Photoshop Tip: No more flattening your images
Here’s a real quick tip I wanted to share – I have only relatively recently happened upon it so I am thinking there may be a whole bunch of you out there who might not know about this simple yet excellent photoshop feature.
I see so many Photoshop tutorials that instruct you to flatten your image for various reasons, like sharpening for example and the vast majority of them literally tell you to do just that – flatten the layers. However this leaves you unable to go back and edit or adjust any of your layers should you wish to do so later.
As an alternative to flattening yout layers, I reccommend the following simple steps:
- Ensure you have the topmost layer selected in your layers palette.
- Hit ctrl-a (or your mac alternative) to make a selection covering your entire image
- Hit ctrl-shift-c (or your mac alternative) to make a merged copy of all of your layers
- Hit ctrl-v (or your mac alternative) to paste the merged layer as a new layer
The image below is an example of how my layers looked after I performed the above steps on one of my images – you can see all of my layers have been preserved whilst I am now free to perform sharpening on my top layer as I like.
This “copy merged” option is also available in the edit menu, but I never realised it was there until about a year ago – and I’ve been using photoshop for around 8 years… Makes me wonder what else I’m missing!
