A couple of additional questions

[MikeFromMesa]

Thanks to photoken I was able to get the Quick Selection Tool working properly. Thank you.

Having gotten that far I now have some additional questions. I have been trying to replace a sky, just to become familiar with PhotoLine, and have the base photo and the new sky as layers. I have also formed the selection for the original sky that I want to remove and now I seem to have two problems.

1) The new sky is on top of the original photo in the layers panel and I want to move it below. I tried dragging it using both the Hand Tool and the Layer Tool, including pressing the Command and Option keys (I work on a Mac), but none of it worked. I made sure the layers were not locked and tried again, but again, nothing worked. The manual says the following:

You can change the order of the layers by simply dragging a layer to a new position.

but that is exactly what I tried, and it did not seem to work at all. Is there something I have to do that I have not done? Is there any other way to move the layers? I have even tried using the arrow keys, but nothing seems to work.

2) Once I get the layers arranged properly I want to make the masked area transparent. Deleting the selection only gave me a white sky, not a transparent sky, so how do I transform a selection into a transparent area so the new sky will show through?

Again, thank you for any help.

One more question (just added after the post). What is the difference between merging layers and flattening? I have always assumed, apparently incorrectly, that they were the same.

[Hoogo]

1) To change the order of the layers, you need the layer list, you drag the list entries there. Active tool doesn't matter.
2) In some versions the background layer was a bit special. You could rearrange all upper layers, but could not move them below the background. If this happens to you, remove the move protection.
3) Transparency is a property of the layer. When you open a jpg, then there's no transparency by default, as jpg comes without. Then you have to enable it manually.
4) Instead of transparency you could try "layer masks". Your selection is transformed into a greyscale layer, with black=transparency, white=opaque. You can edit such masks anytime.

Good thing that you want to sort the layers by their real depth in nature, makes many things more easy.


I think "flatten" always means all layers in the document, "merge down" only cares for the selected layer and all below.

[MikeFromMesa]

Thank you for the response, but:

1) I was using the Layer List as I could not think of any other place to try to move the layers.

2) I made sure the "Lock Protection" icon did not show up on either layer by selecting the layer and clicking the lock icon above the layers.

Here is the panel I have:

LayerPanel.jpg

I click on the layer and try to move it, but can not. It just will not move, and that is true for both. I added another adjustment layer (Curves) and could then move both the new sky and the Curves layer, but could not move the sky below the background layer. I tried to rename the background layer, but could not. I could give it a second name, but not change the background specification. Perhaps there is another way to do that.

I have begun to wonder if I should have done this the other way - that is, add the selected main image to the sky image rather than adding the sky to the main image. Then moving it would not be a problem, but I do not know if there is such a restriction.

3) I did not say originally because I did not think that it mattered, but the main image I loaded and which had the sky I wanted to remove, is a raw image, not a jpg.

I will try doing this the other way and see if that solves the problem, but even if it does I do not know if this is a general rule or if I am doing something wrong. I pretty much always assume the latter ...

[MikeFromMesa]

Well, that was an interesting experiment, and I found out something I did not know.

I can not move the background layer doing the reverse either, however if I duplicate the background layer and then have 2 non-background layers to work with, I can move them around. I am still trying to work this out, but I have learned something here, so the day has not been wasted.

[photoken]

I'm at a loss to explain why you can't move the layers even when the "Lock position" icon is deselected.

Here's my layers list after moving the sky image. The "P1000099" image is a RW2 RAW image. The "clouds 02" image is a JPG:

raw layers 01.jpg

I noticed that your RAW background image does not have the "Raw Adjustments" layer which is created when a RAW image is opened. Did you do some kind of merge to the original image? I don't think that should make a difference for re-ordering layers, but....

When you open an image, the first (bottom) image determines the image size. I've found that funky things can happen when trying to create a bottom layer that is a different size, so I do the following:

1. Open the RAW image.
2. Open the sky image and copy it to the Clipboard.
3. In the RAW image, use Edit...Paste as Layer to get the sky at the top of the layer stack.
4. Drag the layer handles of the sky layer so it fits the width of the RAW image.
5. With the sky layer as the active layer, use Layout...Image...Bring to Document Size to get the sky layer to fit the background RAW image.
6. Remove the lock icon from the bottom RAW image. (In fact, this step is unnecessary on my setup.)
7. Drag the sky image below the RAW image.

Then you can use the layer properties of the RAW image to set it to allow transparency before using, for example, the Autotransparency tool to make the areas of sky transparent so that the replacement sky shows.

[photoken]

OK, I found out when the layers cannot be re-ordered:

After opening my RW2 RAW image, I used "Flatten Image" or I highlighted the top layer and used "Merge Down" to combine the RAW image adjustment layer with the RW2 image. Either way, the RAW image became a "Background" image in the layers panel, and another layer could not be dragged beneath it.

My solution was to highlight the new sky layer at the top of the stack, and after dragging its width to match the bottom image, I brought that new sky layer to the document size as I mentioned in my previous post. Then the new sky layer could be dragged beneath the original image.

[MikeFromMesa]

I'm at a loss to explain why you can't move the layers even when the "Lock position" icon is deselected.

Here's my layers list after moving the sky image. The "P1000099" image is a RW2 RAW image. The "clouds 02" image is a JPG:
raw layers 01.jpg
I noticed that your RAW background image does not have the "Raw Adjustments" layer which is created when a RAW image is opened. Did you do some kind of merge to the original image? I don't think that should make a difference for re-ordering layers, but....

When you open an image, the first (bottom) image determines the image size. I've found that funky things can happen when trying to create a bottom layer that is a different size, so I do the following:

1. Open the RAW image.
2. Open the sky image and copy it to the Clipboard.
3. In the RAW image, use Edit...Paste as Layer to get the sky at the top of the layer stack.
4. Drag the layer handles of the sky layer so it fits the width of the RAW image.
5. With the sky layer as the active layer, use Layout...Image...Bring to Document Size to get the sky layer to fit the background RAW image.
6. Remove the lock icon from the bottom RAW image. (In fact, this step is unnecessary on my setup.)
7. Drag the sky image below the RAW image.

Then you can use the layer properties of the RAW image to set it to allow transparency before using, for example, the Autotransparency tool to make the areas of sky transparent so that the replacement sky shows.

It is taking me some time to work my way through the user manual (it is very long) and learning the functionality means un-learning some things I am used to doing with other editors. However I did notice that none of your layers are marked as background layers and I think that is the reason I could not re-arrange my layers.

If I duplicate my background layer I get a new "image" layer and then I can re-arrange the layers as I choose, disregarding the now redundant background layer. That has solved "that" problem for me.

As a general rule, understanding how to create and use selections was always the main problem I had with learning PhotoLine as the process is quite different from other editors I have used. Now that I am at least beginning to understand the process, it seems to me to be often quite superior to some of the other selection tools I have used and to require less work with much of it being automated by PhotoLine itself.

To answer some of your questions:

> Did you do some kind of merge to the original image?

Yes. I first loaded the raw image, then adjusted it and then merged all of the layers to simply the following work.

> Drag the layer handles of the sky layer so it fits the width of the RAW image.

Up to this point my work flow has been similar (other than adjusting the raw image before copying the sky). The idea was that if I adjusted the base image and then merged all of the adjustment layers it might be easier to create the selection because there would be more contrast between the colors I wanted to separate. Perhaps that idea is wrong, but it is why I did the adjustments prior to copying the sky.

> Drag the sky image below the RAW image.

I can only do that if my base layer is not a background layer. Now that I have solved that problem I can re-arrange as I wish.

All of your steps after this step are new to me and I need to look at them carefully so I can understand what you are doing. Thank you for being so clear as to what your steps are as I am sure there is information in there that will explain things to me.