With adjustment layers the glass is always half full. You’d be crazy not to use them. Especially when you consider that they add almost no weight to the file size. Each adjustment layer is a simple instruction to move a slider, adjust a curve, or change a histogram. Because the adjustments are stored on their own layers, you have total fl...

In this next example we’ll see how painting in shades of gray allows you to introduce transparency effects: Darker grays conceal more, lighter grays reveal more of the layer. Or put another way, the closer you move towards black, the greater the masking effect; the closer you move towards white, the more the revealing effect. 1. O...

Let’s take a look at layer mask conventions and terminology, beginning with a couple of housekeeping points: The Background layerthat layer that most Photoshop images start out withdoesn’t support transparency and thus can’t support layer masks. It sounds worse than it is: to add a layer mask to a Background layer, take the ...

Smart Objects are the latest development in the evolution of Photoshop layers. Working with pixel-based media, we are inhibited by the rules of resolution. Photoshop allows us to stretch and scale our images as if they were Silly Putty, but if we take too many liberties, we irrevocably damage our images. Not anymore. Smart Objects let us scale...

Layer Comps is a great productivity tool. A snapshot of the state of your Layers palette, a layer comp lets you experiment with multiple versions of a layout in a single document, saving time and disk space, but most importantly freeing you from worrying about what layer went with what on which version, and what its exact opacity and blending ...

Layer styles are effects like drop shadows, bevels, and glows that you can add to a layer with a single click. These effects change with the content of the layer and can be updated at any time. Layer styles fit in with our approach of nondestructive editing because while the effects are attached to a specific layer, they do not actually change ...