Lessons

Lesson Info

Working with Layers and Text

all right, so so far, we've learned we can create a new document by going to the file menu. In choosing New, we can create presets for our common sizes, and we can go to bridge to navigate our files. Drag from bridge over to photo shop. It'll automatically ask if I want to scale things, and I can scale whatever size I want. If you don't want to scale something, just when it comes, overhit returner enter without changing those corner handles. Also remember when I was scaling and Futter shop, I was holding down the shift key. If you don't hold down the shift key, it allows you to squish the image horizontally or vertically and you'll distort them. I wish the default was to never squish them, and I had to hold down something special to squish them. But that's not the case. Now let's say I want to organize these a little bit better. What I'd like to do is, if this is a postcard, I'd like to make it so that we have the same amount of space on the right and left side of the postcard. Pretty ...

much margins in here to accomplish that I have a couple different ways I can do it. I'm gonna use guides. Just kind of mark where I should have my design end. I'm gonna go to the view menu and the bottom of the view menu. You're gonna find a choice called New Guide. If I choose New guide is gonna ask me where to put that guide. I'm gonna type in 0.25 meaning 1/4 and then I end for inch. If you put in cmu, get centimeters Mm for millimeters. You can type e x for pixels if you happen to think that way. So in this case, I'm saying creative vertical guide in position at this far from the edge of my document, I'll click. OK, then I got my guide. We're gonna go back to the view menu. I'm gonna choose new guide again. In this time, I'm going to tell it to create a horizontal guide at 0.25 inches. Now you remember the postcard I'm making was five by seven inches, so I can calculate in my head how far over I need it for my next guide. I'll go to the View menu. I'll choose new guide And if this is seven inches wide, I'm gonna type in 6.75 I inch I n. That should be 1/4 inch from the edge on the right side, I hope if it's not, let's say for some reason, the size of my file is different than I thought. Maybe I typed in a different number. I can go to the image menu and choose image size, and it will tell me you got a seven by five inch image. And the other thing is, when I come over here to the View Women View menu and choose new guide, I need to tell it to create a vertical guide. So what I have right now is, ah, horizontal guy. That's down beyond the edge of my screen because it's it's, ah, 6.75 inches down there. So I'll do that again. Just tell it to make a vertical all right. Other ways I can tell what size my document are and put guides in is I could go to the view menu and there's a choice to show your rulers, and I never go to this menu to tell it to go to my rulers because it's so easy to remember the keyboard shortcut holding on the command key is what you use any time that you want to access a menu. Command control on Windows and rulers starts with the letter R. So command are for me is overly easy to remember. Then, if I want a guide, once I have these rulers on my screen, I just click within the ruler itself. In this case, my mouse is at the top of my screen Up here, I have it right within the ruler. I'll click on the ruler and dragged down, and I'm actively adding a guide. I can bring it down here near the bottom of my screen, and I could look at the little tick marks that Aaron the ruler and try to get it right at 1/4 inch. The problem with doing that is, if you look really close to see if I can get up real close, it's really hard to get this to precisely align with that. Well, any time you're in Photoshop, if you want to constrain something, you hold down the shift key. Do you remember when we were scaling things, how to make it, so I didn't distort it. I had to hold shift. Well, if you ever moving something and you hold shift, it will make it so you can only move it horizontally, or only vertically your constraining it. In this case, if I hold shift, you'll notice that it locks it into where the different lines are within the ruler. And so if I want to get 1/4 inch, it's hard for me to tell exactly where. 1/4 inches. Here but holding shift. Make sure it snaps to the to the grid lines. I hate having the rulers visible most the time. They just kind of annoy me sitting there, so I'm gonna type Command are to hide the rulers. If you hate keyboard shark cuts, just know you can make your ruler show up by going to the view menu. There's rulers. All right now. I'm just going to change which layers were working on and move them around. So when you use the move tool, just because I move my mouse on top of this images in the upper left doesn't mean photo shops thinking about it. Instead, it's gonna move. Whichever layer is currently active And so even though I click here when I drag, something else moves. So I have to glance over into my layers panel to see what's currently active. And if I want to switch what's active, I can come over here and see that this is the image I really wanted to work with. I just click on its name and the layers panel. Now it's active, and that's what I'll be moving. Just remember, it's a Ziff. Each one of these images is on a huge sheet of glass, and so if I have one of these other layers active and I click over here, it's like grabbing the piece of glass and moving it around. Whatever sitting on it is going to move. And so you have to make sure that whatever layer it is you want to work with is active. If you want to, very quickly switch between these layers, though there is a way to make it easy. When you're in the move to a look in the upper left of your screen in the upper left, you're gonna find a check box. It's called Auto Select. I'm gonna turn it on now, watch what happens when I click on any one of these images, you'll need to pay attention to what happens in the layers panel. I'm gonna click on the image in the lower right, and when I dio it changed which layer was active. Then I'll click on this image that's in the bottom center, and you see a change which layer is active. What it's doing is it's targeting whatever contains information directly below my mouse. So if I click on this, I can immediately start moving it and move these things around. But I had to turn on a feature at the top of my screen that was called Auto Select. It's a little check box that's there in the upper left. It will only be there when you're using the move tool. I find that to be nice some of the times in annoying the rest of the time, because sometimes I'm not wanting the layer that's directly underneath my mouse if I have a complex image, and so sometimes it can be annoying to have it turned on, so I just need to glance up there on occasion to see if it's on or not. So I'm reminded when I'm done using that After moving a bunch of layers, I usually turn it off now. You could also work on more than one layer at a time. Let's say I want to move and or scale the two images that are on the right side of my screen. Well, I need to figure out what layers there on. So I look in my layers panel and I believe this is one of them because it's in the upper right of my screen. It looks visually like that, and I think this is the other one. If I'm not certain, what I'll do is turn off the eyeball next to a layer. If I turn off the eyeball, it'll hide what's in that layer, so it's no longer being used. I click where the eyeball used to be, and it brings it back. And so I can easily confirm that those with right layers if I want to select more than one layer, I have this layer already selected in the way you select the other layers is just like when you're in bridge when you're in bridge. There were two keys you could use if you've already clicked on one, and you hold down the shift key and click on another. Watch what happens in my layers panel If I'm holding shift. When I click here, you get all the layers that are in between them. If I didn't want all the layers that air in between, I would have to instead use the command key controlling windows. Then I can click on individual layers to add them instead of getting a whole block of them. The command key is controlling windows, so anyway, I'll grab those top two layers. Let's just confirm that they're the right layers. I'll do that by using my move tool and just moving it around. Yet I can confirm that both of those are active now. When I first dragged over these images, it automatically thought I wanted to scale them, and it gave me those little handles on the corners. That only happens at the moment you drag over the images. After that, you're not usually going to see those handles show up automatically. Instead, you'd need to manually access them, and you do that by going to the edit menu. And there's a choice called free transform mean It's not limiting how it's gonna transform things. I could do it freely. There's a keyboard shortcut for it. It's command T. And I'll get used to that, cause I do it so often it's like 40 times a day, so going to the menu could be a little annoying to do it each time. So command T for transform. Or, if you hate keyboard shortcuts, come to the edit menu and choose free transform. That's what puts those little handles on it, and you can transform more than one layer at a time. So do this. I'm holding shift to make sure I don't distort it when you're done, Just like before you press returner enter to say you're done. So what we need to do in order work with things is be able to target the layer that we'd like in this case. I want to move these middle two layers over to the right, and so I need to visually look at my layers panel to locate them, and I'm just looking at what's visually in the middle. All right there. Those two clicked on one of him. In this case, I can hold shift and grabbed the other reposition this. All right. Now let's grab an image for our background. I'm gonna go over the bridge. I can go to the file menu, choose browsing bridge, or remember the keyboard shortcut, which is option command. Oh, and let's see if I can find something that might give me some texture. Yeah, just gonna grab this image, drag it over. Yeah, that one more time. And in this case, it's automatically scales it down. So it fits within this document. You can tell if it ended up having to scale it down to fit within this document. If you look at the top edge of my screen When I dragged it over at the very top edge of my screen, it shows me how much has it scaled the image. Right now, we're looking at this layer at only 29% of its original size. If you needed it for some reason to be at its actual size, the exact size it was on your hard drive, you could type in 100 for both the width and height, and it would leave it at its normal size. But it assumes that you want to see the entire picture within this document, so it automatically scales it down so it would fit in this case, I'm gonna grab the upper right corner. I'll hold shift to make sure I don't distort it. And I'm just going to get it to fill. Grab the lower left corner, drag it down. Press returner entered Assam. Done. Now I want that texture to not be quite as prominent because right now I find it to be rather distracting. And it's kind of weird right now because a lot of my photos look like they disappeared. Well, what happens is if you look in the layers panel with layers, it's always a ziff. You're standing at the top of the layers panel looking down. Imagine you were standing at the top of this layers panel and you were looking down at what was there. You would see three layers on top of this texture, just like if this is my desktop and these were three sheets of paper. Those three sheets of paper would obscure your view of the desktop. But then you happen to have a bunch of stuff underneath your desk that you can't see because the desktop is blocking your view of it. So this is just something blocking review of what's underneath and what I might need to do is change this stacking order of those layers. So what I'll dio is just click on the name of the layer that contains the texture, and I'm going to drag it down in my layers panel. So it's below all the pictures like that. And so now if it's a Ziff, I'm standing at the top of the layers panel looking down. I can see that all the pictures are sitting above that texture, and so the texture is not obscuring my view of it. And that's important any time you end up moving these layers so that they might overlap each other. If I click on one of the other layers and move it so it overlaps over here, there's a very definite stacking order. Then you can see that this picture is underneath the one that's in the lower right, and if you look in the layers panel, you can see that it reflects that If I wanted it to be on top, I click on its name and I drag it above. Now it's on top But when it below those three layers, I'm gonna drag it down in my layers panel until it's below those. But it always has that stacking order, even if they're not overlap E even if it's sitting over here in this position, it just needs to know what would happen if you moved it over. So it overlaps something else. And so, as we add more and more images, we're just gonna get more and more layers showing them. Now, let's have another element to this. I'm gonna add text. So in my tools panels, so far we've only used the move tool because we've been moving layers around. Now I'm gonna add tax, so I need to use the text tool. It just looks like the letter t over here. Click on it. Any time you use something that is gonna create something brand new in your file, like if you're gonna paint or use the text tool or draw shape, Photoshopped needs to know what color to use. And so at the very bottom of my tools panel right down here I have my foreground color in my background color. That's what those two are called the one that's on top is the foreground color, and that's what you're going to use if you paint. Create a shape, creates a text or anything that's brand new that involves color. If I click on that, I don't have to double click. Just click. Once I'll get a color picker shows up automatically, and it happened the moment I clicked on my foreground color to choose a color to use. I choose the color from this vertical bar. In this case, I'm gonna use red, and then I can pick a shade of that color from the big square area. You can just click in here and drag around if you'd like in the color you're ending up with is shown over here on the right. Then I can change it to a bluish greenish by clicking on the vertical bar and then come over here to choose a shade. Once I click OK, you'll see. My foreground color has changed in the lower left on my screen, and so from about to create text or paint or anything else, that's usually the color that is going to be. We can usually change it afterwards, so it's not critical. But that's what we have. Now, if you look very closely at my mouse really close, you'll see that we have a little ibeam That I mean is going to determine where the beginning of my text is. And if you look at this a little horizontal line within it, that little horizontal line represents the baseline or an imaginary line that your Texas going to sit on. And so what I'm gonna do is come down here to the guide that's in the lower left of my screen. I'm gonna put this so it's right on the guide and I'm gonna take that baseline the little tiny horizontal line, and put it right on the horizontal guide Click. And now I'm gonna start typing in my text in notice that the base of the taxed is right on the guide. If I used lower case letters like letter G, it would dip below that. But the baseline, the imaginary line that the text is sitting on is going to appear right where I clicked where that little horizontal bar waas determined where that is. So now I'm going to change the size of this font and all that kind of stuff. The thing is, in photo shop, you can change the color in the font for every single letter. So if you've typed in your tax, it needs to know which letters do you want to change before you make changes? If I currently changed the settings that are at the top of my screen, which is the font in the size, it's not gonna do anything because it doesn't know which letters to change. I usually type command A. That means select all controlling and windows to get all the text selected. Then I could make changes. Internal effect, all of the text. Now at the top of my screen are the settings for the text, and here we have the size. There's a little pop up menu. If you click here that I find the almost useless because if you look at the size is listed the highest number, it goes to a 72 and that's that big, which isn't all that big. Here's how I usually change the size instead of dealing with the number where you can select it and type in another one. Or you can use that little arrow icon on the right side to choose from this menu. Check this out. Just move your mouse over this icon. The icon represents the size of your text. When your mouse is on top of that drag to the right or drag to the left and you see the setting changing and I watch my image. When I do it, it takes a moment for it to update, but I can see by the little kind of highlighting background how big it's going to be. I could make it whatever size I'd like. I I find that to be much more fluid and easy to work with in dealing with the number. So just click on the little double TV icon right here in drag, left or right, and change the size on the far left we ever fought. And with that, I can either click within the field itself in type in something. So if I know I want to font like Helvetica, I could select all this text and type of letter H mm l. You know, to get to where I want. Or I could go to the side menu that's here, and I will get a pop up menu of all my funds. Now, when it comes to this pop up menu, it's nice that they have previews on the right side. But the previous air so darned small that is kind of hard toe. Be useful. I have a lot of fonts loaded. My wife's probably got three times as many, though, um in here, and I want to be able to easily see their difference. So let's figure out how to do that. There's a type menu at the top of your screen. If I click on the type menu, we have choices that are specific to text in there. One of the choices is a choice called font Preview size font. Previous size just determines how big are those previous we saw on the menu? One thing that's unfortunate is right now it's great out because if you're actively in the middle of editing text, for some reason to graze it out, so what I need to do is complete the editing of my text. I can do that by pressing the enter key on my keyboard or by just switching out of the text tool to a different tool. I'll switch to the move toe now If you go back to the type menu, I can change my font preview size huge and unfortunately, I have to go back to editing some text to be ableto see the reflection of the change that I've made. I think it's really dumb, the great out. So let's go back to editing this text. There's a couple different ways of going back to editing this text. I can either grab the text tool itself in, click within that text or if I just go to the layers panel. If you look in the layers panel, you see the letter T for the preview. Just double click on that letter T. It will automatically start editing the text and it'll select it all. I just double click on the letter T. And now if I go back to the font menu in the upper left of my screen, you see how huge those previews are, some of whom haven't generated previews. They usually would be there. I'm not sure why they're not all there, but I can easily come in here now and be able to see the difference. So just remember to change the size of that preview you have to not be editing text, which is unfortunate, but you can change it. And then afterwards you can go back and edit your text as much as you like. One of the other things that I like to do here is, if I'm not sure what font I want to use, here's a trick. Come over here to the font field and just click on It is if you're gonna type something in, but don't type anything in, then use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard. If I use the down arrow key, all it's doing is cycling through the menu choices that air. They're one of the time. So hit down, arrow down, arrow down arrow until I see the font that I like and therefore I don't have to search for it. Within that menu, I could just experiment and very quickly go through the entire list to see what I might want to use. I have too many fancy fonts. I want to really condensed when Let's just do that one. I want to change the size to make it fit across there, and so I remember the letter. Tease the double teas right next to the size setting. I'll click right on it and drag left or right, get her to fit in them. The only other thing when it comes to the text is that when your text is highlighted, it shows you the tax and the opposite of its actual color. You remember I had read this my foreground color when I added the text. But now it's actually the opposite of red because it's trying to show you which letters are highlighted in which letters air not in. That's how it does it. If you want it to look normal while you're changing the settings that are at the top of your screen, you could type command each control H in Windows, and that means hide in the very first time you type that on a Macintosh. This will usually come up because the Macintosh operating system has reserved the keyboard shortcut of command age to hide whatever application you're in so that it thinks you want to hide Photoshopped to go use some other application in. Adobe had been using that keyboard shortcut for many, many, many years before Apple decided to use it in the operating system So the very first time you use it, it asks What do you actually want? Command age to dio. Do you want it to hide Photoshopped like your Mac operating system wants it to do? Or do you want to hide extras? What, you mean like guides? Or that highlighting that we have? I always choose hide extras. I can't stand it when I typed command age in Photoshopped disappears. So command age means hide. In this case, it's hiding the highlighting of the text. It's still selected. You're still working on it. You just have to type command h again to see that. But command age in general means hide. If we weren't working on text in that if I switch to something like the move tool, then command age will hide other things. In this case, command age would hide. The guides usually is gonna hide things that wouldn't be printing. Alright, so I've done quite a bit here. We've ended up creating a new document. We've ended up pulling over a bunch of images from bridge and whenever we pull them over, it ends up letting a scale them know that if you get images into this document in another way, like copying and pasting. You're not going to get the automatic scaling feature that's there. And you would have to go to the edit menu. And you remember those The choice called free transform that's there. Free transform is really what it was. Train on automatically for me. So if you ever get an image into here and it doesn't automatically put it on there, go to the edit menu, choose free transform, then you can scale as much as you want. Jim, how we don't I'm sure we got a gazillion questions. Have a few questions. Thank you. Good time. So, Nathan, I'm gonna start with Nathan. I'm curious about this myself. Can you edit the sample text for the font preview? Can you? No, you can't. Okay. I was first trying to think of what he's saying, but yeah, I think it just know that sample. Yeah, Okay. Not that I'm aware of. Okay. Perfect. And we had a question wanting to know. Can you totally turn the snapping off? Yes. You can totally turn the snapping off, go to the view menu, which I'm going to right now, and they're simply a choice within the view menu called Snap, and if you turn that off, there will be no snapping whatsoever. If you need to do that a lot like you feel you need to turn on and off. Remember, first off, holding control prevents the snapping, but you could toggle it on or off with this weird looking keyboard shortcut. What the heck is that keyboard truck out its shift command and then the semi colon. So if I got used to that, I could talk about it on and off. What else is great? I would like to know. Let's see. Caper would like to know. Can you move things from a photo shop to Photoshopped from light room the same way as from Bridge? Um, I'm not used to bring it over that way. What I'm used to doing when I'm in light room is I go to the photo menu and there's a choice called Edit in. And then I choose a choice. There, you can say open as smart object opens layers. There's a bunch of different choices that are there to get it over. I actually haven't tested it. As faras dragging goes, there's a good chance it would work, but I just have to try. Bring it on over. Great. And this is from a Natalia CR When you open a photo and photo shop that you took at the highest camera resolution, how do you keep it at 300 resolution? Not changing the size and they say it always. Photo shop always shows photos at 72. So when I changed the resolution from the size menu, it changes the size of the photo. Okay, long question about resolution in general. I'm gonna cover that later on in the day. Great, but what happens? Just two semi answer it is. There's a setting called resolution attached to every document you open and Photoshopped. It's measured in pixels per inch. There are peopIe I most people, though, when they talk about it for some reason, call it DP I, Even though that's incorrect, it's pp, but it just means how bigger the pixels when you print them. And if the number gets too low, it means you're only fitting a few of them in an inch and they'll be so big you can easily see him in your image. Looks Jaggi, And so what? They're saying is when they drag between documents and things that that number seems to change. What happens is the document that you drag something into determines the resolution that that file is. And we determined that when I created this brand new document, there was a setting that had the numbers of 300 typed in when we created it. Any file that I dragged into this will become 300 because you can't have a different resolution for different layers. It's the document itself that has that setting, so it's going to change when you bring in between them. But it's a good thing you need to have the pixels all be the same size within that document. We'll get into it more detail later on. When I credit a new document, I had mentioned that I'll tell you what settings you could use for various purposes, and these are the settings that I recommend. What happens is if you go lower than these settings. When you create a brand new document and ask you for resolution, then if you print it with these various kinds of printing, your image might start looking Jaggi where you can see that it doesn't look like a natural photograph. It looks like a digital image that's made out of squares, and if you go any higher than these settings, it's OK. But it's gonna take a lot longer to print because it's gonna have to deal with more information than it means. And any sharpening you apply to the image will be less effective because the details within the image are smaller than what that particular kind of printing could resolve. It's got detail that's smaller than that kind of printing could print. And so the sharpening you apply isn't gonna be as an effective because it can't print things that small and still show the detail. So if you go higher, it's okay. If you go lower, it's gonna look Jaggi. And how do you choose within that range? Well, the closer you get to graphics, meaning not photographs but text or a drawing that has really, really crisp edges, the more you need the higher settings, the more you have a photographic image, the less important it ISS in, the more you can get away with lower settings, so you need to be somewhere within that range for these. We have a question in the eyes. Enbridge. Is it possible to change the sorting of the some nails? Awful. Change the sorting of these? Yeah, and also, if it's possible to change the info shown below that some nail such as Let's show the file size we can change some of that stuff. First off, if you go to the View menu, there's a choice over here called Sort in. Here is where you can say I want to view these based on the file name were instead on what date they were created, that type of things that will change. Which image shows up 1st 2nd and third, that type of thing. There's also in areas in here where I can have it display mawr information. It's not something that I personally use, because what I can use instead is, I think, under the side menu, it might be called as details instead of as thumbnails details over on the right side. It would tell me a whole bunch of information about each file. I personally just find that so it takes up too much space, got that under the view menu. I usually have it set to his thumbnails. And if I need to know some information about a particular picture, here's what I dio remember on the right side of our screen when I first launched Bridge, there was some other stuff over there, and I kind of moved it off the edge where we couldn't use it anymore. And I did that by grabbing the little divider bar like, for instance, this divider bar here and you could click on it and move it to make one area take up more space than another. And I did that on the right side of my screen. But the divider bar I pulled all the way to the edge. That stuff pretty much disappeared. We bring that stuff back. Then when I click on a picture over here, it tells me the information about the file. In most of the time, I'm working on a much larger screen than what we use when we're teaching here and creative live. This would be the equivalent to maybe a 15 inch monitor in maybe a little bigger than that, but it doesn't show that much information. If I had my normal screen, which is a 27 inch display, it's no problem to have this visible at the same time is these thumbnails. It doesn't feel crowded like it does right now. And so if I needed to know anything about my files, I just click on him and then view over here because if you look at what's actually there, you'll find all sorts of good information with and hides in pixels or inches settings that we used to capture the image and so on. You got a couple different options? Yeah. So what happens if the resolution in the bridge It's not the same service air solution in photo shop when you drag it, what happens is her question is about resolution again, and the resolution on Lee matters. When you're printing the number that's called pixels per inch, it means how big are the pixels when you print them in? We're not printing yet. I haven't had a print button yet, so it's ignoring that number. What happens instead is it looks at the width and height of the image in pixels is if you zoomed up on a picture so far that you could see the individual components it's made out of, and you countered, how many you have total in the width and height. And when I drag an image over to this other file, it simply uses the exact same number of pixels in the width or height as the original meaning. It just brings over all the information. And then it takes on the resolution setting of this file that you dragged it into eso. If that file was set to print the pixels really, really small, then the image you dragged over the pixels will be printed really, really small. But we'll talk more about that kind of stuff closer to the end. The class, actually. And we'll talk a little bit more about just how to deal with images that have different settings, because it can feel a little odd when you're doing it. All right. Now, what I'd like to do is make it to the texture in the background is not so prominent, and I've actually want to make it. So There's a photograph inside the text, so we gotta figure out how to do that stuff if you click on any one of your layers to make it active. At the top of the Layers panel is a setting in. It's called opacity. Opacity means how much this image show up. 100% means that it's gonna completely obscure your view of what's underneath. It's going to be like a sheet of paper or anything else that you can't see through. If I lower the opacity setting, then I'm gonna be able to see through. This image is if we printed it on a sheet of glass and we didn't make it completely opaque. We made it see through in the lower I get, the less unless that later will show up. So I have this layer active will turn off its eyeball so we can see where it is within my image. See, it's that thing in the lower left and I'll go to the opacity setting. And just like when we're changing the size of text, I'm not gonna deal with the number. I'm not going to deal with this little arrow, which gives me a pop up. I'm gonna click on the name of the setting they're gonna drag left to right. That's known as a scrubby slider, and it's the way I like to change settings the most. Just try clicking on the name of a setting and dragging left or right Live people just started where you could do that. So I'm gonna click on the word opacity now, going to start dragging to the left. Watch what happens within my image to that image in the lower left. You see it showing up less and less if I bring it all the way to zero, won't show up at all. And so I actually want to do that to the texture that we have in the background. So if you look at my layers panel, I first need to find it. And I think it's down low the edge of my screen. There's a little scroll bar on the side. I'll click on and just drag down so I can see it. If you look at my layers panel, we have right there the texture and below. It is just what's called the background. That was the original thing we had when we first created our document. And so if I make this show up less, I'm going to start revealing mawr of this. Let's blow it. So I'm gonna click on the word opacity and I'm gonna drag it down and, as I do, the texture start showing up less and less when we're starting to see through it Maura and Mawr to whatever's underneath. And when I get it down to zero, we can't see any of it. So I'm gonna bring that up just enough where we have just a hint of texture instead of it being too dominant. Now I want to spice up what we have here. What I want to do is have drop shadows on each of these elements. And I also want to have a black line around each picture. Yeah, question going back to opacity Sometimes I e also used to feel that the future below opacity it seems to give the same effect but are when a, uh, slider value to ah lower. There's both capacity and there's Phil and in general, 90% of the time, you'll find that they do the identical thing different. Exactly. Same. I'll show you the difference once we work with some text and we add things like drop shadows and things, then these to act differently. But for now, if you want something to show up less, I would default to using opacity. One size end up talking about something called later styles, which is where you have things like drop shadows, bevel in Boss and those kinds of features. Then you'll start being able to see the difference between the two, so I'll show you. So I'm gonna click on one of these images. I'm gonna use the one in the centre bottom, so I just need to find it in my layers panel. I'm looking at my layers for something that looks like it's centered in near the bottom. I think it's this one to confirm that it's the right layer. I'll turn off the eyeball to see if they're right Layer goes away, and it does. Now, if you want to add in effect to that, I'll go to the bottom of my layers panel at the very bottom of the layers panel or a bunch of icons in one of those icons looks like the letters F X. That's where you can add what's called a layer effects. The name of this feature, by the way, has two names, and Adobe seems to use them interchangeably like they can't make up their mind what they're called. They're either called layer effects or layer styles. So if you ever hear one or the other, they mean the same thing in this menu. One of the choices is stroke. Stroke simply means at a line around the edge mine layer. So I'm gonna start by using stroke The moment I choose it. This shows up asking me for the settings, and if I click on the title bar at the very top of this, I could move it out of the way so I can see my picture. And if you look at the settings that air here, we have a size setting and I'm gonna bring that up. That means how thick of a line should it draw. And I say, bring it higher and higher. You'll see it getting thicker. I don't want it to be all that thick, just a hint. And then there's a little pop up menu here called Position, which means compared to the edge of where this layer shows up, where should the line be drawn? And if you haven't set toe outside, the problem with that is you end up where the corners are. You'll see it if I bring this higher. The rounded you see that? I don't want the rounded look, so I'm gonna set this to inside. That means it'll actually cover up the picture a little bit, but when it does it inside, I never opened up with rounded corners. That's the only reason I'm using inside. And I'll get a just a small it'll border there. That's four pixels and size. All I was doing was changing the sides setting right here. So that's the size. Here's inside. Then down here, this is the actual color in that defaults. The black in old versions of Photoshopped defaulted to read, and that was annoying because you rarely wanted a red line. But if you were to click on this, you would get a standard color picker and you could change it any color you want. Now, you remember that list that was at the bottom of my screen, where I got the choice called stroke. There was a bunch of other things available there. Those same choices show up in a list on the left side of this dialog box. You see him right over here. Drop shadow, Evelyn, Boss, those kinds of things. These are the same choices that were available underneath that list, and if I want to add more than one of them, I can click on him here. I could either click OK right now and go back to the menu at the bottom of my screen, the letters FX and choose another one, like in this case, Drop Shadow or I never had to leave this dialog box. I just need to click on it on the left side to add more of them. Be careful if you click on the left side to add more effects, because what happens is if you click on the check box to turn something on. Sure, it will add that particular effect, but it won't show you the settings over here for the effect the settings. Your viewing is determined up by what text you click on over here. If I click on stroke, I'm looking at the studies for stroke. If I tricked click on Drop Shadow, I'm looking at the settings for the drop shadow, but the check box just toggles it on and off without changing the settings you're looking at. So I usually click on the names, and that way it will turn on the check box and show me the settings. So I just added a drop shadow. And there's a setting in here called distance, and that means how far away from the layer should it put that shadow? There's also a setting in here called Angle this little guy here, and that means what direction compared to the layer. The little line that's there actually means Where's the light source? So it means light source is coming from the upper left. Therefore, the drop shadow would go the other way. Here's a trick. I never changed the distance and angle settings by clicking on them. Here, click on your picture. When you click on your picture and drag, it's gonna change them for you. So if you drag around here, all it's doing is figuring out what direction did I drag? And it changes the angle study, and it figures out, How far did I drag it? And it changes the distance setting for you. You can only do that while you're viewing the settings that are here after I click. OK, if I click and drag, it has no idea. I wanted to work on the drop shadow, so I would have to go back in here and click on the word drop shadow to get it settings to show up in order to do that. Now, if I want to control how soft the edge of my drop shadow is, that's a stunning called size. So if I bring that up, watch the drop shadow and you see it getting softer and softer. But bring the size all the way to zero. It will be a crisp edge. Drop shadow. I'm gonna bring that up. Just give it a nice softness to it. The other setting you might need to change in here is the opacity setting in that determines how much you can see through the drop shadow, just like the opacity of layer. The more you bring this down, the less you see in this case the drop shadow. And so I wanted to be relatively subtle, so maybe I have my capacity down at 40. So let's look at the settings that were here. You don't have to change all of them, but in general size means how soft is the edge angle and distance means Where is the drop shadow located? But I usually change that by clicking and dragging on my picture. And it figures out those settings based on my dragging and opacity is how dense is that shadow? Is it really dark and dense, or is it barely show up at all those air? The settings? You mainly need a change. You do have a bunch of other weird settings you could play with, but they're beyond what we cover in a fundamentals class. I'm gonna click, OK, and now let's see what that did, how it was applied. So first you can look in the image itself and you can see the black line. That's the stroke, and you can see the drop shadow within my picture. But look over in the layers panel. Now there's a couple things that have happened there. There's the letters FX over here. Those are the same two letters that we saw at the bottom of my layers panel, where I first applied them. That just tells me some effects have been applied then below that it tells me which effects have been applied and there are eyeball icons next to it, so I could disable or hide a particular effect. So if I click on the eyeball next to the word stroke. Watch the image and you'll see the stroke around. The edge goes away temporarily. I click where the eyeball used to be to turn it back on and it's back on. I could do the same thing for the drop shadow. Or I can come in here and do it for the word of facts. And that means all over the effects because sometimes you can literally have eight of these things applied to a layer. And if you want to hide them all, you click right here. You see those air slightly grade. But what it does on the image is it completely hides the effects. I want that same effect. We applied to the other layers that contain pictures. I couldn't do that by clicking within my layers panel on the words of facts in just dragging it to another layer. So watch I'm gonna click on the word effects, and I'm gonna drag it until my mouse is on top of the top Most layer. Now, if I look in the layers panel, it looks like a dark picture in the lower right of my image. Just by looking at the little thumb now. So just so you can kind of preview where it's gonna go when I let go, you see, just moved over to a different layer. But you notice that it removed it from the layer it was originally on. I didn't want to remove it. I wanted to move a copy of it. So it's on both in photo shop. In general, there's a key you can hold down that often will duplicate things. Usually when you're dragging, it's gonna duplicate things. What that key is is the option key all time Windows. I have that key held down right now and a watch. What happens if I click on the word effects? I have the option key held down already. Ultima windows and now a drag to a different layer. You see, it just copied them. I got have the option key still held down. I can drag here. I could drag it there, drag it down here. I missed the layer. So drag it up there, and now I have it on all sorts of different layers that are in here. If you look within my image, you'll see that just about all the layers. It looks like I missed one of them. This guy, cause I don't see it visually off to find it in my layers panel. Where is that guy always down here. I'll just hold option When I dragged the word effects and I could get it there now, I could have dragged just the word drop shadow, and it would have moved only that one effect. But dragging the word of facts means all of the effects that are there now. Let's also added to the text hold option again. Click on the word effects from one of the layers and drag it up to the layer that has the letter T, which indicates text. You see. We have it there, too. But now, if you look at my layers panel, look at how busy this thing is. The list of layers is so long now it's hard to see what the heck is in there. It's kind of annoying. Well, that's why where you look at the letters FX on a layer, there's also this little triangle next to it. That little triangle allows you to toggle from having the list of a fax collapsed down or expanded where you can see them, that's all that little arrow dust. If you click on it, expands it so you can see the effects or collapses it so you can't. And I could do that Each one of these layers clicking on that little arrow to just collapse it down and simplify my view of what's happening in my layers panel. If you want to get fancy, the option key has multiple purposes want Oh, I already mentioned which is to duplicate something. But another is if I hold down the option key, it changes the behaviour of something it just if something could do more than one thing like clicking on an icon could do. Two things usually will have to hold option to get the second option. So what I'm gonna do is hold down the option key right now when I click on that little triangle, so watch what happens on my screen here. I'm going to hold on the option key. I'm gonna click on one of the triangles, and what it's gonna do is collapse all of them if I do the same thing a second time holding on the option key when I do it, it will expand all of them. And so that way, you don't have to have like, 20 layers. You don't have to click 20 times to get all of those. But the option key is like the go to key, which is Alton Windows. If you think that a button has more than one function options, the first thing you're going to choose to say, Give me the second functionality and there'll be some things that have that. So now if you look at this particular image, we see that we have strokes. We have drop shadows on everything. So we're getting it to be a little bit more interesting looking. I think we're gonna do one final thing to this image. And that is I want text to be inside or a photo to be inside that text so that the text only defines where the photo shows up. I don't see the red of the text, Adul. You gotta figure out how to do that. So let's go find a photo. We need to get to bridge to get to it. Remember, you could go to the file menu. We have browsing bridge. We have the keyboard Chaka, which was option command. Oh, all control. Oh, and Windows. Or if I didn't have Photoshopped taking up my entire screen If I grab the lower left corner, just pulled it over, I could see bridge back there and just click on it is your personal preference how you want to get there? I'm gonna come in here and find an image that I might like inside of my text, and I don't know what a look. Good. Here, let's use this one. I'm gonna drag it over. Let go. And it asked if I want to scale it, I'm gonna move it right over the text and ah, hold shift When I grabbed the corner Now enlarging a photo is less than ideal. Anytime you in large picture from its original size, it's gonna get softer. It's just not gonna look a sharp, But in this case, I picked that picture and we're going to use its song Scale it up like that. All press returner entered Assam done then opposition this wherever I'd like it and you notice how it's underneath some of the layers and on top of others what it did is it put the picture directly above whatever layer happened to be active at the time I dragged it over and I didn't wasn't even thinking about what Layer was active. It just happened to be one that was halfway through the layers stack. So sometimes that can be confusing. If he wanted to be on top of everything, you drag it within the layers panel up to get it on top of things. But if I want this to show up inside my text, what I want to do is click on the layer and dragged down until it's sitting directly above the layer that contains the text. So do you see here that I have the text here and then I have the later I want to put within it directly above needs to be that way. I also need to be working on this layer, not the text layer. Need to be on the photo later. All right, then here's what I'm gonna do to make this show up inside the text. There's actually a couple different ways of doing it, and so if when you see the end result, you've done that before and you did it in a different way. There's always more than one way of doing things in photo shop, so just know that there's you may have used a different method. I'll go to the layer menu in under the layer menu is a choice right here. It's called Create clipping mask Any time you see the word mask usually means limit where layer shows up. In this case, a clipping mask means allow the layer that's underneath to clip where the limit where the layer you're working on shows up. It always looks at the layer directly underneath, so watch what happens when I choose Create clipping mask. Now that photo only shows up where the text is and in the layers panel. It gives me an indication that I've done something so I can tell it done it. Do you notice that there's a down point arrow and that means this layers on Lee showing up where that stuff ISS with layer is below? And I did that by going to the Layer menu. There was a choice called create clipping mask. Since I've already done it now it's called release clipping mask, which means get rid of that effect, and if I choose that I go back to normal now, another way of doing that method you may have used in the past. If you've been using photo shop for a while, I'll show you just in case you've done it. And just in case you hate going up to the menu to get to it, I could move my mouse to the line that separates these two layers. You see, there's just the horizontal line sitting right there. If I move my mouse right there, then you remember there's a key on your keyboard that can change the behavior of how button works. Where if a feature has more than one choice and what it does, you could hold out down. It was the option key. Well, I'm gonna hold down option right now. Ah, half my mouse, right in the line that separates the two layers. I hold down option and I click, and it does the exact same thing. So if you've ever option click directly on the line that separates two layers that's gonna do the same thing. It's gonna clip the layer you're working on, so it only shows up where there's information on the layer below All right, So now we've created a pretty nice postcard. So why don't we save this image? I'm just gonna go to the file menu, and we got a bunch of different choices for saving, but I'm just gonna choose safe since I've never saved this image before in my lifetime, when I choose save, which usually means save it into the same location it was in before. It doesn't know where that location is. You've never saved it. So when I choose save it asked me where to save it. And I'm just gonna choose my desktop all coat postcard, and I need to choose a file format. If you want to be able to edit this later where you can get to the layers that are contained within it, then you either want to use Photoshopped file, format or tiff. In general, there are a couple other choices you could use, but those were the two best working file formats, meaning you're gonna open the image and make additional changes later. And there's no quality difference between the two. And so it's really a personal choice between the two. It's up to you. I'll use tiff in this case. And if you want to deal to edit those laters later layers later, make sure this stays on. It's on by default, you'd have to turn it off, Teoh manually in Don't turn off this check box at the bottom. That's a technical thing, but it means make sure when you open this picture again that Photoshopped knows what the color should look like. You turn that off. The colors could look different when you open it again, I'll hit save, and the first time I do that with a tiff, it's gonna ask you for settings. I just use defaults, but it'll Hey, hey, putting layers into a tiff file is gonna make it bigger on, and I just shoes don't show again. And it's like I know that's why I say that is Tiff and it's gonna compared to combining all the layers together where you permanently do that image. All right, so now we have this project. We've got it all saved, and we're good to go so we can close it. If I ever need to get to it again, I'm just gonna need to go to Bridge and remember where I saved it. It's on my desktop