How to Understand Photoshop Layers

Male: Hello, and welcome to a new easydigitals.com video tutorial. Remember, you can get all of our high quality Photoshop and Photoshop elements templates at easydigitals.com. Just click on the products button and don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter. We giveaway free templates and tutorials each and every month, along with product update info and coupons. Okay, Kim what easy tutorial are you going to show us today? Kim: Today, I want to show you how to customize this simple elegance template set. First, I want to go over my work area. I have auto-select layer and show transform controls checkmark. And I have my history and layers palette up, and I probably make this a little bit bigger. So first, I want to talk about these frames. We have two sets of frames and if you have the element version, you are going to see these layers but they won’t be in folders. The rough edge is on right now, but if you wanted to turn that off, you could turn on these simple edges. These layers can be turned and resized and duplicated so that you can use in anyway that you want. Basically, you’re going to come up here to where you have this little arrow and you press shift and you’ll resize it up and down and then you press enter. And you can also come over here to where you get this little curve arrow and you can change the curve and re-tilt them and press enter. If you want to resize the square into a different size, I recommend that you come down to this one that’s called extra shape. And you can pull up the edges and resize it at any shape that you want by using that one and then you can tilt it if you want to. But if you try to do that same thing, I’m going to go back up here to where I started. If you try to do that, if you pull down the edges with this, what you start to do is change the shape so that it’s not squared on the corners and it might look a little odd, unless that’s the look you’re going for. All right, now I’m going to go back up here. If you would decide you want to make this box smaller, you can duplicate any of these by just copying and then you’ll have an extra box that you can resize and use however you want. So you can use as many pictures on here as you too by doing that. Okay, let’s look at some of these layers. We have the vines layers which can be turned off or you can just turn off the left side or just the right side of you want a simpler look. Another thing you can do with this is double click them and you can do this with any of the layers. You can reduce the opacity so that it doesn’t show up quite much or you can increase it so it’s 100%. You can also change the color, just by double clicking. You can move these vines around and take them off the page if you want and you can move them wherever you want to a different location. You also have this hue saturation layer and that is what you’re going to use to change the color. Once you put your picture in, I suggest you put your picture in first and then try to match the color. And you also look to the—you could colorize and it will be one tone instead of the multiple colors and you can change the saturation and the lightness and darkness. You also have a medallions file. And if you open that, you can see that you can use all different, this is the gradient behind the name and you can actually come up here and make this smaller and larger in case you need to make this type bigger. The medallions right now, the white is turned on which is also a lowered opacity. It is a 75% which you can also see right here. And you can turn that off and have it see through. Or we also have a squared medallion and an oval medallion. We have a white stripe and we have the music layer which you can turn on and then you can come up to the vines and turn them off and you have the music look. And you also have the background which you can turn off. And this is a background with a circular color gradient, a little brighter in this corner, then you just have the plane background. And on these frames, with the rough edges, you can also change the size of the rough edge. You can increase and decrease, so I can see it. Make it over dramatic so you can see what’s going to on here. And there’s also an inner shadow which you can turn off and on and you can just play with any of these things that you want too to change the look. I’m coming back to my history to where I started. The music layer has a blending mode which is right here, have soft light. You can also reduce the opacity or you can change it to normal and reduce the opacity or you can change it to any blending mode just by highlighting that and then arrowing down. And you can see how it changes it. Okay, that’s the basics of layers on the template. In the next tutorial, I’m going to go over adding a photo and customizing it. So stay tuned. Male: Hey, hey that was easy. Thanks for watching. If you have any questions about this tutorial or any of our products, you can always reach us at easydigitals.com. Have a creative day!