diarrhea

I'm currently working on a design and come to a point where I want to optimize my work. I have two layers both have its blend mode set to "Overlay".

The top one is at 40% opacity and the second one is at 19% opacity. My question is... How do I merge the two and yet still retain the look that I see on screen? It perfectly fine if both Layers are identical in terms of blending mode and opacity, but when both are different I have a hard time collapsing the two together so that they look exactly what I saw before collapsing it. I've been living with this for a long time but now I need to know a solution to this.

Is it possible?

jokitty714

I'm assuming there is a third layer beneath the two Overlay layers. Turn that layer off. Use Merge Visible. The resulting layer will be in Normal mode and 100% opacity, but the actual fill will reflect the original opacity of the previous two layers. Reset this merged layer to Overlay and you should see an identical effect.

Welles

Another possible solution is to add a new blank layer, link the three and then merge linked. That'll do it, I believe. I have to do that regularly with complex styled layers.

MisterMister

I run into this problem a lot and the best solution I have found is to make a new layer and then Stamp Visible (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E), which merges a copy of all visible layers into the current layer (the new one you created).

Hope this helps.

- dc

Rantin Al

Alternative recipe, same flavour.

Top layer active:

Select > All, (Command + A)
Copy merged, (Command + shift + C)
Paste, (Command + V)

This creates a new layer and pastes the final into a new layer.
It retains the construction layers for re-editing if required.
Just flatten the image if absolutely final.

(Substitute Control for Command on PC)

Cheers, Al.

diarrhea

Thank you for reply.

I just tried all method mentioned and have close look at the pixel and it seems very different. This is harder than I thought. For that I've attached a psd file for you to experiment. My goal is to merge the two overlay layers into one in such a way that it retain the look and still be able to move this merged layer around or into another document.

Edit: I don't think there's a solution to this. Suppose overlay1 filled with colour A and overlay2 filled with colour B. Once you merged the two together you have a whole new colour and let's call it C. Since C being a new colour from merging, setting its blending mode to overlay would result in a different colour! than to have (A overlay B) and overlay the bottom layer. Which is very different from C overlay the bottom layer. IF that's hard to understand. How about this: You're trying to put two different pixel into one pixel.

Welles

I have to admit, I don't think there is a solution either. I just tried and while the results are sort of close the merged former overlay layers just don't have the same effect on an identical background layer no matter what I tried. |

Rantin Al

When you merge the 'Overlay' layers, the resultant is set to Normal and 100% Opacity by default. The merged layers may have transparency but the actual layer is set to 100%.

It is usually better to retain the layers until you have finalised the image.

Cheers, Al.

Bacardi

Overlay is the opposite of Hard Light. Both ignore medium grey, but overlay uses the data of the underlying layer to nfluence the brightness of the top layer.

So I tried placing two layers filled with medium grey (128,128,128) each one below one of your overlay layers. And setting the one between the two overlays to Hard Light . Making the background invisible, I merged those four layers. When I then looked at your result, flattened, and the one I created, also flattened (I only have your background and one layer, like you asked) on a layer on top of it and set to difference, all I got was black. There seems to be no difference. At 1600% there was a *very* slight hue on some pixels, but that is due to the fact that all calculations must end somewhere.

diarrhea

I agreed with Erik, the different are very subtle. It's just a slight change in brightness (in my case). I guess I was going after perfection. As of now, I think the way to do it (optimize layers) is to create a folder layer and place the two overlay layers into it. Or just make a backup and flatten it or flatten into a new layer and start experimenting with that layer.

Thank you all for putting your time into this. It was an eye opener for me.