The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

Sorry I've missed you the last couple of weeks. I just returned home from a lengthy Photoshop jaunt and ran into the usual snaggles and snafus trying to send this tip from the road (it takes about six hours to send it out on my office ISDN connection, so you can imagine how long it takes on a modem connection). Now that I'm back, let's jump in and revisit Photoshop 6.0's Layer Sets. We explored the basics about a month ago, and now we're ready to get into some more juicy stuff. If you haven't read the first tip yet, point your browser to www.digitalmastery.com/tips and take a look.

If you'd like to color code a bunch of layers, then link those layers together (by clicking to the left of the preview thumbnail for each layer), choose Layer>New>Layer Set From Linked and choose the color you'd like from the dialog box that appears. Now that all the layers within the set (it looks like a folder) are color coded, you can click on the trash icon at the bottom of the Layers palette (assuming the layer set is active) and click the Set Only button when prompted. That will delete the set, but keep the layers that were inside it and will retain the color-coding that you applied.

You can drag a set to the new set icon at the bottom of the Layers palette (it looks like a folder) to duplicate the set, but how do you duplicate multiple sets? Well, link the sets you'd like to duplicate by clicking in the area to the left of the folder icon for each set (on the layer set itself, not at the bottom of the Layers palette). Next, create a new document that is in the same mode as the one that contains the sets (RGB, CMYK, etc.). Now, use the Move tool, click in the document that contains the sets and drag over to the new document (drag from the document window, not the Layers palette). That should copy the sets to that document. Finally, drag from the new document back to the original and the sets should have been copied.

In a previous tip, we talked about the basics of Layer Masks, but now let's see how Layer Masks apply when Layer Sets are involved. Usually, you can have only one layer mask per layer, but if you put that layer into a set and add a Layer Mask to the set, then you can effectively have two layer masks applied to the layer.

Just make sure the layer set is active, then choose Layer>Add Layer Mask. A Layer Mask applied to a set will limit where all the layers within the set show up. If you'd like to be able to partially see through multiple layers, you can put those layers in a set and then lower the opacity setting on the set (at the lop of the layers palette).

When you use any of the commands available under the Image>Adjust menu, they will only apply to the layer that is currently active. To apply an adjustment to multiple layers, you'd have to choose Layer>New Adjustment Layer instead. Then the adjustment would show up as its own layer in your Layers palette and it would affect all the layers below it, but none of the layers above. You can limit the number of layers it applies to by putting the Adjustment Layer into a Layer Set and then changing the blending mode of the set. To do that, click on the layer set in the Layers palette and then change the menu that appears at the top of the Layers palette from Pass Through to Normal. Once you've done that, the adjustment layer will only apply to the layer that are in that set.

Next week I'll premiere a new free service. Until this year I've always prided myself on being able to answer just about every question that was sent to me. But as the number of readers and subscribers to my books and tiplist increases, I just haven't been able to keep up with my overflowing in-box. If you're one of those I haven't responded to, please accept my apologies. So, in an effort to do a better job helping everyone get a little smarter with Photoshop, I'm going to start a new section on my web site, which will be titled the *Photoshop Questions of the Week.* In that section, I'll pick the top five questions I get (give or take a few) and answer them so everyone can increase their knowledge of Photoshop. And, of
course, this new feature will be 100% free for anyone who would like to visit my web site. I'll announce the location of the *Photoshop Questions of the Week* in next week's tip, but for now, you can send your questions to questions@digitalmastery.com.

-Ben Willmore