Merging Layers in Photoshop

In this digital photography tutorial we learn how to merge layers using Photoshop.

Processing the Raw File Okay, I’m just going to do a little check on my Levels here to see if all is well, hold on alt key and that’s looking pretty good and set that to one so just OK that. Right now, I’m just going to go in there and that’s our font. Okay, so channel levels one off for now. I’m going to make a new layer above all these so I can teach you, we’ll catch up on our Layer, I’m going to hold on the alt key and from my layers menu, I’m going to go Merge Visible but hold down alt key and that would just flatten virtually all these adjustments into a single layer. It’s called a stamp. That takes a while as you can see it’s quite a big image. I guess, okay. So we can turn these off now if you want to and what we’re going to do down here, just to rename this one “Sharpen” and now let’s go to Filter, Other, a High Pass and we’re just going to adjust this, a little play around. That looks good, about 9.9 pixels for this one and we’re going to change the mode to overlay. And how we get to that and that is a bit too OTT. It looks like some bad hasty again on there so we’ll change it to soft light. That looks really better. That’s really sharpen the image off and again we can apply this selectively by adding a layer mask. Fill the layer mask with black using the paint bucket tool and that takes where adjustments and then we could just paint this in where we want to and again your eyes are going to get led to the sharpest areas of the picture. So again, we can selectively paint in the areas to sharpen that we want our viewers to view in and leave these outer edges pretty much alone. You’ve got to be careful here at the back of transitions if you can’t go from a really sharp page to some of this very soft so you need to be careful about that. Make sure it doesn’t look silly or unnatural. So just o click on the mask and fill few of these areas in here, like so and if you’re again using a mask, drop your opacity. I’m just going to use my previous initiative probably. I’m just go in the edges of these very gently and that will just soften the transitions of virtually there around the edges, I hope then click again. I will just zoom in and just make sure turn it off. Okay, I don’t want to, it’s too bad. But you know always, always check your image a 100% when you’re making image adjustments, go on 100% to make sure you’re not getting any odd effects going on. Okay, that’s taking it right but again, that’s just another way of drawing attention to the post image that you want. There we go. So I think we are pretty much finished. So here’s our before and here’s our finished image. So I think you’ll agree that’s quite a bit adjustment there. So I do believe that star image is finished so I hope you’ve enjoyed that video. You’ve learned a few tricks and I hope I catch you on the next one. Thanks for watching. Cheers.