From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

Using adjustment layers to change color and tone - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Photography

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Using adjustment layers to change color and tone

- [Instructor] This chapter on adjustment layers picks up where my Essential Training Basics leaves off. If you're unfamiliar with adjustment layers, then be sure to watch the Adjustment Layer Essential chapter in the Basic course where we cover the key benefits of using adjustment layers and how to adjust the tonal and color values, using adjustment layers such as levels and curves, hue, saturation, vibrance, color balance and more. I'm going to start by opening this WhalersBay.psd file into Photoshop and using Command + zero on Mac, Control + zero on Windows in order to zoom to fit on screen. Now, throughout this course, you'll notice that I'll be closing several of the panels on the right and displaying only the ones that we'll be covering in the lesson just in order to keep the interface a bit less cluttered and easier to navigate. So in this image, I want to make a change to de-saturate this boat, as well as adjust the color of the smaller building in the background. Now, before we start adding adjustment layers, I want to be clear that if I am working with raw files, I'll want to make as many adjustments to my color and tonal values in either Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw before I open the file into Photoshop because the quality is going to be higher if you make the adjustment to the raw file. But in this image, we can see on the Layers panel, there's two layers. There's the Original and then the Retouched layer. So I've already invested a significant amount of time in doing the retouching so I don't want to return to the raw file in order to make changes to the boat. Plus, it's going to be easier for me to select the boat in Photoshop and it was going to take less time than if I actually painted in my adjustment using Lightroom or Camera Raw. So to make the selection, I will choose the Object Selection tool. It's set to the rectangular mode and I will click and drag over the boat in the foreground. Then I'll use Command + 1 in order to zoom in and then hold down the space bar to reposition the image so that I can see the boat. At the bottom of the Layers panel, I will choose the adjustment layer icon and then select Hue and Saturation and I'm going to move the saturation all the way down to the left. It's definitely more than I want but it's going to show me very quickly any areas that Photoshop selected that it actually didn't want it to. So when I had that selection and I made that adjustment layer, Photoshop automatically turned the selection into a mask. I can hold down the Option key or Alt key on Windows and click on the mask. So we see where the mask is white. That's where we can see the adjustment. Where the mask is black, that's where it's hiding the adjustment. All right, that tells me, if I toggle on the visibility of that layer and I tap the B key to select my paintbrush, and before I start painting, I'm actually going to right click or Control + click on Mac and reset the tool just so we're all starting in the same place. I'm going to want to paint with black anywhere that I want to hide this adjustment. So I'll tap the x key and that will give me black as my foreground color and then I'll use the right arrow key in order to get a little bit larger of a brush and I have the opacity set to 100%. And I can just paint over these areas anywhere that I want to hide the mask. Now, you'll notice that I have painted over a few areas that I may not have wanted to. And that's just because I'm doing the larger changes first. Then I'm going to get a smaller brush and come in here and do a little bit more of the detail work right in there. Maybe over in here, and then since I did paint too much in some areas, all I need to do is tap the X key. That exchanges my foreground and background color and then I'll come in here and now I'm painting with white and white is going to show me the contents of the layer. In this case, it's the adjustment, turning it to grayscale, using the hue and saturation adjustment layer. So I'm just going to come in here and do any touch-ups but you can see, all I'm having to do really is touch up along the edges. I'll go ahead and use the space bar in order to scoot over to the right. So instead of having to paint the entire thing, I'm just doing some touch-up. Excellent, I'm going to use Command + zero in order to zoom back out. So I don't really want the saturation all the way down to -100, so I'll click on the icon for the adjustment and in the Properties panel, I'll go ahead and just move that saturation up to maybe -70 or so and I'd like to add a slight feather to the mask, so I'll click on the mask icon, making sure that the mask is selected or targeted in the layers panel and then just add a slight feather, maybe about 1.3 pixels. All right, if I want to make another adjustment, say for example, I might want to lighten the boat as well, I can add a second adjustment layer. I'll select Curves and then use the Properties panel in order to click and drag up to lighten the boat. But we can see that all of the layers below the curves adjustment layer in the Layers panel are being altered. So what I need to do is I need to create a clipping mask so that the curve will only affect the boat and if I clip it to the hue and saturation adjustment layer because it already has that mask, it will only display the curve within that mask. So at the bottom of the Properties panel, I will click on the Create Clipping Mask icon and now we can see that the curve is only affecting the boat. All right, I'll make one last adjustment here. I'll return to the Objection Selection tool, click and drag around the smaller hut in the background there and then at the bottom of the layers panel, I'll click on the adjustment layer. This time I'll add a Color Balance adjustment layer. One of the nice things about color balance is that you can adjust the shadows, mid tones and highlights independently of one another. So in this case, I'm going to move the cyan-red slider a little bit over to the right, adding a bit of red, and then the yellow-blue slider I'll move to the left in order to make that a little bit more yellow. Again, we can toggle on and off the visibility. It's a slight change but it makes it pop just a bit more. So while in an ideal world, it would be best to make these adjustments to the raw file because although Photoshop's adjustment layers are nondestructive in that I can make changes to them at any time, I can toggle them off, I can delete them, but eventually, if I'm making changes to the pixels, when I flatten this or I export this, there is a potential loss of quality, especially if I'm making large adjustments to eight-bit images. However, I'm making quite a small adjustment to these, so I think we'll be okay. Plus, there are times when I might not have access to the raw file. It might have been captured as a JPEG or perhaps I was given a TIFF to do some retouching on and as we can see, when I've already invested a lot of time retouching the file, then it's much easier to make quick selections as well as small adjustments in Photoshop. So for all these scenarios, using adjustment layers can really help us change color and tone in our images.

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