PS 17 - Color your Layers and Groups

14 January, 2014

Color help you to visually identify a set of layers or groups easily. You can also use the filter option to isolate one set of colors.


You have the Primary and Secondary colors + Gray in the layer palette. You can assign any one of the seven colors to any group or layers.

You can have only these seven colors and cannot create your own custom color.

(fig 1.0)

Right-click anywhere on the layer or group to see the colors from the popup menu. To see only the colors, right-click on the eye icon.

(fig 2.0)

You can have different color for different groups for visual clarity.

On the left (fig 3.0 - 1) i have child 1 and child 1a inside a group called 'Parent'. Child 1 has yellow, child 1a has green and parent has red.
If i rename the parent group (top most group), then all the groups and the layers under the parent group will change to red color.

When assigning colors to groups, always start from the top.

Example:
01. Parent
02. child 1
03. child 1a
Child 1 will overwrite the parent color and child 1a will overwrite the child 1 color.

If you start from inside, then it will overwrite all the colors (image on the right (fig 3.0 - 2))

(fig 3.0)

If you drag and drop a no-color layer to a colored group, the layer will automatically takes the group color.

(fig 4.0 - 2)
But, if you drag and drop a colored layer (red) into a different colored group (yellow) then the original color remains (red). But if you group the layer (red), then the group color will be change to yellow.

(fig 4.0)

If you group a colored group by selecting 'New Group from layer...' from the layer palette menu, then the new group won't take the layer color; it will be left with no-color.

(fig 5.0)

You cannot set a layer to 'no color' if it is inside a colored group.

(fig 6.0)

Creating a new layer inside a colored group will automatically assign the existing group color.

(fig 7.0)

You can isolate a color through filter in the layers palette filter option. Filter option is helpful if you have a set of one color for a particular group.

Select 'Color' from the filter option, this will turn on the filtering switch automatically. Then select any one of the assigned color from the color selection dropdown (fig 8.0 - 2).

Even-though 'child 1a' is inside 'child 1', it isolates everything and display all the layers of child 1 only (fig 8.0 - 3).

(fig 8.0)

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