Photoshop® CS3 Layers Bible

Chapter 2. Managing and Organizing Layers

In this chapter, you look at the nuts and bolts of layers in more depth. We cover the nitty-gritty of creating new layers and then look at different methods of selecting layers in your document. We show you how to duplicate layers, both within the current document and across documents. After that, we look at moving layer content—manually by using the Move tool, and automatically through the use of Photoshop's functions to align and distribute layer content.

We look at some different ways that Photoshop lets you change the order of layers in a document, then cover renaming layers and changing their color. We show how to lock various aspects of your layers to prevent them being changed accidentally, and we also look at the different ways of deleting unwanted layers.

Finally, we look at ways to organize your layers, including linking layers, creating layer groups, and color-coding layers and groups for easy access.

As discussed in Chapter 1, there are a few different types of layers in Photoshop: normal bitmap layers, type layers, shape layers, fill layers, and adjustment layers. Although each of these layer types has its own particular features, uses, advantages, and disadvantages, you can generally manage them all in the same way. Pretty much everything in this chapter applies equally to all these types of layers.

Creating Layers

Chapter 1 showed you the quickest and easiest way to create a new normal layer: Simply click the New Layer icon in ...