Photoshop Ninja
Expert Photoshop tips and tricks for designers and photographers since 2005
Merging the right layers quickly in Photoshop
There are times when you need to merge certain layers together in your Photoshop composition and there are a number of ways to do this quickly and easily.
Certain situations warrant loosing the edibility of keeping all your layers intact, like adding a single layer effect to composted layers, or simply just to reduce the working file size of the document when open in Photoshop. The more layers you have, the more RAM the document consumes, so you have to try and keep a balance between edibility and working file size.
If you are working on a very complex document, sometimes it can also be tricky to work out which layers you want to merge and which you want to keep intact – which I’m going to clear up in this post.
As always in Photoshop there is a number of ways to quickly merge layers. Which technique you choose depends on how you have your layered document setup.
The easiest way is to link together the layers you want to merge and select ‘Merge Linked Layers’ off the layers palette sub-menu, just make sure you haven’t got any rogue layers linked that you don’t want to merge! A quick way to find out if you have rogue layers you don’t want to merge is to switch to the move tool with one of the linked layers active and move it – you should then be able to identify if there are layers that shouldn’t be merged Just hit undo, and go ahead!
Another technique is (if you have been organised with your layer sets!) is to put all your layers you want to merge into a layer set and select ‘Merge Layer Set’ from the layers palette sub-menu. These two techniques suit complex documents with lots of layers.
To avoid merging the wrong layers, sometimes it easier to hide the visibility of all the layers you want to keep intact just leaving the layers you want to merge visible. Then select ‘Merge Visible’ from the layers palette sub-menu. This is good if your layers are all over the place order-wise.
Other times you just want to merge a couple of layers simply and quickly – for this we have the ‘Merge Down’ command – I couldn’t write a tip and not include a shortcut or two! Apple+E merges visible layers down, retaining the name of the layer you have selected.
Finally, for users of Photoshop CS2 and above we have the powerful ‘group into smart object’ command, which offers very flexible resizing due to the original grouped layers data being linked to rather than permanent rasterisation at a given size. I will write all about this in another post.
A final bit of advice is to save your document as a new ‘merged’ version – so if you ever need to get back to the individual layers you have merged you can always pull them out of an older document.
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Written by Jonny Allbut - freelance graphic designer
Last modified: 14 August, 2006 (13:28) | First published: 14 August, 2006
Filed under Photoshop Top Tips, Techniques - Layer No Comments »
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