With Adobe Photoshop we can do many things. And surely we have put them into practice many times, but something has prevented us from achieving it. One of the great mysteries is the famous Fund layer, the one we always see with a closed padlock. Today we are going to discover what it is for and what we can do with the Background layer of Adobe Photoshop.
The Background layer is essential within Adobe Photoshop. Surely many of you have never noticed his presence until he has given you trouble. I have been one of them; at the most inopportune moments I always forget it exists and make beginner mistakes.
Our workflow will seldom change, but its presence serves to constantly remind us of how Adobe Photoshop, the layering program, works.
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The Background layer of Adobe Photoshop and the meaning of the program
When explaining anything about this program, it is necessary to delve into the original source, the Adobe Photoshop bible. Unfortunately there is no longer the famous F1 on the keyboard to find it. And in Help> Photoshop Help we found nothing at all. So you have to go to the help page on the internet:
The Background layer is the bottom layer of the Layers palette. When an image is imported from a scanner or digital camera, the entire image will be placed on the Background layer. The Background layer, the bottom layer of the Layers palette, is always locked (protected), which means you can’t change its stacking order, blending mode, or opacity (unless you make it a normal layer)
As is almost always the case, the solution to our problems is not clearly in the famous manual. But at least in this case we can highlight two properties of the Background layer:
- It is always the bottom layer and we cannot change its position.
- It does not allow changing or blending modes nor his Opacity.
What is it? What is it for? As we are going to stay in the world of photography, we may not find all the uses for it. Another thing is the world of graphic design …
The reality of the Background layer
When we create a new document in Adobe Photoshop, this layer automatically appears as the background (worth the redundancy) on which we will place everything else. It is their function. But in the strict sense, it is not a layer for the properties that we have pointed out.
As some authors say, the Background layer is the space in which we are going to start working directly. It is the canvas on which we create everything. For this reason it is impossible to move it, not even with the tool Move. And that’s why we get the warning window when we try to move it for any reason.
You cannot change your position within the window Layers. Any layer that we create will always be above it. The quickest way to change this limitation is by doing click on the padlock and it will become a normal layer with all the usual functions.
Best of all, it helps to make sure that we will not lose the original information of our photograph. As we have commented, it is impossible to change your Opacity (it wouldn’t make sense) and we can’t modify its blending modes either (obvious because it will never have an underlying layer)
In fact, in a normal workflow, based on adjustment layers, we have the possibility to see at all times what the original image is like through this layer Bottom. So the best advice we can give is to always leave it as a verification layer to be able to see, directly, what the original photo was like and how we are leaving it (alt + click on its visibility icon).
We hope it has been useful especially for those of you who are starting out and for all of you who have ever wondered what that padlock means.