Digital Slimdown, Part 4, Merging Masks
Digital Slimdown, Part 4, Merging Masks
by Jen White
Have you taken a hard look at your Layers panel lately? There’s a very good chance that you’re leaving a lot of unnecessary megabytes mucking up the edges of your layer masks. Here’s what I’m talking about:
On your scrapbook page, you don’t see the pixels outside of the masks, but that doesn’t mean they are not adding to the filesize of your layout. They are!
Do you need those pixels? If you’re done editing, then NO!
CAUTION: I do not merge my masks in the Layers panel until I know I’m done editing.
How To Merge a Layer Mask
- In the Layers panel, Right click on a layer mask and choose Apply Layer Mask.
How To Merge a Clipping Mask
- In the Layers panel, Right click on a clipped layer (not on the thumbnail) and choose Merge Down.
NOTE: I recommend keeping Smart Objects disabled in Preferences. But if you have it enabled, and any of your layers are smart objects, you may need to simplify/rasterize the smart object layer(s) before you can apply or merge. To simplify/rasterize a smart object, Right click on the layer (not on the thumbnail) and choose Simplify/Rasterize Layer.
Let’s take a kook at what this did for this scrapbook page:
Okay. I knew that merging the masks would make a difference, but I was totally blown away by the enormous number of megabytes I saved. Wow!
Are unmerged masks usually on your radar? Since you’ve see how many megabytes I saved above, will they be on your radar now?
If you slim down a document by merging masks, let me know how many megabytes you saved in a comment below.
Digital Slimdown Series:
Part 1: Moving from PSD to TIFF
Part 2: Deleting Hidden Layers
Part 3: Cropping the Edges
Part 4: Merging Masks
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Author: Jen White | Contact Us
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That’s a crazy amount, I have some serious work to do!
Thank you so much for this wonderful information. I have been so surprised at how much space I can save!
Always looking to save space so thanks for the reminders!!
Great info and also a lot of work ahead. But so glad to save space!
That certainly is eye opening. I use so many layer masks I could probably decrease a terabyte 🙂
Wow! I don’t think I’ve ever thought of the extra pixels a layer mask adds to a document. I’d probably merge a photo with a layer mask with straight defined edges, but I’m not sure I would with a mask that has a pattern on the edges