Discover the essentials of layer organization and stroke addition in graphic design. Learn how to add, modify, and move strokes, as well as manipulate layers for optimal organization and visibility.
Key Insights
- Strokes are borders that can be added to shapes. They can be modified in terms of color, weight (thickness), and style (solid or dashed). Stroke selection and adjustments are performed via the options bar.
- Shapes in a design can be moved around the canvas with the move tool. The order of stacking, or which shapes appear in front of or behind others, is determined by the layer organization in the layers panel. This order can be manually adjusted by dragging layers to different positions.
- Layers also have a visibility feature, allowing designers to hide or show individual layers as needed. This is useful for examining specific elements without altering the established layer order.
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In this video, we will be discussing layer organization as well as strokes. With our Shapes file open that we created in the last video, let us begin by adding strokes to our shapes.
Strokes are essentially borders around the shape. Let us do an example of a stroke. We will make sure that we have our orange circle highlighted, showing that it is selected.
We can then navigate to our Options Bar and see that we have a stroke indicator here. If you do not see this arrangement in your Options Bar, you may have a different tool selected. Make sure that you have the Ellipse Tool selected for us to make this change.
Let us select the stroke indicator. Currently, we can see that we have a white box with a red line through it. This indicates that there is currently no stroke set to our shape.
We can change this by selecting Solid Color. We now have a black stroke associated with this. However, I want to change it to a yellow stroke.
We can do this simply by picking a yellow color from below. We will then press ENTER to close the color window. As you can see looking at our circle, we have a very slight stroke around this circle.
We can change the weight of the stroke—or how thick it is—by adjusting it in our Options Bar. Let us click on 1px to change the weight, which is short for one pixel. We can change it to 15px and press ENTER.
We will see that the stroke is now much larger around our circle. In addition, another way to change this is by clicking the drop-down menu where we have a slider. I will let you change the stroke to your desired weight.
For me, I will stick with 15 pixels by double-clicking on the value, typing 15, and pressing ENTER. Let us add another stroke to a shape. We will do this by first selecting the shape in our Layers Panel.
I am going to select the blue square. Next, I will go back to my Options Bar and select Stroke, and let us change it to black. Then, let us change the weight of the stroke by clicking on 1px and changing it to 20.
I will press ENTER. For this square, I want to add a dashed stroke, so we can change this by navigating to our stroke type next to the weight. Clicking on this line, we will see that we have a drop-down that gives us different stroke options.
Let us click the dashed line and press ENTER to close the window. As you can see, we now have a dashed stroke on our square. We can again change the weight of this using the stroke weight control in our Options Bar.
I will change it to 50 and press ENTER. As you can see, when we change the weight using the slider, the number of dashes also changes. Next, let us begin moving some of our shapes around the canvas.
We will select the Move Tool in our Tools Bar, and we can begin moving shapes by simply clicking on them and dragging them to the desired location. As you can see, some shapes stack in front of others, and some stack behind. This is due to the stacking order in the Layers Panel.
If we stack all of our shapes in the middle, we will see that they stack on top of each other. In addition, I want to bring your attention to the Auto-Select option. Auto-Select means that if you click on an object, it will automatically determine which object you are trying to select.
With Auto-Select unchecked in the Options Bar, Photoshop will only move the object that is selected in the Layers Panel. If I try to move the red ellipse while the blue square is selected, it will only move the blue square. If I have the gray rectangle selected and try to move the blue square, it will only move the gray rectangle.
Depending on how you are trying to move objects, Auto-Select can be either helpful or problematic. Let us move each of our objects into the center of the screen. Next, let us talk about stacking.
As you can see, our gray rectangle is on the bottom, followed by the blue square, the red ellipse, and finally the orange circle. This stacking order matches exactly how the layers are arranged in the Layers Panel. Additionally, we can change the stacking order by clicking and dragging one of the layers to its desired location, as indicated by the blue line.
I will move the gray rectangle to the top. In addition, we can drag other layers down or place them between other layers. I will move the orange circle between the red ellipse and the blue square.
Now, let us say I want to see the orange circle. Currently, the gray rectangle and red ellipse are covering it. I do not necessarily want to move the orange circle to the top, but I do want to reveal it.
In this case, we will hide the gray rectangle and red ellipse. We can do this by selecting the layer visibility icon—or the eye—next to the layer. We will click on the visibility icons for the first two layers, and now we can see our orange circle.
Depending on which layers are visible, that will determine what is shown on the canvas. Let us make all of our layers visible again, and using the Move Tool, drag them back to the four corners of the canvas. One other note about moving objects is that if we begin moving an object and hold Shift, we can constrain the movement to a straight line.
Therefore, if I click an object, hold Shift, and begin moving it to the left, it will move perfectly horizontally. Likewise, if I hold Shift and move it vertically, it will move straight up and down. Finally, if I begin moving the object at a diagonal angle while holding Shift, it will maintain that angle.
Another way to use the Move Tool is by using your keyboard. You can move objects by using the arrow keys on your keyboard. Pressing an arrow key will move the object in the corresponding direction—left, right, up, or down.
In addition, if you hold Shift while pressing an arrow key, the object will move more quickly in that direction. Let us save our Shapes file by navigating to File, Save.