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Participant
April 9, 2021
Question

Activate onion skin on only one layer?

  • April 9, 2021
  • 5 replies
  • 2940 views

Hi, I just started animating with photoshop and I was wondering if there was a way to only activate the onion skin mode on specific layers? When I activate it, it always shows all layers and I couldn't figure anything out in the options either.

5 replies

ElPi ngas
Inspiring
October 23, 2025

As evewrything with Adobe, here comes one user suggesting a "workaround", for any future user in 10 years in the future looking up for this same issue that haven't been addressed by then still.

 

For referencing or for dealing with 1 layer bellow, you can move the start of the video layer you don't want the onion skin to show up up to the playhead. This way you can still see the other/s layer/s without having the awful clutter of all the transparency of previous layers.

In this example, Layer 40 is the one I'm working on with onion skin. Layer 39 is the reference/sketch I'm cleaning up. Cropping the starting point of the clip to the playhead (frame I'm working on), makes it not generate onion skin for previous frames. If you are using forward onion skin, do the same but for the end of the clip.

BEAR IN MIND THAT YOU MAY HAVE TO VIEW OTHER FRAME AND GO BACK FOR IT TO APPLY. At least for me, with hardware accel disabled (because adobe hates my 3070) it won't auto-refresh the onionskin when I change the clip's width in the timelin.

 

Edit: This works with more than one layer too, but moving one-by-one gets tedious FAST, since there's no currently an option to change video layers' lenght many at once.

 

nack8
Participant
September 8, 2022

Hey there. Any luck figuring this out?

Participant
January 5, 2022

Just chiming in here to see if anyone has figured it out. It's actually surprising that onion-skinning only the current layer isn't the default, but it seems like there's actually no way to do this. Is that true? That's bananas.

Sefrautic
Participant
April 12, 2022

Yeah, looking for that too, I have no choice only to animate without background at all.

Photoshop is actually quite bad for animating. Animate is far better, but its not raster..

Bojan Živković11378569
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 10, 2021

Only one, single layer? What is purpose then of automation when you work with single layer?

Nancy OShea
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 9, 2021
Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert
ElPi ngas
Inspiring
October 23, 2025

what's the politically correct way of saying "what a lazy answer"?