Project #1: Understanding Layers

How do Layers work? Well, one way to think about it is this. You are making a sandwich for a quick snack, you place your butter on the bottom slice (Background). You then add a piece of ham (Layer 1), some cheese (Layer 2), and some tomatoes (Layer 3). Finally you put a piece of buttered bread on top (Layer 4). Apart from making you hungry, just think of layers in this way. Bring up both photographs (countryside and horse.psd) in Photoshop and activate the horse document. You will notice that I have already removed the background area for you.

1. Press the ‘V’ key to activate the Move command, click on the horse and drag it onto our countryside scene.

2. Position the horse to just off the bottom right corner. If you look at the Layers palette you will now see two layers: the bottom one named Background and the second named Horse.

3. The horse looks out of place now so we need to do a few things to it; the first is to resize it, it does not fit with the scale of the countryside image. From the Edit menu select Free Transform and then Scale (or you can press CTRL+T). Hold down your shift button, click on one of the corner handles and drag towards the center. By holding down the Shift button you are making sure that the image stays in proportion while you scale it. When you are happy with the new size, press Return.

4. The second thing to correct is the horses position - it needs to be behind the fence post, not in front of it. Click the eye icon next to the horse thumbnail in the Layers palette to turn it off.

5. Get the Polygonal selection tool from the Tool box (press and hold the left mouse button over the Lasso tool and a fly-out menu will appear. Select the second icon to get the Polygonal Tool) and draw around the fence post. When the selection is closed press CTRL+J to copy the fence post to a layer of its own.

   Click on the eye icon again next to the horse Layer. If necessary, click on the fence post layer and move it above the horse layer. You should now have a post in front of the horse.

   Finally, we need to bring the wire fencing to the foreground. We will use the Layer Mask option for this.

6. At the bottom of the Layers palette you will see three small icons: Add Layer Mask, Create New Layer, and Trashcan. We need to add a Layer Mask, so click once on the first icon.

7. Press ‘D’ to change the colour palette back to its default, (black foreground, white background). From the Brush palette choose a small brush (just big enough to cover the barb wire).

8. Because we set the colour palette back to its default settings for use in the Layer Mask, our Brush will act as an eraser unlike the normal Eraser tool, we can replace something we erased simply by pressing the ‘X’ key to swap our colour around and repaint the image back in.

9. Our final step is to carefully paint the barbwire back in to give the illusion that the horse is behind both the wires and the fence post. Carefully paint the wires back in over the three visible legs and body. Don’t forget, if you make a mistake, press the ‘X’ key, paint over the mistake to bring the original back.

   Once finished we should now have an image of a countryside scene with a horse looking at us from behind a fence.