To fill an empty layer with the current foreground or background color use Alt + Delete or Option + Backspace on the Mac to fill the layer with the Foreground color or Ctrl + Delete or Command + Backspace on the Mac or to fill with the Background color.

This adds a flattened version of the image to the new layer but leaves the layers intact too. Here’s how to have your cake and eat it too (or more accurately, flatten your layers and keep them too).Īdd a new empty layer to the top of the layer stack, click in it and press Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E (Command + Option + Shift +E on the Mac). Sometimes you need, for example, to flatten the layers in an image to sharpen the result but you don’t want to get rid of the layers either.