Activate onion skin on only one layer?

[Celia5E7C]

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.

[Nancy OShea]

See Onion Skin settings.  Changing opacity might help.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/creating-timeline-animations.html#specify_onion_skin_setting...

[ElPi ngas]

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

[Bojan Živković]

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

[gageu22609394]

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]

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..

[nack8]

Hey there. Any luck figuring this out?

[ElPi ngas]

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.