In Krita layer has many properties. And we can utilize these properties to make our work more organized and faster. If you want to follow along right away, just download and use the file I provided for this lesson. First is the visibility of the layer. To hide or to show a layer, we can click on these eye symbols at the left side of each layer. Click to hide and click again to show the layer.
Okay, next is locking. We can lock a layer by clicking on its padlock symbol in here. If this is on, the layer is locked, meaning we cannot make any changes on this layer. We cannot move it nor edited such as painting or erasing on this layer. Now you might be wondering, why do we need to lock a layer? Well, when you are working on complex image composition, we are Do you have a lot of layers in place, it is common to accidentally thin on wrong layers or accidentally move them locking layer will secure the layer from any accidental changes.
Okay. This button in here is called alpha inheritance. Now because to discuss our inheritance thoroughly we also need to discuss about group layer. So we will cover this more in depth in the next lesson. Okay, for now, let's just move on to alpha lock. The Alpha lock option, which is this checker like symbol at the right side of each layer will lock the transparency of a layer from any changes.
We can still pane and edit the colors inside it but we won't be able to add more pixel area outside the existing pixel area. So essentially, this is different from the lock layer at the left side which will lock everything. To see the difference. If we lock this layer and try to pane on this layer, the cursor already show no candle symbol. And if we try to draw a stroke, it will display this warning message that the layer is locked. Okay, but if we only lock the alpha, we can use the brush tool.
And let's say we want to use a red color and then paint on this layer. We can see we can only paint on existing pixels, we won't be able to draw on this transparent area. This alpha lock is very useful when we need to do recovering or adding details to certain existing area but we don't want to alter its physical area. The last layer property we are going to discuss in this lesson is layer coloring. Sometimes when our composition become very complex, it will be very helpful. To add color to our layers, so we can spot and access them faster.
To give layer a color, we can simply right click on the layer and then choose any of these colors. For example, let's pick yellow color in here, or let's pick another color, for example read, etc. If you want to clear the color, we can right click again and click on this X button. Another way to access layer properties is by going to the Layer Properties window. To access it, we can select a layer and then click on this button down here or by right clicking on a layer and then choose Properties. We can see the layers properties from this window such as naming the layer, picking color for it, turning the visibility on or off, locking the layer etc.
But honestly, most of the time, you will never need to open this window because you can access all of these options directly from the layer darker. There is one functionality that you can access from within this panel, which is these channels checkboxes. With this you can turn on or off certain channel of your layer, but it is very rare that you need this feature.