Understand. But I still smell the misconception rat (blind leading the blind).
As you know, it's exceedingly common for shaded artwork to involve grads and blends which transition from midtone to shade, midtone to highlight, etc., etc. You can't separate those as saved selections according to highlight, midtone, shadow.
And we've seen countless instances in this forum of beginners thinking that Layers have to correspond to colors. In my experience, instructors are just as often beginners as are their students, and suffer under the same misconceptions.
As usual, example of the artwork needs to be shown, or a better description of the problem needs to be clarified.
JET
