Photoshop Layers - Introduction

What Would Life Be Like Without Layers?

Before we look at what layers are and how to use them, let's first see what working in Photoshop would be like without layers! We'll start by creating a new document in Photoshop. I'm using Photoshop CS5 here but any recent version will work just fine. Go up to the File menu in the Menu Bar along the top of the screen and choose New:

Go to File > New.

This opens the New Document dialog box. Enter 800 pixels for the Width of the new document and 600 pixels for the Height. Leave the Resolution value set to 72 pixels/inch. There's no particular reason why we're using this size other than to keep us both on the same page. Finally, make sure the Background Contents option is set to White:

Set the Width value to 800 pixels and the Height to 600 pixels. Background Contents should be set to White.

When you're done, click OK to close out of the dialog box. Your new white-filled document will appear on the screen:

The new document.

Now that we have our new document open and ready to go, let's start drawing on it. We'll keep our "art work" very simple for this example, since we're really just trying to understand layers, not showcase our creative talent. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool from the top of the Tools panel:

Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool.

With the Rectangular Marquee Tool selected, click somewhere near the top left corner of your document and drag out a rectangular selection. Don't worry about it's exact size or location:

Click and drag out a rectangular selection in the top left of the document.

Now that we've dragged out a selection, let's fill that selection with a color. Go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Fill:

Go to Edit > Fill.

This open's the Fill dialog box. Change the Use option at the top of the dialog box to Color:

Change the Use option to Color.

As soon as you choose Color, Photoshop will pop open the Color Picker so we can choose the color we want to fill our selection with. You can pick any color you like. I"ll choose red:

Choose a color from the Color Picker. Any color will do.

Once you've chosen a color, click OK to close out of the Color Picker, then click OK to close out of the Fill dialog box. Photoshop fills the selection with your color, which in my case was red:

The document after filling the selection with red.

We don't need the selection outline around the rectangle anymore, so deselect it by going up to the Select menu at the top of the screen and choosing Deselect:

Go to Select > Deselect to remove the selection outline from around the rectangle.

So far so good. In fact, that first rectangle turned out so well, we should add a second one! Click inside the document with the Rectangular Marquee Tool and drag out another rectangular selection. Just for fun, start your selection from somewhere over top of the existing rectangle so that the new selection partly overlaps it

Make sure the new selection partly overlaps the original rectangle.

With the second selection added, go back up to the Edit menu and choose Fill so we can fill it with a color. The Use option at the top of the dialog box should already be set to Color, but if you simply click OK to close out of the dialog box, Photoshop will fill the selection with the same color you chose last time, and that's not what we want. We want a different color for this second rectangle, so click on the word Color, then re-select Color from the list of options (I know, it seems weird), at which point Photoshop will re-open the Color Picker. Choose a different color this time. I'll choose green. Again, feel free to pick any color you like as long as it's something different:

Choose a different color for the second rectangle.

Click OK to close out of the Color Picker, then click OK to close out of the Fill dialog box. Photoshop fills the second selection with your chosen color. To remove the selection outline from around the second rectangle, go up to the Select menu at the top of the screen and choose Deselect, just as we did last time. We now have two rectangles, each a different color, in the document. Award winning stuff:

I call this piece "Two rectangles, two colors, one document."

If that isn't a work of artistic genius, I don't know what is. Although.... hmmm........
Now that I've been looking at it for a while, I'm not sure I'm happy with something. See how the green rectangle overlaps the red one? I know I did that on purpose, but I think it was a mistake. It might look better if I swapped them so that the red rectangle was overlapping the green one. Yeah, that's the problem. The red shape needs to be in front of the green shape. Then my masterpiece will be complete! All I need to do here is grab the red one and move it over top of the green one.
We do that by..... um.... hmm. Wait a minute, how do we do that? I think we have a problem here. I drew the red one, then I drew the green one, and now I just need to move the red one in front of the green one. Sounds simple enough, but how? The simple answer is, I can't. There's no way to move that red shape in front of the green one because the green one isn't really in front of the red one at all. It's just an illusion. In fact, the two rectangles are not really two rectangles, at least not as separate independent objects. Again, It's an illusion. The green shape is simply cutting into the red one, and the pixels that were initially red in the original rectangle were changed to green when I filled the second selection.
Speaking of illusions, the two rectangles are not really sitting in front of the white background, either. The entire thing is nothing more than a single, flat, two-dimensional image. Everything in the document - the red shape, the green shape and the white background - is essentially stuck together. We can't move anything without moving everything.
Let's take a quick look in our Layers panel to see what's happening. Notice that everything - the two rectangles and the white background - is sitting on a single layer. This means everything is part of the same flat image:

The Layers panel showing everything on the Background layer.

With all of our work on a single layer, we don't have many options if we want to change something. We could undo our way back through the steps to get to the point where we can make our change, or we could scrap the whole thing and start over again. Neither one of those options sounds very appealing to me. There must be a better way to work, one that will give us the freedom and flexibility to make simple changes like this without having to undo and redo anything or start over from scratch.
Fortunately, there is. Let's try the same thing, but this time using layers!

Photoshop Tool Basics

This is a quick summary of Photoshop’s Tools palette with a description of each tool’s functions and shortcuts. Great for those brand new to Photoshop.

I decided to start at the beginning. The very beginning. For those people who just “picked up” a copy of Photoshop and have no idea what to do with it. The keyboard shortcut is in ( ).

Rectangular Marquee Tool (M)
Use this tool to make selections on your image, in a rectangular shape. This changes the area of your image that is affected by other tools or actions to be within the defined shape. Holding the [Shift] key while dragging your selection, restricts the shape to a perfect square. Holding the [Alt] key while dragging sets the center of the rectangle to where your cursor started.

Move Tool (V)
Use this tool to, well, move things. Usually you use it to move a Layer around after it has been placed. Hold the [Shift] key to limit the movements to vertical/horizontal.

Polygon Lasso Tool (L)
Ok, this should be the Lasso Tool, but I use the Polygon Lasso a lot more often. Use this to draw selections in whatever shape you would like. To close the selection, either click on the beginning point (you’ll see the cursor change when you’re on it), or just double-click. When holding the [Ctrl] key, you’ll see the cursor change, and the next time you click, it will close your selection.

Magic Wand Tool (W)
Use this to select a color range. It will select the block of color, or transparency, based on wherever you click. In the Options Bar at the top, you can change the Tolerance to make your selections more/less precise.

Crop Tool (C)
The Crop Tool works similarly to the Rectangular Marquee tool (see above if you have no short-term memory). The difference is when you press the [Enter/Return] key, it crops your image to the size of the box. Any information that was on the outside of the box is now gone. Not permanently, you can still undo.

Slice Tool (K)
This is used mostly for building websites, or splitting up one image into smaller ones when saving out. It’s kind of an advanced tool, and since you’re in here for the basics, we’ll kind of skip over it. Kinda makes you mad I made you read all that for nothing, huh?

Healing Brush Tool (J)
This is a really useful tool. Mildly advanced. You can use this tool to repair scratches and specs and stuff like that on images. It works like the Brush tool (see below). You choose your cursor size, then holding the [Alt] key, you select a nice/clean area of your image. Let go of the [Alt] key and paint over the bad area. It basically copies the info from the first area to the second, in the form of the Brush tool. Only, at the end, it averages the information, so it blends.

Brush Tool (B)
This is one of the first tools ever. It’s what Photoshop is based off of. Well, not really, but it’s pretty basic. It paints one your image, in whatever color you have selected, and whatever size you have selected. There’s a lot of options for it, but this is basic, so you don’t get to learn them. Ha.

Clone Stamp Tool (S)
This is very similar to the Healing Brush Tool (see above). You use it the exact same way, except this tool doesn’t blend at the end. It’s a direct copy of the information from the first selected area to the second. When you learn to use both of these tools together in perfect harmony, you will be a Photoshop MASTA! Not really, it’s just less irritating.

History Brush Tool (H)
This tool works just like the Brush Tool (see above) except the information that it paints with is from the original state of your image. If you go Window>History, you can see the History Palette. The History Brush tool paints with the information from whatever History state is selected.

Eraser Tool (E)
This is the anti-Brush tool. It works like an eraser (duh) and erases whatever information wherever you click and drag it. If you’re on a Layer, it will erase the information transparent. If you are on the background layer, it erases with whatever secondary color you have selected.

Gradient Tool (G)
You can use this to make a gradiation of colors. Gradiation doesn’t appear to be a word, but it makes sense anyway. It creates a blending of your foreground color and background color when you click and drag it. Like a gradient.

Blur Tool (R)
The Blur tool is cool. It makes things blurry. Click and drag to make things blurry. The more you click and drag, the blurrier things get.

Dodge Tool (O)
This tool isn’t as crappy as the car brand. It’s actually used to lighten whatever area you use it on. As long as it is not absolute black. Absolute black won’t lighten.

Path Selection Tool (A)
You use this tool when working with paths. Since this is all about the basics, I won’t go into details. It’s related to the Pen Tool (see below) though.

Horizontal Type Tool (T)
It makes type. Or text. Or whatever you want to call it. You can click a single point, and start typing right away. Or you can click and drag to make a bounding box of where your text/type goes. There’s a lot of options for the Type Tool. Just play around, it’s fairly straight-forward.

Pen Tool (P)
I mentioned this tool above. It’s for creating paths, in which you would use the Path Selection Tool to select the path. Paths can be used in a few different ways, mostly to create clipping paths, or to create selections. You use the tool by clicking to add a point. If you click and drag, it will change the shape of your path, allowing you to bend and shape the path for accurate selections and such.

Rectangle Tool (U)
By default it draws a Shape Layer in the form of a rectangle. It fills the rectangle with whatever foreground color you have selected. It’s pretty complicated, don’t hurt yourself with this one.

Notes Tool (N)
Like post-it notes, but digital. You can use this tool to add small little note boxes to your image. These are useful if you’re very forgetful or if you’re sharing your Photoshop file with someone else. I’m pretty sure it only works with .PSD files.

Eyedropper Tool (I)
This tool works by changing your foreground color to whatever color you click on. Holding the [Alt] key will change your background color.

Hand Tool (T)
You can really make short work of your job with the Hand Tool. It’s for moving your entire image within a window. So if you’re zoomed in and your image area is larger than the window, you can use the Hand Tool to navigate around your image. Just click and drag. You can get to this tool at any time when using any other tool by pressing and holding the [Spacebar].

Zoom Tool (Z)
Pretty obvious what this tool does. It allows you to zoom into your image. Don’t be dumb, it doesn’t actually change the size of your image. Hold the [Alt] key to zoom out. Holding the [Shift] key will zoom all of the windows you have open at the same time. Double-click on the Zoom Tool in the palette to go back to 100% view.

BONUS!!
These are your color boxes. Foreground (in the front) and Background (in the back). Click on either one to bring up the color select dialog box.

Photoshop Shapes And Shape Layers Essentials

In this tutorial, we'll learn the essentials of working with shapes and Shape layers in Photoshop! We'll start by learning how to use the five geometric shape tools - the Rectangle Tool, the Rounded Rectangle Tool, the Ellipse Tool, the Polygon Tool, and theLine Tool. Then, in the next tutorial, we'll learn how to add more complex shapes to our documents with Photoshop's Custom Shape Tool.

Most people think of Photoshop as a photo editing program, and if you were to ask someone to recommend a good drawing program, Adobe Illustrator would usually be at the top of their list. It's true that Illustrator's drawing and illustration features are far beyond Photoshop's, but Photoshop has more drawing ability than you might expect for a pixel-based image editor, thanks in large part to its Shape tools and Shape layers which make it easy to add simple vector-based graphics and shapes to our designs and layouts.

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The Shape Tools

Photoshop gives us six Shape tools to choose from - the Rectangle Tool, the Rounded Rectangle Tool, the Ellipse Tool, the Polygon Tool, the Line Tool, and the Custom Shape Tool, and they're all nested together in the same spot in the Tools panel. By default, the Rectangle Tool is the one that's visible in the Tools panel, but if we click on the tool's icon and hold our mouse button down for a second or two, a fly-out menu appears showing us the other Shape tools we can choose from:

All six Shape tools are located in the same spot in the Tools panel.

Once you have a Shape tool selected, if you need to switch to a different one, there's no need to go back to the Tools panel (although you can if you want to) because Photoshop gives us access to all of the Shape tools directly from the Options Bar along the top of the screen. For example, I'll select the Rectangle Tool from the Tools panel:

Selecting the Rectangle Tool.

With the Rectangle Tool selected, a row of six icons appears in the Options Bar, with each icon representing a different Shape tool. The tools are listed from left to right in the same order they appear in the Tools panel, so again we have the Rectangle Tool, the Rounded Rectangle Tool, the Ellipse Tool, the Polygon Tool, the Line Tool, and the Custom Shape Tool. Simply click on one of the icons to choose the tool you need:

All six Shape tools can be selected directly from the Options Bar (after one of them is first selected from the Tools panel).

The Shape Layers Option

Before we start drawing any shapes, we first need to tell Photoshop which type of shape we want to draw, and by that, I don't mean rectangles or circles. Photoshop actually lets us draw three very different kinds of shapes - vector shapes, paths, or pixel-based shapes. We'll look more closely at the differences between the three and why you'd want to use each one in another tutorial, but in most cases, you'll want to be drawing vector shapes, which are the same types of shapes we'd be drawing in a program like Illustrator. Unlike pixels, vector shapes are resolution-independent and fully scalable, which means we can make them as big as we like and resize them as often as we like without any loss of image quality. The edges of vector shapes will always remain crisp and sharp, both on the screen and when we go to print them.

To draw vector shapes, select the Shape Layers option in the Options Bar. It's the first of three icons near the far left (the Paths option is the middle of the three icons followed by the Fill Pixels option on the right):

Select the Shape Layers option to draw vector shapes.

Choosing A Color For The Shape

With the Shape Layers option selected, the next thing we need to do is choose a color for our shape, and we do that by clicking on the color swatch to the right of the word Color in the Options Bar:

Click on the color swatch to choose a color for the shape.

Photoshop will pop open the Color Picker where we can choose the color we want to use. I'll choose red. Click OK once you've chosen a color to close out of the Color Picker:

Choose a color for your shape from the Color Picker.

Don't worry about choosing the wrong color for your shape if you're not sure which color you'll need. As we'll see, Shape layers make it easy to go back and change the color of a shape at any time after we've drawn it.

The Rectangle Tool

As you can probably guess from its name, Photoshop's Rectangle Tool lets us draw four-sided rectangular shapes. Simply click in the document to set the starting point for your shape, then keep your mouse button held down and drag diagonally to draw the rest of the shape. As you drag, you'll see a thin outline of what the shape will look like:

Dragging out a rectangle shape. As you drag, only an outline of the shape appears.

When you're happy with the look of your shape, release your mouse button, at which point Photoshop fills the shape with the color you selected in the Options Bar:

Photoshop fills the shape with color when you release your mouse button.

Drawing A Shape From Its Center

If you need to draw a rectangle (or any shape) from its center rather than from a corner, click inside the document where the center of the rectangle should be and begin dragging out the shape as you normally would. Once you begin dragging, press your Alt (Win) /Option (Mac) key and keep it held down as you continue dragging. The Alt / Option key tells Photoshop to draw the shape out from its center. This works with all of the Shape tools, not just the Rectangle Tool:

Hold down Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) after you begin dragging to draw a shape from its center.

Drawing Squares

We can also draw squares with the Rectangle Tool. To draw a square, click inside the document and begin dragging out a rectangular shape. Once you've started dragging, press your Shift key on your keyboard and keep it held down while you continue dragging out the shape. Holding the Shift key down will force the shape into a perfect square no matter which direction you drag in. You can also add the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key to draw the square out from its center (so you would press and hold Shift+Alt (Win) /Shift+Option (Mac)):

Hold down Shift as you drag with the Rectangle Tool to draw a perfect square.

Again, Photoshop will display only a thin outline of the square as you're dragging, but when you release your mouse button, Photoshop fills it with color:

Photoshop always waits till you release your mouse button before filling the shape with color.

The Shape Options

If you look in the Options Bar, directly to the right of the six Shape tool icons, you'll see a small down-pointing arrow. Clicking on the arrow opens a list of additional options for whichever Shape tool you have selected. With the Rectangle Tool selected, for example, clicking on the arrow brings up the Rectangle Options. With the exception of the Polygon Tool and the Line Tool, which we'll look at later, you won't find yourself using this menu very often because we've already learned how to access the main options directly from the keyboard.

For example, the Unconstrained option is selected for us by default, and that's just the normal behavior of the Rectangle Tool, allowing us to draw rectangular shapes of any size or aspect ratio. The Square option lets us draw squares, but we can do that just by holding down the Shift key as we drag. And the From Center option will draw the shape from its center, but again, we can already do that by holding down our Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key as we drag:

Click on the small arrow to view additional options for the Rectangle Tool.

Shape Layers

Before we check out the rest of the Shape tools, let's quickly take a look at what's happening in the Layers panel. If you remember at the beginning of the tutorial, we learned that to draw vector shapes in Photoshop, we need to make sure we have the Shape Layers option selected in the Options Bar, and now that I've drawn a shape, we see that I have an actual Shape layer in my document, which Photoshop has named "Shape 1". Each new vector shape we draw is placed on its own Shape layer which look different from normal pixel-based layers. On the left of a Shape layer is a color swatch icon, which displays the current color of our shape, and to the right of the color swatch is a vector mask thumbnail:

Shape layers have a color swatch on the left and a vector mask thumbnail to the right of it.

Earlier I mentioned that we don't need to worry about choosing the correct color for a shape because we can easily change its color after we've drawn it, and we can do that by double-clicking directly on the Shape layer's color swatch:

To change an existing shape's color, double-click on its color swatch.

Photoshop will re-open the Color Picker for us so we can choose a different color for the shape. I'll choose blue this time:

Choosing a different color from the Color Picker.

I'll click OK to close out of the Color Picker, and Photoshop changes the color of my square shape from red to blue:

It's easy to go back and change the color of a shape at any time.

To the right of the color swatch on a Shape layer is the vector mask thumbnail. The white area inside the thumbnail represents our shape. Vector masks are similar to pixel-based layer masks in that they reveal some parts of a layer while hiding other parts, and by that, I mean that when we draw a vector shape, Photoshop actually fills the entire layer with our chosen color, but it only displays the color inside the shape area. It hides the color in the areas outside the shape. This isn't something you really need to know to work with shapes in Photoshop, but it's always nice to understand what it is you're looking at. The gray area around the shape in the vector mask thumbnail is the area on the layer where the color is being hidden from view, while the white area is where the color is visible:

The white area on the vector mask represents the visible shape area on the layer.

To make it easier to see how Photoshop is displaying the vector shape, we can actually turn vector masks off temporarily by holding down our Shift key and clicking directly on the vector mask thumbnail. A big red X will appear in the thumbnail letting us know the mask is now off:

Hold Shift and click on a vector mask to turn it off.

With the vector mask turned off, the entire layer is revealed in the document, and we can see that it's completely filled with the blue color I chose for my shape. If you look closely, you can see the thin outline of where the shape is sitting on the layer:

Turning the vector mask off shows that the entire layer itself is filled with color.

To turn a vector mask back on, simply hold down Shift and click again on its thumbnail in the Layers panel. With the mask back on, all of the color outside the shape is once again hidden from view, and all we can see is the color inside the shape itself. The white areas around the shape in my document window are from my Background layer below it:

The document after turning the Shape layer's vector mask back on.

Now that we've looked at Shape layers, let's see what other types of shapes we can draw in Photoshop using the other geometric Shape tools.