Layers
The Layers tab holds a Photoshop-style stack composited over your render.
The render is the base
The bottom layer is always Render: whatever feeds the CS Layers node, normally the Render Layers node. Adding the first layer (or Start from Render) puts CS Layers straight after Render Layers, creates a compositor tree with a Viewer if the scene has none, and moves the Render Layers' other links onto it.
- Insert After "node" puts the group after the compositor's active node instead.
- Take Out removes it and reconnects what was on either side.
Kinds of layer
Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
Image | A cutout, a sky, a texture. Thumbnails in the list |
Fill | Solid colour, or a linear or radial gradient |
Group | Holds sublayers |
Adjustment | Compositor nodes applied to everything below |
Remove | A hole filled from around it |
Clone | Everything below, shifted, painted in through a mask |
Depth of Field / Fog | Blur and haze by distance |
+ adds image files through Blender's file browser in thumbnail view. Select several to add them all, first file on top. The menu beside it adds the other kinds.
Layer properties
- Visibility, blend mode (Normal plus 18 modes, under Photoshop's names), opacity.
- Clip: only show where the layer below is (Photoshop's clipping mask).
- Lock: no moving, rotating, scaling or re-pinning.
- Color Label: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet or grey, to find a layer at a glance. Pick it from the swatches under Clip and Lock, or right-click the list. The colour shows beside the layer in the list, on its frame in the compositor, and on the layer in an exported Photoshop file.
- Image layers: flip horizontally and vertically; X/Y offset in pixels from the frame's centre, rotation and scale. Press G, R or S over the image to transform the active layer.
How it builds the nodes
The stack compiles into a per-scene CS Layers node group, rebuilt on every change. Inside, each layer's nodes sit in a frame named after it, coloured by kind, left to right from the bottom of the stack. Node names carry each layer's id, so reordering never mixes them up.
Layer via Copy and Select Pixels
- Layer via Copy (Ctrl+J) copies the selected pixels into a new layer, in place: from the active image layer, or from the render. For patching, cloning a window or extending a sky.
- Select Pixels selects where the active layer is: Photoshop's Ctrl-click on a layer thumbnail. Shift adds, Alt subtracts.