Newbie seeks help with layering

The FWIW info: I have been trying to learn the elements of Photoshop through Nat Gertler’s book Project Photoshop 7 , if anyone has that to refer to. I am fighting with a mini-project very similar to Procedure 3 in Project 3 ("The Baseball Card"). I am working on a Mac Powerbook G4 running OS 10.3.9

My problem involves layering. I have cropped and loaded a picture (Layer 1). It is completely covered by a second layer of solid color (Layer 2). What I want to do is cut a rectangular-shaped hole in the Layer 2 so that part of Layer 1 shows through it.

I couldn’t do this with the cropping tool. According to the manual, I should be able to do it with some combination of the rectangle tool and the Subtract-From-Shape-Area option on the top bar. But I can’t get these two to work together. Clicking the rectangle tool only gives me the Shape Layers, Paths, and Fill Pixels options. The only way to get the Subtract-From-Shape-Area is to choose the Rectangular Marquee Tool, but no combination of the two will subtract the selected area from Layer 2 — all I get are the marquee lines.

I don’t know whether the problem is a result of a faulty copy of Photoshop, some problem with my own computer, or the result of my own incompetence. Any suggestions would be mightily appreciated.

I can see a couple of places where you might have gotten confused to get to this point. First, the layer used
in the example is a standard layer, not a Fill Layer. If you added a fill layer, the subtract option will not be
there. You also cannot use the subtract option if you
drew the original rectangle with the Fill Pixels option. You want the Shape Layer option.

Beyond that, well, it’s hard to diagnose these things
remotely.

–Nat Gertler

Kesvirit wrote:

snip<

My problem involves layering. I have cropped and loaded a picture (Layer 1). It is completely covered by a second layer of solid color (Layer 2). What I want to do is cut a rectangular-shaped hole in the Layer 2 so that part of Layer 1 shows through it.

I couldn’t do this with the cropping tool. According to the manual, I should be able to do it with some combination of the rectangle tool and the Subtract-From-Shape-Area option on the top bar. But I can’t get these two to work together. Clicking the rectangle tool only gives me the Shape Layers, Paths, and Fill Pixels options. The only way to get the Subtract-From-Shape-Area is to choose the Rectangular Marquee Tool, but no combination of the two will subtract the selected area from Layer 2 — all I get are the marquee lines.

snip<