So now that I have made my burger and it's beautiful I don't want anything to happen to it. So what I can do is lock my layers and here in the Layers Palette there are four different types of locks that we can apply to layers.
Now the first one is the Transparency Lock. This is kind of interesting. As we have this layer selected and then hit this Transparency Lock, it will lock all transparent pixels which means that they are always off limits for this layer, you can tell that it's locked because it has a padlock.
Now don't get confused because this Transparency Lock icon is different than the Padlock icon but it's the Padlock icon that you are seeing here. Well, all this Padlock means is that there is some type of lock applied to this layer. Now again, with the Transparency Lock, the transparency is off limit, so if I select the Paintbrush Tool and try to paint with black, you hear my mouse going, do you hear that? Nothing going on there. But as I go across the meat, it is painted over, because the transparency is protected. Going to hit Command+Z to undo that.
Now these locks are not mutually exclusive, in plain English that means that you could apply as many of them simultaneously as you want. So just because I go to this button and click Lock image pixels, doesn't mean that this lock is lifted. So we have to actually unlock that one, unlock that one. So just be aware of that. And speaking of Lock image pixels, what this one does is it basically makes sure that you can't paint over your image. So if you have your image, you know that your hamburger meat is looking absolutely beautiful, you have even got those super sexy grill marks there. But you are not sure where you want to place it. You could lock the image pixels with this one and then you still have the ability to move it around although you can't paint on.
So now I am going to take off the Lock image pixels lock, and if I lock down the Move Lock, then basically it's the opposite of the Image Lock. I can't move it but I could paint on it however I want. So I am going to remove this Move Lock and finally we have the great grand-daddy of them all, the Lock all button. And basically what this does is it locks everything. It locks the transparency, it locks the image pixels, it locks the movement, it locks everything you could ever lock about a layer. So be aware of what these locks do.
One final thing about lock is that as you probably notice, whenever you bring in an image into Photoshop typically, there is a background layer that is already been created for you. Even if you are opening up a JPEG file that doesn't have layers, it will automatically create that as a background layer.
Now basically what a background layer is, is a regular layer that's just been locked, and Photoshop does this as kind of a favor to you, just to make sure that you don't accidentally delete or move something that you don't want to accidentally move or delete. It assumes that you want the background layer to not get erased or deleted or that type of thing.
So we can't move background layers, but if you want to unlock the layer all you have to do is just double-click your background layer and it will convert it to essentially Layer 0 or you could name it to whatever you want.
So I can just hit OK here and that's now Layer 0, the lock has gone and I could edit it or move it just like any other layer.
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