What I Know about layers!

Layers make a photoshop picture what it is. They can be transparent, coloured, textured and so on. This means they can act as embellishment, background, main focus (like our pen tool exercise below) or change the colour overall.

In this picture created in class today there are 5 layers! The beach scene is the background, meaning it is layered underneath all of the others. This can easily be done in photo shop by dragging this layer to the bottom of your layers list in the "Layers" window (usually to the right of your workspace on screen).

The next layer (so moving up the list) is the glowing blue around the model, this layer is called shadow. Shadow was created using the brush tool set to airbrush and semi-opaque (about 50%). These modifications can be done in the top menu when the brush tool is selected. You can also can the size of the brush either by pressing command or using the option in the top menu.

The third layer was created as a tester that was the beginning of our fun with layers :) using the elliptical selection tool (the square one, hold down and choose the circle) whilst pressing shift, which makes a perfect circle (also valid for straight lines etc.). Then in swatches window on rightside change colour and in edit menu select fill, it should say use foreground colour which is what you've just changed, and ok!

The second layer is our pen tool exercise and the first is using the text tool (the big T in your tool box) - if you hold it down you can do vertical writing but otherwise go to edit and select free transform and you can pull and move your text anyway you want.

Once layers are complete you can place them in any order you want, if you click on the layer and click the trash can at the bottom of the same window you can delete a layer but for these pictures all five layers are still present if not somewhat invisible :)