In today's Photoshop tip we are going to look at the use of layers. Being able to understand and use layers is extremely important when you are looking to maximise the possibilities of Photoshop. They are so important they even have their own panel and category in the Menu bar at the top of the screen. The good news is that layers are pretty easy to understand and once you get the hang of them your photo editing skills will improve in leaps and bounds.

What is a Layer?
The easiest way to think about a layer is to imagine it as a sheet of paper, you start off with your bottom layer of paper and you can add more layers over the top. The layers literally sit on top of each other so that whatever is in the layer above will be seen on top of whatever is below it.

Layers are useful as it allows us to add extra things to an existing image such as a logo, person, whatever you have an image file of!

To explain more easily lets take an example, here is the picture we will start with it is one of my current fairy edits that is partially completed but you can choose any photograph or image that you have.

So we can see from the image above that it is already a pretty nice image but it is looking a little bare so it would be nice to add more blossom and perhaps a few other things.

The first step is to open your image in Photoshop, I am using Photoshop CS4 but you can also create layers in Photoshop Elements.

If you look at the image to the left you will see I have highlighted the Layers panel which sits at the bottom right of the page in pink. At the moment you will see one layer called 'background'. This is the image you have opened.

To create a new layer click on the second button from the right at the bottom of the layers panel that looks like a page being peeled over from the bottom.
When you hover your mouse cursor over it the words 'Create a new layer' will appear and when you click on it you will see a new layer appear above the Background layer called 'Layer 1'.

It is important when you are working within layers to always make sure the layer you want to work with is selected. You can tell it is selected when it is highlighted in blue, so as you can see from the image to the left here the background layer is currently selected here.

The next thing we are going to do is to open up the blossom image we want to use to add to our background layer. We do this in the normal way (File>open etc) then once the image is open we can either select part of the image we want to use in our background by using the lasso tool to select or if we want to use the whole image we can simply go to Select> All.

Now we go to Edit>Copy

At this stage we can go back to the original image that we want to use as our background, so in this example I click the tab to go back to the baby image. Once there I make sure 'Layer 1' is selected and I click on Edit> Paste.

You can see from the image to the right that
the blossom image that I copied has now 
appeared in my baby image.

I can move this around and resize it using the move tool from the left hand tool bar.

 I have also renamed the 'Layer 1' layer to 'Blossom' by double clicking on the layer name. This is a good idea if you are going to be adding a lot of new layers as it can become confusing as to which is which! 

You can carry on adding new layers and copying and pasting other images into your document until you are satisfied with your final image. 

You can see from the image below that I have added more blossom and some butterflies to my final photo.

So as you can see using layers isn't so complicated and the difference it can make to your images is huge!

Our Blossom Baby image is available to buy for just £12 if you don't fancy having a go yourself, we use images of your baby and insert them into the photo to create a magical image to treasure and makes a wonderful gift for friends and family.