From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Introducing adjustment layers - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Start my 1-month free trial

Introducing adjustment layers

“

- [Instructor] Adjustment layers are a powerful way to make non-destructive edits like changing color or tonal values in an image or to a portion of an image. So in a perfect world, if we have access to original raw files, then we should probably make these types of adjustments in Camera Raw, or in Lightroom Classic's develop module, or in the edit stack in Lightroom in order to maintain the highest quality possible. But there are definitely times when we either don't have access to the raw file or maybe the area that we need to select is much easier to select in Photoshop than it is in those other programs. So let's see how we can take advantage of using adjustment layers. We can add them by either choosing the layer menu and then selecting new adjustment layer, or at the bottom of the layers panel, I can click on the adjustment layer icon and then add an adjustment layer. I'll start with hue and saturation, and we can see all of the different options in the properties panel. Some of the adjustment layers have presets that we can select from, so we can try these out. And of course, none of the changes are permanent, so we can try as many of these as we want to, and we're not hurting the original image. If you find one that you like but you want to make modifications to it, we can just change the sliders and customize it in order to make it our own. If we like these settings and we think we're going to use them again, we can use the fly out menu and choose to save this as a preset. I'll call it JK sepia, and then save that. And now it'll appear in that preset list. Now, if we look at the layers panel, we see that the hue saturation adjustment layer is its own layer. So we could always toggle the visibility of the layer, make it visible again. We could throw away the layer if we don't want it. Or we can make edits to it at any time. We can also change the opacity of the layer as well as change the blend mode. For now I'll leave it to normal at 100%. Course, we're not limited to just one adjustment layer. I'll go ahead and add a second brightness and contrast adjustment layer. And let's just brighten this up a bit, as well as add more contrast. And we can see to the right of the adjustment icon is a layer mask. And these masks work like any other layer mask in Photoshop. If I tap the B key to select the paintbrush and I select a large brush and decrease the opacity, maybe to 30%, then I can start painting with black in that mask, and it will hide the adjustment that I just made. So here I'm hiding the brightness and contrast that I just added around the edges of my image. When I'm finished, if I save this as a layered Photoshop file or a TIF file and then I reopen it later, I can always come in and edit any of these adjustment layers. For now I'll go ahead and decrease the opacity to 50%. And if we hold the option key on Mac or the alt key on Windows, and I click on the eye icon next to the background, we can see a before and then after. So you can see how easy it is to add adjustment layers in order to make flexible, non-destructive edits to your images.

Contents