The Tomorrow that did not come

Fortunately, The Day After did ! I apologize - my Saturday and Sunday were crazy busy and I just couldn't sit down to write this up until now. Wow its almost Monday but here goes .... Here's the 411 about layers. Although I use Gimp to illustrate my point, the details remain the same in PSE.

So what are layers ? I think of layers as nothing but transparent (or opaque as the case may be) sheets of paper which can be manipulated as desired. When you first open an image, Gimp opens it in one layer. Like so. Gimp (or PSE) calls this layer "Background"

The Background layer in PSE is locked as long as its called "Background". If you change its name to something else eg Layer 0 (as PSE may prompt you), it gives you the added functionality of deleting and or moving it up or down in the hierarchy. When I start editing an image, I always duplicate the background layer. I do this so that if I do make a mistake or don't like the look, I can always go back to the way it looked originally. When you create a new layer in Gimp it offers you the following options -

The first three options of the fill type are pretty self explanatory. The last option called Transparency will basically add a transparent layer. Which means, whatever is under that layer, will be visible. That is, until you add something to the transparent layer. Think of it like putting a see-through plastic film on top of your sheet of paper. Thats all layers are ! The fun part about the layers is, they can be blended in different ways or they can be masked to hide/reveal certain aspects of the layers underneath.

I will cover the different layer blending options in tomorrow's post. Happy Monday y'all !