Inside Photoshop® CS

Examining the Flexibility of Layers

Layers have been a Photoshop feature since version 3.0 (shortly after electricity was discovered). In passing years, Adobe has made the layers feature so powerful that today, it almost overshadows Photoshop's most used feature, the cartload of different ways you can select image areas.

In the sections that follow, you will become familiar with Layer modes, layer locking, layer linking, clipping groups, clipping paths, layer sets, layer ordering, layer deleting, layer comps, and layer effects. Is learning all this stuff necessary? Yes, most certainly so; once you make layers a part of your Photoshop knowledge, you will work at least twice as fast as the next (uneducated) guy or gal.

First, we felt you would ...