New Users Guide To Photoshop Elements - Layers

[wannabehorsephotographer]

Open two different documents. With one pic in front of you hit Ctrl+A (this selects your image. Go up to Edit>Copy. Now in your bin (across the bottom), double click on your other pic. This should bring your second pic to the front. Now go up to edit>paste. Your 2nd pic should be on top of your 1st one (Resize if necessary by clicking the move icon upper left and dragging the corners).

Now take a look at your layers palette to the right. You should now have two layers. The bottom one has a lock on it, so lets go ahead and right click on that layer, and select "layer from background". Now you can perform edits on this layer the same as the other.

For some quick fun select a large, soft brush at opacity 50% and start erasing with your top layer selected. See how the bottom layer shows through? Now experiment with the layer blending modes. (The drop down menu that says normal). My favs to use are screen and multiply. There are lists of what these different blend modes do, just search layer blending modes in your search engine of choice. Also play with the opacity slider. See how your image looks when you decrease opacity?

There are infinite amounts of possibilities with layers. There are also a lot of good resources on the topic. I have some more tips on working with layers in PSE, including creating your own layer mask and removing a background. If there is interest, I'll post a sequel. Good luck - Love to see your work with layers!

Now let's go up to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation or just click the black and white circle in your layes palette. Slide your saturation slider all the way to the left (image should turn grey). Click ok. Now you have created a mask. Click the mask layer and hit ctrl+d (this selects black and white for your color choices). Now paint on your image with a black brush selected. Painting in black masks out your sat. adjustment. Do you see the color coming back? Now paint over parts of the black paint with white. It should turn back to desaturated. Now try painting with grey. Some color shows through, but not as much when pure black is painted.

Here's one of my favs:


Copied and pasted five images on top of a black background and erased the edges so you could see the horse's face in each pic.

[wannabehorsephotographer]

hmm...the pic isn't showing up? Here's my second try...

[wannabehorsephotographer]

Hmm...not sure what's going on? Copied and pasted from flickr as usual. Oh well, sorry guys.

[i speak in math]

I am having the same problem in my thread, I PM'd a mod about it but no response yet.

[wannabehorsephotographer]

Thanks! Keep me posted.

[Nicole]

Ahh. I see the problem. It'll have to wait until one of the admins can fix it, but the HTML isn't turned on in this forum. I'll send off a note to Sime. In the mean time, fixed your pic wannabehorsephotographer. I'll have a look and see at your thread i speak in math, and see if I can fix it (but I think you're posting from Picasa, right?)

[wannabehorsephotographer]

Thanks Nicole!

[private]

Wannabe, I would love more tutorials from you - this one was great - gonn aplay later...

[prrs4me]

Thanks wanabe
I haven't been able to figure out layers yet. I'm going to go play with it later. Yippee!