Oh my goodness. I hope he's gonna do a whole video on working with layers. They are layer power moves and totally not boring. This is a super fun, I like doing this stuff. Anyway, so we're gonna get really, uh, nerdy with layers. I bet you there's gonna be a couple of things in here.

You're gonna be like, oh, you're gonna do that face  and you're gonna be like, ah, it's gonna save loads of time. Have I made it seem interesting? Hopefully. Alright, just get on with it Dan. Let's get in there. Hey, if you wanna play along,  there is a file in here called Layers ai.

You can open it up or just take notes. Um, we're gonna go to the layers panel. Uh, the first easy one is this little Chevron opens up. I've just got one layer and there's  lots of stuff inside of it. Basically like internal layers. Okay, so remember you can open those up.

It's the same with groups. So I've got this group down here. Okay. The good thing about it is  that little red icon there means I've, that's  what I've got selected, okay? And inside of that is the group. So you can go inside of it  and kind of work on things inside of the group.

Okay? Just know that you can twirl a lot of these down. So helpful stuff. Let's open up the background layer. Uh, you can search for stuff. So if you are naming things in your layers, really good.

I've called some of my layers star. You can see here it's just giving my stars  and I can select them all and delete them  or do something to them. Okay? So I can select them all by doing a search. What I find more useful though,  is this option here, the filter. So this go on filter and I want you to show me all  of the text in this document.

It just cuts down everything. There's a text layer. Now you have to have this open for this to view, okay? Otherwise it just, it's closed like that. So open it up and you should only see text  and it's really handy to go, all right, I want you  and you, now I wanna go and change the font  or delete them or something. Okay?

So there's lots of options in here. Like if I wanna see text and groups, I could do that. Okay? Or turn text off. You can turn the tick off shapes  that you've got, effects that you've applied. Link files.

There's lots in here. The thing to remember though, is that it'll stay on. Okay? And you've lost layers in here. Like where are they going? Okay?

You gotta click on this and say Clear all to get, just  to be able to see them all again. Go, huh? What are the big cushions I get  is what does that donut do? So there's a couple of things, right? We know that this is the eyeball, okay? Which just is it visible.

This is the  weird thing where you meant to know. Just click in there and it will lock That  layer no longer moved. The fox is no longer movable. The background is though. Okay, so I'm gonna unlock it. What does all this rest of it do?

So there's this option here at the end. That's an easy one. 'cause that is, uh, I have now got the fox selected. If I want the star underneath  it selected, I can click in there. That's what that little icon does. The color is more to do with the layer.

The layer has the color red. So this little color over here will be scion or blue  or green, whatever, whatever. You've got the layer color as. Okay, what does this thing do? What does the donut do? Okay.

It kind of tries to explain it. I don't know. I find this the worst one. So I have got, oh,  I'm gonna go back to that. I forgot to reset that one. Um, so I've got a star here that has, uh,  a stroke applied to the outside.

It has a hole in the middle. And I wanna apply it to this. We've done it earlier on in the course  with the appearance panel,  but you can also do it with this little donut thing. So what you do is you say, all right, this,  I want to apply it to this one. And what you can do is I've kind of stacked them up here  because this star is just underneath. So this is the star I have  Selected here that has the stroke.

The thing underneath it, I would like to apply the, um,  all the attributes to it, okay? And what you can do is you can just drag it from this layer  to any layer, but  I'm just dragging it to the one underneath. And watch, see it shifted from this to this one here. Now that's the way to move it. Often. That's not what you want to do.

You want  to like duplicate it. So while you're dragging it,  hold down the option key on a Mac, I key on a pc and click  and drag and say, there you go on that one. Okay. It just duplicates attributes. You might be like, oh man, that's really helpful. I don't find that helpful.

It's really weird except  that there's a donut that I have to explain in classes. What does it do? And I find copying  and pasting appearance from the appearance panel is easy. Using the eyedropper is easy. Making graphic styles is easy. The donut, I dunno.

Now, you know, weirdly useful thing  that I use when I'm handing over documents to other people,  I want to name my layers is, let's say I've got a few stars. I know that that one, if I zoom out  and I click on this little bit here is a star. Where's another star? Is that a star at the top there? It's nothing. But what I end up doing is if I go  and click on this, double click the word  and I can name this one instead of group calling it Fox.

And then I hit tab, you can see I've kind  of got upper K star, upper K star. This one here is uh, upper K Star. So I just kind of go through them  and go, all right, that is a star. And I just tab means I don't have  to take my hands off the keyboard. Is that actually helpful for anybody else? I don't know.

I do find it good for tabbing along  and then being able to rename it and sometimes copy  and pasting it can go copy and then go paste, paste, paste. You can't see my hands, but you get the idea. Um, so yeah, click in one  and then tab along to get to the next one to type in it. Alright, another one is sometimes you'll have this closed up  and you'll have multiple layers. And you'll be like, where is this thing in my layers panel? Instead of going through and doing the, do you do this on,  off, on, off, on, off.

Which one is it? Okay,  what you can do is select it over here  and see there's this option, this like little,  um, what is it called? Hourglass, no magnifying glass. Click on that. You see it actually jumps into it  and actually highlights the thing. And you're like, ah, there it's,  and then you can go work on it or name it.

'cause that's what I want. All right, let's star. Now, uh, when you are working, especially like, uh,  using the pen tool, can you see this  red line isn't very good. It's all the way either around the  outside when I'm using my pen tool, it uses  that same red line that comes from the layer. So what you can do is you can go to this layer. My one happens to be called background.

Yours is probably called layer one. You can double click on not the word. You can click on the little icon here  and say, actually you are something like green. Okay? Just to be, it's not done anything. It's not gonna color it.

Really, it's just the preview  around the outside of the vectors. And you can see it just kind of, I don't know. I find it useful sometimes, especially when you are dealing  with something that's, you know, red in the background. You've got red lines. It doesn't really work. Um, another useful one is, let's say I do a search  for my stars and I wanna put them on another layer.

I wanna get 'em off the background layer. Okay? So I'm gonna grab all of these. Uh, actually I've got everything that has a star. You can select them all. Go up to the little fly out menu in the top  of the layers panel and go to collect a new layer.

And all it does is it's put them all in this  layer here called layer two. Okay? And I can call it and call it stars. It's just like a group, okay? But it's on its own layer. It's within this one here.

So sometimes I need to drag it out. So I'm gonna drag it out. So it's on its own layer. It needs to be above the background. So it's a little bit tricky to do,  but you can, yeah, yank them out, get them  as part of their own layer, okay? By using that option in here called collect a new layer.

Just have them selected first. Next is locking layers. We all know that we can go into here  or we can go up the long way and go object and go to lock. Okay? But the shortcut here is really handy. And good one to learn is lock selection.

So on a Mac it's command two. On a PC it's control two. Okay? So that's a handy one to go just this bit here,  instead of trying to find it in this thing  and go, all right, it's part there. Part there it is there. Okay.

And locking it, you can just select it  and go command or control two. Now the big unlock though is well big unlock. See what I did there is I can't select it, right? The problem is, is does everybody do this? Go object, unlock all  and then every single thing  that you might have locked is unlocked. And you're like, Ugh.

Okay. So I'm gonna lock it though. What you can do is you can right click over it  and say unlock just the fox. Okay? So if you've got a couple of things locked,  so lock that. Lock that lock the background, you can just go, all right,  just this, I'm gonna right click it.

Unlock just the cheat sheet. It doesn't work for an entire layer. If you've got the whole layer selected, it doesn't kind  of right, click it and unlock it. So it only works for individual objects where you've used  that kind of, uh, lock selection. But you can just right click it. It's awesome.

Another handy trick is,  let's say I've got some layers going on here. Let, let's actually move, let's go  to, let's use our filters. Show me all the text. Um,  maybe you've got, have that tol down. I wanna put this on its own layer. Click the new layer.

I'm gonna call this layer. Double click it. I'm gonna call it text. Okay? And I'm gonna drag it up, up, up and over above stars. So you've kind of done some really interesting, well,  you've done some organization in your file.

So text stars background and you want to grab it all. Okay? I'm gonna actually use the object unlock all now  'cause I do want everything unlocked. Grab it all, copy it, make a new document. Okay? And you gotta paste it in  and it just dumps the wall in this one layer.

And you're like, huh? Spin A is getting  it all on its own thing. What you can do is you can go to this little option  and say paste. Remember layers. You turn that on,  it'll be on forever, okay? So you can turn it off if you need to.

But when I hit paste now it remembers the layers. It hasn't overridden this  for, I don't need that one anymore. But it broaden all those layers. Okay? That can be really handy when you're trying to like,  you know, reuse stuff in another document  and keep all those layers going. I'm gonna turn mine off, okay?

Uh, for the moment, another super handy one is if you are,  let's say I'm drawing and I'm drawing with my mouse  and I am okay in key for the pencil tool, okay? If I'm drawing, I'm really good,  kind of like moving down like that. But as soon as I have to kind of go up, yep, I find it. My muscles and my hands don't do that very well. I can drag down nicely, but moving up is a bit more wonky. So what you can do is you can  say, all right, I'm gonna draw this.

Okay? And then I want to use the H key  for my hand tool. That's the key there. You can click hold and drag it. Actually, no, it's not the hand tool. You click  and hold down the hand tool  and it's this one here, shift H, okay?

And rotate view tool. The cool thing about this, if you click on that  and you click and drag it, you can move it around,  grab my end key again for my pencil tool,  continue on this line and use that kind of like direction  that I'm good at at drawing. Okay? Down and down, okay? And it's rotated around,  but it actually hasn't done up forever. You can hit a escape key  and it just goes back to the regular view.

So shift H and just drag it to the kind of angle  that you find you might want. You might be using a tablet and drawing. You just find it's better to illustrate okay,  around this kind of direction. We just need to see it upside down. Maybe you're doing packaging, okay? And it's easy to see the barcode  'cause it's on a flap that's opened up.

Do you get what I mean? There'll be lots of use cases,  but now you know, okay, it's kind  of not adjusting the layer, it's just kind of the view  of the layer and you hit escape to get out of it. Cool, huh? Last one is,  there is an option down here to use the clipping mask. I don't use very much. You might find it really useful.

I'm going to work on my background layer. I'm gonna draw on ellipse over the top  of it, get it kinda lined up. It's got no stroke, no fill. I'm gonna use D from the defaults just so I can see it. And whatever's at the top of this group of layers. If I select the layer kind of parent  and had this option here, okay?

Is the make release clipping mask. It does exactly what our command seven does. Control seven on a PC to make a clipping mask. But we're doing layers  and those are some of the, those  are all the things about layers. You're now layer master. Okay?

Lemme know in the comments what your favorite layer tool,  any game changes they've probably won in there. Anyway, I like this nerdy stuff. I hope you did too. I'll see you in the next video.