I am constantly on the lookout for ways to streamline my scrapbooking process – I prefer to focus on the photos and journaling and less on the mechanics of putting the pages together. So anytime I figure something out that helps me to put my pages together more easily, I do a happy dance (note that I’m *not* a dancer and you would not want to witness the aforementioned happy dance)! One of the best time-saving features I’ve found in Photoshop is layer groups (that little file folder in the layers palette). Maybe I like them so much because I’m an organization junkie, I don’t know. I do know that layer groups have helped save me a lot of time and frustration while scrapping my pages. Today I’m going to share a few ways I use layer groups.
Layer groups are great for organizing the overabundance of things on a layout. Often I’ll put things into layer groups just to keep them together and make the layers palette “cleaner”. Imagine the layers palette as a file drawer and each layer is a piece of paper. Now suppose you want to reorganize the drawer a bit – maybe you have an element cluster that you want to move “up” in the layout so it’s on top of a photo instead of under it. You can select one of the elements in that cluster pretty easily, but then have find and ctrl-click on all the other layers to select everything in the cluster. Using the file drawer analogy, you have to find all the papers and hold onto them together, then pull them out as a group and move them to another part of the drawer. Imagine instead that the papers were all in a file folder and you could just grab the folder and move it. Easier that way, isn’t it?
I’ve made a simple layered file as an example. The first thing you need to know about using layer groups is how to make them. To make a layer group, simply click on the file folder icon at the bottom of the layers palette. Making it this way will result in an empty group. What I usually do is select the layers I want in the group and drag them on top of the group layer. This is what it looks like after you’ve selected the layers and while you’re dragging them.
An even easier way of doing this is to select the layers than type ctrl-G on a PC or CMD-G on a Mac. This is what it looks like after the layers are in the group.
There are some really helpful things you can do with groups:
- Move the group together
- Resize the layers in the group together
- Add a style to the entire group at once (I do this a lot with shadows, especially when doing title work)
- Make groups within groups
- Rename groups (the same way you’d rename a layer)
- Select some (or all of) the layers inside a group and manipulate them as if they weren’t grouped
One of my favorite features of groups is that when the group is selected (the file folder icon, not the individual layers in the group) they keep their orientation with each other. This means that you can align groups without aligning each individual layer in the group. This is huge! Let me show you what I mean. In the next screen shot I selected the six individual layers and aligned them horizontally.
This isn’t the result I want. I want to keep the groups together and align the middle of the groups. This is what it looks like when I select the two groups and align them.
Wow! The first time I realized I could do this I think I actually cheered out loud!! I use this sometimes when I’m making titles and want to align all my words to one side of the page then distribute them vertically so they’re all spaced out the same amount. Being able to do this has saved me literally hours of frustration.
Finally, I’d like to show you an example of how I use layer groups from one of my actual layouts. This is one that I made recently of my boys playing with sparklers on the 4th of July using Penny’s awesome 12 Months: July kit. I put the letters for each word in a group, then grouped the two words together. After selecting the group “title”, I resized the group, applied a shadow style, and changed the angle of the words. Next, I selected each word separately and moved them to where I wanted them on the layout. Easy peasy! And look at how nice and clean the title is in the layers palette!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial and learned something new. If you know another way to use layer groups, I’d love to know about it. Please leave a comment and let us know! How do you use layer groups?
Fabulous tutorial.
Thanks for sharing.