hello I'm Robin Whalley welcome to lentcraft today we're going
to look at another of the common editing tools that you find in many photo
editors and that's layers when we edit an image we should make use of layers
this is an important tool and it's very powerful
it makes photo editing that much easier unfortunately lots of people avoid using
layers because they find them confusing let's look at an example in Photoshop to
start with when you're new to photoshop it's easy to fall into the habit of
applying adjustments directly to the image for example we can apply a curves
contrast adjustment to this image
you
if you're not sure how the curves are just
works try watching my previous video I put the details in the video information
below know we've applied the adjustment if we think it's too strong we can't
correct it our only option is to undo and reapply the curve
this means if we've made other adjustments after the curves adjustment
we also need to undo and redo those this is time-consuming and it's easy to make
mistakes it's also important to understand that each adjustment we apply
to an image degrades the quality of the image slightly if you make lots of
adjustments it's very easy for quality problems to arise the alternative and
better approach is to apply adjustments as a layer now if we add a curves
adjustment layer to our image we can continue to make changes to it even
after we've applied subsequent adjustments
you
this is much less damaging to the quality of the image so you reduced the
risk of introducing problems like banding here we can see the original
image together with the layers we've added this is called the layer stack
each layer in the layer stack has an effect on the layer below it and creates
the overall edited image if we hide a layer by turning it off or on in the
layer stack we hide the effect from the image
but layers also have other advantages too you can attach a mask to a layer
this allows you to control where the layers effect is visible or hidden in
the image
you
you can also adjust the opacity of the layer to control how strong its effect
is
you
and layers have something called a blending mode attached to them which
I'll be covering in a later video
one very useful way to use layers is to combine different images into one this
is called compositing in this example I've got two versions of the same image
one of these was deliberately over Expo and it has a pink tint to it the other
image was under expose when he was captured and has a normal tent you can
then apply a mask to one of the images allowing you to hide it and allow the
image below to show through
you
as I paint you can see the Heather becoming lighter because the image below
is starting to show through in this way I can blend multiple
exposures together into a single realistic and more pleasing image once
you're familiar with this technique you can use it to create all kinds of
interesting images layers are important because they help us to preserve image
quality and make photo editing easy now let's look at how layers are used
similarly in affinity photo just as in Photoshop we have a layers studio panel
showing the layers in the photo we're editing
you
just as before we can turn the layers on and off to hide or display the effect
there's an opacity slider to control the strength of the layers effect
a layer mask to control where you see the layers effect on the image
you
as well as each layer having
once you know how to use layers in one photo editor it becomes easy to
translate that knowledge to others I hope you found this video useful
I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching Lenscraft I'll see you soon for
another video