Using layer masks and adjustment layers - Photoshop Tutorial

- While adjustment layers are quite powerful the ability to further refine them with advanced layer masking really gives Photoshop its strengths. Other tools like Lightroom and other photo editors often let you brush in effects. But the ability to precisely target is what makes Photoshop Photoshop. In this example, I've changed the color here of the scooter. And to do this, we used a hue saturation adjustment layer, but one with the precise mask. If the mask wasn't applied, which I could temporarily disable by shift clicking, you'll see that it affects too much of the image. And even if we change the blending mode to something like hue or color, you see how it produces unwanted results in the background. Well, let's turn this layer off for a moment and select the background. What I'm going to do is make a selection here based upon color. Photoshop offers several ways to do this, but I'll choose the method called select color range. Now I could click on the object to make the initial selection and then adjust the fuzziness. Notice how this controls, where the selection is made. If I hold down the shift key, I can continue to click to add more. However, if it gets too far of an area, just hold down the option or alt key and you could subtract. The key is to try to get a good selection. Let's tighten up the fuzziness there a little bit and try the option here called localize color clusters. Now it's easier to control what's selected. And as you continue to click, it grows the selection. If there's parts you don't want, just hold down the option key and also click and those will be subtracted. This looks pretty good. And I'll just increase the fuzziness for a gentler selection. Now, when I click okay, we get our initial selection and it looks pretty good. I see just a few areas I want and don't want like this little outlier here. Using the ellipse tool, I could hold down the option or alt key to subtract and remove that. Similarly I could hold down the shift key and drag to add, and you see how it puts it into play. Any lasso tool like the polygonal lasso here for example, could be useful for picking up areas you might have slightly missed. And now we've got a pretty good selection. Let's click here on the adjustments, layer icon, and add hue and saturation. Now with that adjustment layer selected, you see how easy it is to make a change. I could just roll through the hue to change the color of the bike or click the colorize option and it's even easier to dial in a whole new color, such as blue control the saturation and the lightness of the effect. This makes it super easy to target. If you notice that there's areas being affected, that you don't want, that's a simple fix. Let's just zoom in here a little bit command plus, and with the layer mask selected, I can choose my paintbrush. I'll paint with black here to subtract. This will let me remove parts here from the light. If I hit the X key for toggle, I can now paint with white and see I can add in some of the areas that might've been slightly missed. So it's easy to refine that and brush in as needed. Notice with the mask selected how simple it is to tell what is and isn't being painted. This allows you as you make that color change to pick up any areas you might've missed by simply brushing. And if you got over, like for example, if it bled into the Chrome, just flip on over and remember black subtracts, and it becomes quite simple to pick up any missing areas. If you need to, you can go back to the white and lower the opacity of your brush. This way you could brush in and paint in small areas at lower intensity, where there's transition, giving you the flexibility to really blend that in nicely. That's looking pretty solid. I see a few rain spots here, so let's just flip over and paint with white and that's looking great. And we'll just finish up the front of the grill, nice. So now we've got a well-targeted adjustment on the bike itself. If I toggle that on and off, you see that we can dial in just about any color that the manufacturer decided to make that year. Need a mint green scooter, no problem. How about Tangerine? As you see, it's super flexible and we can get the results that we need in a matter of seconds.