THE ABSOLUTE BASICS OF LAYERS A BEGINNERS' STEP-BY-STEP
GUIDE |
NB : Because
I have gone into so much detail with so many screenshots I get several emails a week from people confused by layers, even though I have tried to be clear in my general tutorials. The following tutorial will hopefully explain the most basic concepts behind layers. Understanding these is essential if you want to get the most out of PSP5. Layers make your graphic life extremely easy and add multiple new dimensions to your art work. 90% of what I cover here will probably be old hat to 90% of the readers -- this is mostly for the other 10%, so I have tried to cover every single thing! There are quite a few other tutorials on layers to be found on many sites. This one is not meant to replace them, but to complement them. Many of those tutorials will cover things that I have not -- so, when you've grasped the basics of one tutorial, try someone else's to consolidate what you've learned. |
WHAT IS A LAYER? Sometimes it helps to visualise what you do with your computer graphics in terms of what you might be used to doing with real life objects. So, imagine that you have done a regular drawing of a flower on a piece of black paper. A layer is like a sheet of clear plastic that you might place on top of that drawing. If there's nothing on that sheet of plastic, you can see your flower through it. You only know it's there because you PUT it there :) If you draw a bug on the plastic sheet, the bug is on its own layer and you can move the layer around to place the bug somewhere on top of the flower to suit yourself. You could add a butterfly to a second sheet of plastic. Obviously, you can move the sheets containing the bug and the butterfly over the top of the flower, or each other, any way you like. You might decide you'd like to put the bug, the butterfly and the flower under another a sheet of coloured, but still transparent, plastic ... Hopefully this will give you the general idea! You can do exactly these things with graphical layers, and much more. However, I will use the analogy above for this tutorial. |
YOUR PSP5 SCREEN This is roughly how your PSP5 screen will look when you have a new blank image, and both the regular Control Panel and the Layers Control Panel open. (Obviously I have made everything smaller for this page.) Some of the icons you see on my top toolbar will not be on your screen. (You can customize your toolbar from the File menu.)
Figure 1 |
Creating the Background Draw something on a blank black background image. I have used some flowers done with tubes from my tubes page. It really doesn't matter what you do here -- a plain circle will do.
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Adding a Layer for a Bug To add a new layer, or a clear sheet, over these flowers, make sure your Layers Control Panel (LCP from now on) is open, by clicking on the icon as in Figure 1. Now, on the LCP, click on the icon as demonstrated below :
A large options screen will pop up. Don't change anything on it, except to give the layer a name to make it easier to identify. Where the text Layer 1 is highlighted next to Name, I have typed in Bug. My LCP now looks like this :
As you can see, the bar with the word Bug on it is depressed. This indicates that the Bug layer is active, and anything I do now will appear on that layer. Next, go to the left-hand toolbar and click on the Picture Tube icon.
You will now see a menu appear on your general Control Panel.
Select the Beetle (or any other tube) and place one somewhere on your layer by clicking your mouse. You can modify the size of the tube image with the % slider. If you don't like what you have done, hit the delete key. You will see that only the bug has disappeared. Nothing on the layer below is affected.
You can move the bug by clicking on the Mover tool and placing your cursor on the bug itself. Hold the mouse button down and drag the bug around.
You can also rotate the bug by choosing Rotate from the Image dropdown menu and entering a free rotation angle. In other words, you can do what you like to the bug! Until you move on to another layer, only the bug will be affected. |
Adding a layer for a Butterfly Now you can repeat the steps above, adding a layer for a butterfly. Name the new layer Butterfly. Click on the Butterfly tube, and place a butterfly on the new layer.
If you look at the title bar on the graphic above, you will notice that the word Butterfly is now showing next to Image5, and Bug showed up in the previous picture. This is just another way of keeping track of what layer you are working on at a glance if you take the trouble to name your layers. If you don't, all you will see is Layer1, Layer2 etc. If you let your mouse hover over the layer title bars, a small thumbnail of the contents of the layer will appear. Now that you have come this far, you can take your mover tool and click on either the butterfly or the bug. You will see the title bars change, because by clicking on that image you have activated the layer belonging to that image. Move the insects around to your heart's content. |
Adding a Colour Layer Click on your new layer icon on the LCP again, this time naming your layer Colour -- Color if you're American! *G* Your LCP will now look like this :
Choose the flood fill tool, and in the General Control Panel, choose Sunburst Gradient.
On the color palette, click on a colour for your foreground, then right click on a contrasting colour. These two colours will blend into each other in a circular sunburst gradient effect.
To swop the colours around -- i.e. in the case of a gradient to change which colour will appear on the outer limits of the sunburst -- click on the two-headed arrow pointing between the two colour boxes. Alternatively, clicking with either the right or the left mouse button when you apply the flood fill will swop the colours automatically. Now, click anywhere on the new Colour layer you just created. Everything beneath the Colour layer will disappear under the sunburst gradient fill. |
Working with the Layers First of all, drag the Opacity slider on the LCP next to the Colour layer. You will now begin to see your picture below as though you were looking at it through that sheet of coloured plastic I mentioned earlier.
Next, we want to move the coloured layer so that it sits between the insects and the flowers, and so that only the flowers will be affected by the colour change. To do this, place your cursor on the Colour layer's title bar. Hold your mouse button down and drag the bar; drop it between the Bug and Background bars by releasing your mouse button. Now for the fun part.
Figure 2 Work your way down the various Blend Modes in the drop down menu that appears when you click on the Colour layer's Blend Mode tab. Each blend mode does a different thing to the colours on the layer beneath it. The best way to see what does what is to try out different colours and different blend modes -- it's always an adventure! There is no simple way to explain the different effects. |
Experimenting Try clicking on and moving the bugs around some more. Change the bugs, add more bugs. Add some text to the background layer as I have done below -- try different colours. Add an Airplane or anything else you can think of!!! Generally mess with the layers until you are comfortable with how very simple it all is!
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Merging the Layers When you are happy with your graphic, save it as a PSP file. The PSP format will retain all your layer information so that you can go back and change anything at any time. To save the image for use on the web, you will have to combine, or Merge, the layers. Go to the text menu at the top of your PSP screen, and click on the Layers option. Select Merge all/Flatten will turn your image into a regular one-layer "background" image -- you will see that the single layer is now entitled "background." You can reverse this process by double-clicking on the background title bar. Selecting Merge visible will combine your layers into a single transparency layer. Note : If you want to merge any number of individual layers during the course of constructing your graphic, you can do so by hiding the layers you do NOT want to merge. Hide these layers by "switching off" the visibility toggles for those layers -- i.e. click on the icon immediately to the right of the layer's label/name; the layer will become invisible until you click on its visibility toggle icon again. This is very useful if you want to keep your background layer and merge everything above it -- just temporarily hide the background, then merge the rest of the layers/visible. (Make sure you have clicked on one of the active layers, not the background, before merging.)
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A Final Note That should be more than enough to get you started, and I hope you feel comfortable with layers by the time you have worked through this tutorial. There is a lot more to it, of course, but I don't want to write a WHOLE book on the subject!! Please experiment on your own. I almost invariably start any graphic by creating a new layer and working on that. Had I done so for this tutorial, I would have had my flowers on their own layer and been able to move them around too. |
