Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Organise your complex Photoshop projects with this simple tool. Particularly useful for template projects that you will be coming back to again.
Exercise files
There are no related exercise files for this lesson, or we cannot provide them due to copyright issues.
Quick reference
Topic: Color Coding Layers
Add color labels to your Photoshop layers.
When to use
Organise your complex Photoshop projects with this simple tool. Particularly useful for template projects that you will be coming back to again.
Instructions
Changing existing layer colors
- Select the layer in the layers Panel. Right click and scroll down to the bottom where the color options are and select the color that you want.
Tip: Create a color code system that you use often
Example:
Red = urgent attention
Orange = not urgent attention
Blue = Good
Green = Template Change section
Changing multiple layer colors
- Hold down the Command or Control key and Select the layers in the layers Panel. Right click and scroll down to the bottom where the color options are and select the color that you want.
Create a layer with a set color
- Hold down the Alt or Option key and click the new layer icon in the layers Panel. This will bring up a dialogue box for naming and color choices.
Filter visible Layers in the Layers panel
- Click the Filter options in the layers Panel. This will bring up a dialogue box for Filter types. Choose color and then a dropdown for the layer colors that you want to focus on.
- 00:03 Today we're gonna be looking at one of the smaller features in regards to
- 00:08 layer management, and that's color coding your layers.
- 00:11 This is perfect for
- 00:12 people like me who really worry about organization in their Photoshop documents.
- 00:18 As you can see here in the layers panel, this document is not organized at all.
- 00:22 And I am gonna be doing a full layer organizational video in the future, but
- 00:26 to start off, let's look at color coding.
- 00:28 Now, you may have done color coding on your documents on your computer or
- 00:31 even in your emails, but Photoshop also has this functionality, as well, and
- 00:35 there's a few ways to go about doing it.
- 00:38 The first way, if you already have a document with layers already created,
- 00:41 you can simply right-click on a layer, and
- 00:43 at the bottom of the menu, you have all of your different color options.
- 00:46 No color which is your default option, red,
- 00:49 orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and gray.
- 00:52 And, you may use these colors for different reasons.
- 00:54 For example, I may choose red for
- 00:56 this example to tell me that this layer needs to be changed immediately.
- 01:00 Or for this color, I may scroll to the bottom, and
- 01:03 choose orange, because it needs to be changed, but not immediately.
- 01:07 There are a lot of different reasons,
- 01:08 just like with your emails, that you would colorize a layer.
- 01:11 And you can also colorize multiple layers at once.
- 01:13 So, if I select this layer here, layer 27, which should be named, but I will
- 01:17 cover that in a future video, and then you hold down your Cmd key to select layer 19.
- 01:21 You right click once again.
- 01:24 You can select, let's say, green, and both of these layers will update at once.
- 01:29 Now, what if you're creating a new layer and
- 01:30 you want to color code it right from the beginning?
- 01:32 Well, if you press the new layer icon at the bottom of your layers panel,
- 01:36 you just get a single layer with no color code.
- 01:39 So, let's undo, command or control-z.
- 01:41 Now, this time, instead of simply clicking on it, you wanna hold down your alt or
- 01:45 option key, option on the Mac, alt on Windows.
- 01:47 And this will bring up the new layer dialogue box, where you can go ahead and
- 01:51 name your layer.
- 01:52 I'm gonna keep it layer 27, just to really make things disorganized.
- 01:55 And for the color, you can choose the same colors.
- 01:59 And for instance, I can choose blue and press okay.
- 02:01 And when that new layer is created, it now has a blue label.
- 02:04 Which of course, I can change at any time by right-clicking and
- 02:07 selecting a new color, just like that.
- 02:10 So visually, color coding your layers allows you to prioritize which layers need
- 02:15 to be focused on first and which layers may not be as important.
- 02:19 But from an organizational standpoint, until Photoshop CS6,
- 02:22 there wasn't a huge benefit.
- 02:24 However if you are running Photoshop CS6 or Photoshop CC,
- 02:28 you have layer filtering, which can be found at the top of your layers panel.
- 02:33 By default it's set to kind, but
- 02:35 if you select this drop-down, you can choose to filter your layers by color.
- 02:40 So, If I select this right here, and
- 02:42 then I choose the color from the drop-down to the right, let's say green,
- 02:46 Photoshop's gonna show me all the layers that have a color code of green.
- 02:51 So, if you are a user like myself who prioritizes layers using color codes,
- 02:56 the new filtering options in Photoshop CS6 is gonna help you
- 02:59 organize your layers even more.
- 03:01 So once again, if you color code your layers that need to be changed right
- 03:05 away with the color red, you can simply select red from the filtering drop down,
- 03:09 and these will be your layers that you need to focus on right away.
- 03:13 And when you combine that with other organizational methods, such as groups and
- 03:17 layer names which I'll cover in a future video,
- 03:19 the workflow of your projects will be that much more efficient.
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