Photoshop Interface Tutorial: The Layer Menu

Create/Delete Layers, Layer Styles, Adjustment Layers, Layer Masks, Smart Objects, and More

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll look at the Layer Menu, part of Photoshop's Menu Bar.

Photoshop's Layer Menu in the Menu Bar is where you'll find options that have to do with, you guessed it, layers. From here, you can do things like create, duplicate and delete layers, add layer effects and layer masks, rasterize layers (a fancy term for turning the contents of a layer into pixels if they're not pixels already), move them up and down in the stacking order, and even flatten them all into one layer. Plus a whole lot more. Once you become more familiar with Photoshop, you'll probably find that you spend less and less time in the Layer Menu and more time either selecting the same options from the Layer Palette itself, or even better, by simply using the keyboard shortcuts associated with many of the options and commands. And don't forget, you can create your own custom keyboard shortcuts as well. Let's take a closer look at the various groupings inside the Layer Menu. New/Duplicate/Delete This first group of options in the Layer Menu is fairly straightforward. Here's where you can create new layers, duplicate existing layers, and/or delete existing layers. You can also create new layer groups, which are a great way to organize your layers into manageable sections, and if you have a bunch of layers you've hidden from view and you're absolutely positive you have no use for them anymore, you can delete all your hidden layers at once from here. Properties and Styles The second group in the Layer Menu is where you can change the layer properties and add layer styles. Properties are essentially just two options, the layer's name and, if you choose, a color to associate with that layer. Associating a color with a layer is simply another way to manage and organize your layers and has nothing to do with adding color to your image. Layer styles though are a whole lot more interesting than properties. "Styles" is what Adobe calls effects, and they deserve a whole section on their own. Layer styles can be a lot of fun to try out and play around with even if you don't really know what you're doing, and if you do know what you're doing, even better. Shadow and glow effects, bevel and emboss, gradients, strokes, patterns, colors, and for the truly adventurous, advanced blending modes! Go ahead, give them a try.

Fill And Adjustment Layers

The third group under the Layer Menu is where we find Photoshop's Fill and Adjustment Layers. There's 3 types of fill layers and 12 types of adjustment layers. Fill layers are used to, well, fill your document with either a solid color, a gradient or a pattern. Adjustment layers, on the other hand, allow you to make things like Levels and Curves adjustments to your image. The great thing about Adjustment Layers though is that none of the adjustments you make with them physically affect your original image. Your original image remains safe at the bottom of the Layers Palette. It still appears in the Document Window as though you're making the changes to the image, but what you're really seeing is a live preview of how the changes would be altering your image if they were, in fact, altering your image, which they're not. We'll look more closely at Adjustment Layers in another section.

One really cool feature here is the "Change Layer Content" option, which allows you to select an adjustment layer in the Layer Palette and change it to any of the other types of adjustment layers. If you have a Levels adjustment layer in your Layer Palette and you decide you need a Curves adjustment layer instead, you can change it from Levels to Curves instantly and easily here. It probably isn't something you'll use very often, but still an interesting feature.

The final option in this group, "Layer Content Options", is one you'll only use if you're being paid by the hour. If you need to alter the settings in one of your adjustment layers, you can select the adjustment layer in the Layers Palette and then select "Layer Content Options" from the Layer Menu to make changes to the adjustment. However, since double-clicking on the adjustment layer in the Layers Palette does the exact same thing, you might as well forget this last option even exists in the Layer Menu.

Masks

The fourth group under the Layer Menu is where we find our masking options. From here, you can add a layer mask, a vector mask, or a clipping mask. Masks allow us to show only parts of a layer while hiding the rest from view without actually deleting the areas we want hidden. Layers, Adjustment Layers and Masks are three of the most important elements of Photoshop and you'll be using them over and over again.

Smart Objects, Type and Rasterize Layer

The next group under the Layer Menu is where we find options for type, such as the amount of anti-aliasing we want on our type, whether we want horizontal or vertical type, an option to convert our type to a shape so we can do all sorts of cool things to it we otherwise couldn't while it was still editable type, and options that allow us to warp the type into different shapes while still keeping the ability to fully edit the text.

We also have the option here to "rasterize" the contents of the layer. In other words, take the type or other vector shape and convert it to actual pixels.

The very first option in the list though, which I've purposely saved for last, is Smart Objects, which is an amazing new feature in Photoshop CS2 that is changing the way things are done inside Photoshop. We won't get into a huge discussion about Smart Objects here, but this is where you can take the contents of your layer and convert them into a smart object.

Layer Based Slices

The sixth group under the Layer Menu has one option in it, "New Layer Based Slice". Slices have to do with optimizing images for the web and involve dividing an image into sections which can be optimized individually and saved in different file formats if needed, and then put back together again as one complete image in a web page. It's sort of like creating a puzzle out of your image in Photoshop (or ImageReady) so you can put the puzzle back together again in your web page (if that makes no sense to you and you're not or have no plans to be a web designer, feel free to forget all about it).

The "New Layer Based Slice" option is simply an easy way to create a sliced section of your image. It will create a slice automatically based on the contents of a layer. So if, for example, you have a rectangular shape on its own layer in your document and, with that layer selected in the Layers Palette, you choose "New Layer Based Slice", Photoshop will create a slice using that rectangular shape as the slice dimensions. Again, this is of interest primarily to web designers.

Grouping and Hiding Layers

The next group under Layer is for grouping/ungrouping and hiding/showing layers. If while working on a Photoshop document you find that you're creating many layers (which is usually the case), it's often times easier to manage those layers if you group similar layers together. For example, if you have a bunch of layers that were used to correct a color problem in an image, you may want to group those layers together into a folder and name the folder "Color corrections". Or you may have multiple type layers which could be grouped into a "Type" folder. Similarly, you can choose to remove any layers from a group at any time.

Hiding and showing layers is basically for turning the visibility of layers on and off. You can also click on the small eyeball icon beside the layers in the Layers Palette to accomplish the same thing, which is much easier than going up to the Layer Menu every time.

Arranging and Aligning Layers

The eighth group under the Layer Menu is for arranging, aligning, and distributing layers.

"Arranging" layers means changing their stacking order in the Layers Palette so you can move layers above or below other layers.

"Aligning" layers allows you to align the top, bottom, left or right edge of the contents of a layer or layers to the edge of the contents of another layer, or to the edge of the document, or to a selection.

"Distribute" layers allows you to spread out the contents of multiple layers equal distance from either other based on their top, bottom, left, or right edges, or their vertical or horizontal centers.

Locking Layers

Continuing our journey down the Layer Menu, we come to another group with only one option, "Lock layers". This option allows us to either lock the layer completely so we can't move it or do anything to it accidentally, or we can lock only certain aspects of the layer, such as only the areas that are transparent, or only the areas that are not transparent, or we can lock the position of the contents of the layer so we can't accidentally move what's on the layer. Or, we can choose to lock it all down at once which leaves us with a layer we can still see but can't make any accidental changes to.

Linking Layers

The third last group in the Layer Menu allows us to link layers together so you can select multiple layers at once. In Photoshop CS2, this option has become irrelevant since we can now select multiple layers simply by clicking on a layer and then holding the Shift key down while clicking on a second layer, which will select both layers plus any layers in between. To select multiple layers that are not stacked directly above or below each other in the Layers Palette, simply hold down the Ctrl key (Win) or the Command key (Mac) and click on the layers you want to select.

Merging and Flattening

The second last group in the Layer Menu is for merging layers and flattening the image. The difference between the two is that merging layers allows you to choose which layers you want merged into one, while flattening the image will take every layer in the document and merge them into one layer which Photoshop will rename "Background".

When merging layers, you can also choose to merge them onto a new layer while keeping the individual layers intact, whereas flattening the image will always flatten the entire document and leave you with one merged "Background" layer. In most cases, flattening the image is something you'll only do after all the work on an image is complete and you're ready to have the image printed. Even then, since you'll lose all of your individual layers when you flatten the image, you'll want to save your flattened version as a separate document and keep your original document with all its layers intact in case you need or want to make additional changes down the road.

Matting

Finally, the last option under the Layer Menu, grouped all by itself, is "Matting". Matting has to do with the slight fringe or halo effect you sometimes see when making an anti-aliased selection of a person or object in an image and then moving that selection into a new image, or replacing the background in the image with a different background. Sometimes the colors from the original image or background are still visible along the outer edge of the selection. The commands under "Matting" allow you to attempt to remove those unwanted edge pixels, although your mileage may vary as to the effectiveness of these options and there are more advanced ways of correcting the problem.