What is a active layer in Photoshop?

Answer 1

An active layer is anything that is being used at the time. Usually it has an "eye" peeking out from a box. If you want the layer to be inactive then you just click on the eye and it will turn the layer off. Active layers are there to show what layers are currently being used. It helps me when I'm drawing because if I make a mistake and there are multiple layers active then I can turn them off and see just what layer I made the mistake on.

Answer 2

Look at it like this. Say you have 3 sheets of transparency paper. You draw something separately on all of them. Then you stack them on top of one another and you have a one final project. They are used for editing one piece of the final artwork at a time while keeping them in the same file. You start with a background that is locked. Then you add text from the toolbar and that's a separate layer. Then say you wanted to add a shape or a picture. You would use that as another layer. The main purpose is to be able to add or subtract certain aspects of the drawing that you do or don't like without starting completely over.

Answer 3

Imagine several transparency sheets, like the kind used for overhead projectors (or tracing paper if you don't know what that is).

You can draw on a transparency sheet and make it look very nice, but you might be afraid to do much else in case you ruin your previous work. What you can do now is place another sheet on top, and draw on that instead.

In Photoshop, that is called 'adding a layer'.

Layers are pieces of a work that are placed on top of each other. You can edit or move one without affecting the others. You can also link them together, merge them (which makes two layers into one) change their order (top to bottom) and delete them.

This makes Photoshop a lot more versatile.