Hey guys, this is Matt Kor from ControlPaint.com and especially if you're just starting out with digital painting, getting clean edges and smooth transitions might just seem like an impossible task. How are people doing it? Well, everybody's got a different technique, but a lot of the videos on this site are going to talk about something that I call temp layers. I'm going to give it an underlying, no two underlines and one little caveat because it is so important to the way that I work. It's not the way everyone works, but this is in my opinion a great way to get clean, controlled painting. So what are temp layers? Well, first off, the caveat is that this is a term I made up and you will not find in other tutorials and you won't find it in Photoshop's menus. All it means is using layers temporarily. So for instance, if I wanted to add, I don't know, some stripe on top of this instead of just painting on what I already have, I'd make a new layer first and then I'd start my painting. So maybe I'll put the stripe right here. So because it is its own layer, a temp layer in my language, you can do a few things. You can free transform it. Maybe you didn't get it in quite the right position and you can erase. And this is where the second half, the really the most important half of temp layers comes into play. What I just did there was additive. I added pigment. And I'm not done. Next I subtract pigment. I'm going to sort of shape what I laid down. So maybe I'll switch to harder eraser and kind of clean up that edge a little bit. Same thing over here. Or I could switch to a softer eraser and maybe I want to fade it. So I have like less pigment on the sides and more in the middle. Or maybe I switch back to the harder eraser again and even curveable shapes out of it. Something like this, if you just looked at that stripe and you didn't know how I made it, it might look really tricky. If all you could do was add pigment, so I try and recreate that, it would be hard. It would probably look sloppy. But you can achieve results that are much cleaner if you acknowledge the fact that half of painting is subtractive. Now this is very different from traditional painting. And I think it's important to point that out. If you learned how to do oil paintings, this is not how you would learn. But Photoshop is not oil painting. We have more options. So I'm going to do a little more painting here and I'll show you really how great temp layers can be. It's not just adding stripes. So here I want to darken underneath this lip a little bit here. So I'll make a new layer, select that color and maybe darken it a little bit. And I'm painting with a hard brush. And this is because I'm concentrating on that top edge. I'm less concerned about the bottom edge. You notice I'm also kind of going over the boundary on the right side. That's fine. And then I'm just going to paint lower because I know I'm going to erase it in just a minute. Okay, so that's part one. I concentrated on this top edge. That's the careful one. Now I'm going to do the erasing. So I'll go to a harder eraser and really chop off the things I don't want. Okay. And then I could go to a softer eraser and really fade this transition back in. So what I've done there is I've painted a relatively tricky transition that included both a hard edge at the top and a soft edge at the bottom. And it was all possible because that layer was temporarily separate from the rest of the document. You can see here if I were to get the move tool, I can shift it around its own layer. Now I don't need them forever. You'll notice by working in this method, you'll end up with lots and lots of extra layers. This is where the temp part comes into play. I have another keyboard shortcut, which is merge down. And this just takes one layer at the current layer and squashes it onto the layer below. So what I do over time is just merge down a few different times so that I can take a few of those most recent temp layers and just have them as a single thing. Once you're not actively editing the stripe or whatever you've recently added, it doesn't really need to be a zone layer anymore. So temp layers are something that are absolutely baked into all the control paint videos. You'll see me using this all the time. It's not the only way to paint, but it really makes things easier if what you're going for is clean rendering. Now in the next video, I'm going to talk about how to accelerate this process with keyboard shortcuts, but I encourage you to just give this a try. Make a new layer, add some paint, carve some away, and then start the whole process over again. Have fun. Thanks for coming to the site, guys.