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| Category: | Adobe Photoshop |
Layers - Photoshop guide - Using layers to make a quick composite image of balloons
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Jargon Buster: Off| Words & Pictures Barry Beckham/David Rowley Layers is the real workhorse of Photoshop and can appear very daunting when you first look at them, but it's worth spending a little time getting to grips with the Photoshop layers. You will find that once you do the opportunity to create some great images will open up to you. |
| Duplicating an image to a new layer |
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| Your layers palette can be found viawindows>show layers (Photoshop shortcutF7, Elements shortcut F11). Click onto the thumbnail in the layers palette and drag it over the create a new layer icon to duplicate our original background. |
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Copying another image into our original  To copy another image into our working image we first make sure the image we want to copy is live (title bar highlighted in blue) from themainmenu choose select>select all (short cut ctrl+A) and you will see the marching ants around the edge of your image. You cancopyourselectionusethe edit>copy or press ctrl+C - this will copy your image to the clip board. Now select your main image byclickingonit,selectedit>paste or ctrl+V and we find that Photoshop has pasted in our selection as a new layer. (See below)  |
| Drag and Drop |
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| Your image can also added as a second layer by dragging it into your main working image using the move tool. With both images opened on our screen call up the move tool from the tool box (shortcut V). Click on our 'live' image and drag it across into our main image. You will notice that as we drag it across our move tool cursor becomes a + symbol indicating that the image is being copied. Photoshop will copy the image as a new layer (see above). |
| Merge Down |
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| Clicking on the background copy layer will highlight it in blue and a paint brush appears in the window showing us that this is the working layer (see above). You can merge this layer into the background layer by clicking on the black arrow head in the top right corner of the palette. From the drop down menu select merge down. This will leave you with layer 1 and your background layer (see below). |
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| Merge Visible |
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| From the drop down menu in the layers palette choose merge visible which will merge all the visible layers e.g.. All layers with the eye icon showing. |
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| Renaming a layer |
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| You can rename the layer by clicking on the black arrow head in the top right corner of the palette and selecting layer properties from the drop down menu (in Elements it's the rename layer option). This opens our layer properties dialogue box and under the name box we can type the name of our choice. You can also try right click on your layer, which also allows you to select properties. If you are using Photoshop 5, choose layer options. |
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