Rangefinder Magazine
January 2005

Click Here for printable version of this article.

Photoshop CS by Felix Nelson
Revealing Your Genius with Just One Mouse Click

This is one of a series of Adobe® Photoshop® tutorials sponsored by Adobe Systems and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) to be reprinted in Rangefinder. The article is from Photoshop User magazine, the official publication of NAPP (www.photoshopuser.com).

You’ve been in a two-hour, Zen-like, state, adding layer upon layer of Styles, Effects and type treatments. You’ve got four different concepts buried into 70 different layers. You can’t think about making Layer Sets or naming layers. You’re in a zone, man. Then it happens: The boss, client, or just some goober walks by and says, “What ya working on?” How do you show them these awesome ideas? How do you show them your genius? Layer Comps, baby, that’s how.

Admit it: When you’re being creative, you don’t name layers. You don’t organize your files into Layer Sets. You don’t do anything that closely resembles any kind of order. Nobody does. When you’re being creative, you’re experimenting, inventing, conceptualizing. You’re just being, well, creative.

Layer Comps give you a fast, effective way to organize and share your ideas without stopping the creative process. Here’s how it works:

Step One:
Let’s say you’re working on a project (a fictitious car magazine in our example), and you come up with a layout you like. You’ve got some layers hidden, some Layer Styles hidden, and other layer combinations you want to show. Simply go to the Layer Comps palette, click on the right-facing arrow, and choose New Layer Comp. When the dialog box appears, you can choose to name it and maintain the Visibility, Position and Appearance (Layer Style) of the New Layer Comp. When you’re done, click OK. A new layer comp (Layer Comp 1 or the name you typed in) appears in the Layer Comps palette.

Step Two:
Go ahead and create an entirely new layout using new Layer Styles, images and text. There’s a catch though. If you change the font of an existing layer (used in the first Layer Comp) or delete a layer, you’ll pretty much wreck the first Layer Comp you created. So, if you want to change the font in a layer, you’ll have to duplicate the Type layer and make any changes to this new layer, before you create a second Layer Comp. And, don’t delete layers; just hide them. Once you have a new layout ready, create a new layer comp (Layer Comp 2), as we did in the previous step.

Step Three:
Here’s the cool part. If you want to see what the first Layer Comp looks like, simply click on the space next to Layer Comp 1 in the Layer Comps palette. Any layer combination you used to create Layer Comp 1 is now shown in the Layers palette. It didn’t remove any of the new layers you added for Layer Comp 2; Photoshop CS simply hides them.

Step Four:
Go ahead and create another layout, and a third Layer Comp (Layer Comp 3). We now have a document that consists of 35 different layers that make up three different Layer Comps. Now, you can preview or show any version with the click of a mouse.

Step Five:
Let’s say the client really likes Layer Comp 1 (above right) but wants to make a change (which hardly ever happens!), such as putting all the text on the left side of the layout. Choose the Move tool and reposition any text layers you want toward the left. Now, simply click on the Update Layer Comp icon at the bottom of the Layer Comps palette, and any changes you made will now be reflected in Layer Comp 1.