Chapter 6

How to Work
with Layers

This Is Where It Gets Fun

Why did we have to wait until this chapter before things got fun? Here’s why: you have to pay your dues. Plain and simple, that’s it. Look, if you cracked open the book and starting doing really fun stuff right off the bat, by now you’d be bored. You’d say stuff like, “This was fun when it first started, but now this is just kind of routine,” instead of saying what you’re thinking right now, which is, “Finally, we’re getting to the fun stuff.” I think that alone is worth depriving yourself of fun. This was a technique our parents not only invented, but thrived on, and it was literally the fuel in their tank. Remember how, when we were little, our parents used to say stuff like, “One day we’ll let you eat solid food like we do, but that’s not until you’ve paid your dues. Now eat your liquefied oatmeal and pea casserole.” Man, those were the days. Anyway, they were masters at making us wait for good things, and now we get to pass this time-honored tradition onto our own children by making them always do everything on the Background layer, like back before Photoshop 2.0, before layers were first introduced. But, of course, since the concept of layers hadn’t been invented yet, they didn’t call the Background layer the “Background layer.” Instead (and this is going to sound weird to people who came to Photoshop after version 3.0), they called it simply “Ernie.” So, when I did my first few books on Photoshop, when I needed to talk about something happening on that image layer, I’d have to say “head over to Ernie and apply a Levels adjustment” and everybody knew that meant it was time for another serving of liquefied oatmeal and pea casserole. We’ve waited long enough my friends. Let the fun begin!