Help Finding the Most Basic Photoshop Tutorial On Layers

A friend of mine, who is new to Photoshop, does not yet understand the magical wonders of using layers.

I would try to help her, but I'm bad at teaching stuff like that, especially over Second Life.

Does anyone have a link to a quick, easy, basic Photoshop tutorial that will serve as an Intro to Layers 101?

Thank you.

Not a tutorial, but I can highly recommend a book:

Lynch, Richard, "The Adobe Photoshop Layers Book," New York, Elsevier, 2007. ISBN=978-0-240-52076-6

It is VERY nicely written and illustrated, and it has a CD with exercises that parallel examples in the text.

I would just explain it as using construction paper to make paper doll clothes... it's very similar. But if that doesn't work, I did a quick Google search and found these:

http://www.desktopdeck.com/tutorial/20

http://photoshopschool.blogspot.com/2006/12/photoshop-layers-explained-how-to-tips.html

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/layers/Layers.htm

Hope that helps.

Nice analogy! Nothing like playing with pixelated paper dolls. I am new to the photoshop world...there are tons and tons of tutorials on the web...just takes a little sorting and weeding through to find what you like. Some of the tutorials are in the form of how-to-videos while others are static based. What did we ever do without the web?

Happy Holidays All.

...and the layers of paper can be made more or less transparent...not so easy with construction paper.

For me, the idea of layers is pretty obvious. The hard part is all the clever and amazing way to use layers.

I think I'd compare Photoshop layers more to animation cels. Clear sheets of stacked celluloid. Any part of the celluloid that is painted will cover what is beneath it. Another book that is supposed to be good (I've only read part of it in the bookstore so far... ) is Layers by Matt Kloskowski.

Yes, a perfect analogy... can't get any better than that. Thanks Betty!

I find it too constraining to use any single analogy when I think about layers.

Layers ARE sort of like construction paper or maybe celluloid sheets, but they are lots more than that. You can go nuts thinking about different ways to describe them. Because you can change the opacity of layers, for example, you can imagine them as a stack of different kinds of material (cloth, tracing paper, acetate, ...) that you might use for making a collage. Unlike physical media, you can even turn them ON and OFF without removing them and losing them in the clutter on your work table. By fiddling with layer modes, you can change the effect that one layer has on all layers below it -- adding or subtracting selectively to the properties of certain pixels -- so layers are sort of like the cheese, sauce, and pasta interacting in a lasagna. Adjustment layers let you experiment with changes (hue, saturation, levels, ...) without messing up your basic drawing irreversibly -- the way layers of clouds and haze change the appearance of the Earth in aerial photos. Masking layers are analogous to stencils or maybe like the tape you use to define the edge of a watercolor painting.

You can also combine layers into a group that behaves like a single layer, analogous to the composite blueprint an architect makes of all the structural, electrical, and plumbing details on each single floor of a building, separate from the next floor. In this way, a layer can be like a file folder -- a way of organizing common design elements for display purposes, or so that you can easily lift them and drop them into another project at a later date.

Thinking of layers in only ONE way locks me mentally into thinking of one way of designing.