photoshop, first ...