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Using Adjustment Layers

Lesson 18 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

18. Using Adjustment Layers

Mark explains how to use Adjustment Layers to edit non-destructively. Adjustment layers apply color and tonal adjustments to your image without permanently changing pixel values.
Next Lesson: Using Filters

Lesson Info

Using Adjustment Layers

Let's just play with one of these things. So earlier I changed Karen to black and white. I wanna do that again, but this time I'm gonna use an adjustment layer. So I can go up here and I see the black and white adjustment layer. If I click on that, now I have the ability to go and change the color mix and make the contrast to whatever of Karen exactly like I want, and it's all good. Now, the difference here is I have an adjustment layer and I have a mask and I am affecting all of the layers below the adjustment layer. But what if I just want to make Karen black and white, but I wanna leave the beans in color. Well, normally, you have to work with changing the layer order. So if I put the adjustment layer above the beans but below Karen, the beans are black and white, but Karen is in color. If I move that up, then everything is in black and white. But I just want Karen to be black and white. So I can do that by hitting option and clicking between these two layers, and you'll see that my...

icon turns into a little arrow going down. So when I click on that, it says make this adjustment layer just to the layer below me, that's what that's saying. And so now I have an adjustment layer that's just on Karen. Now, here is the cool thing about an adjustment layer. It comes with a layer mask and all the properties of a layer. So I can click on the layer and I can change the opacity. So let's see what happens if I move this down to maybe 40% or 45%. It just desaturates Karen, and it doesn't make her totally black and white. It just makes her some black and white. I can go all the way up to a hundred percent opacity, and so we have that ability to do that. I can click on the layer mask, now watch this. If I want her face to be in color but her body to be in black and white, on the layer mask, I'm going to get black and I'm going to get a brush by hitting b. I'm gonna increase my brush size by hitting the right bracket, that's the shortcut key. I can do that with the right bracket or the left bracket on the keyboard. And now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna paint on Karen's face. And what we're doing is we're painting out the adjustment brush or the adjustment layer. So we're just painting in her face, and what you can see is if we zoom in on the layer mask here, so I'm gonna zoom in really quickly after I get this done. Okay, so look over here, I'm gonna zoom this in really far. You can see that there's this little area right here on the mask that's black. That's where I painted out that adjustment. And so the color from Karen is coming through that mask. The white is where everything is black and white, which is Karen's body. And then the white around Karen is knocked out from this layer mask. So we're using layers and layer masks to start creating different things. And so we have an adjustment layer that makes Karen black and white, but we've used a mask to remove that adjustment layer on Karen's face, and then we have another layer that, or the beans, and we're seeing all of this stuff work just fine. Okay, let's say we don't like this layer mask. We can just hide it and it goes away. So maybe later we can bring it back. We can do different things. That's the non-destructive part of this thing. Let's do a different adjustment layer. So we're gonna go down here and then let's go into photo filter. And in this photo filter, we can do something, this is similar to having a filter on the front of a camera. We can say, hey, we wanna do a magenta filter. We can change that to be more or less. And so let's do a lot of color here. So we've got this magenta filter here. It's pretty good. And so I will hide that. And again, this is affecting everything. All the beans, everything. So again, I can go in here and click option and click this, now it's just affecting Karen, and just like before, we can paint on the layer mask. We can say I don't want this adjustment to be on Karen. Let's paint that out. And we can do any number of filters and effects here, so we can use the effects that we learned about earlier, we can do that, we can use our different adjustment layers to change different things, and we can do all of that stuff and we can do it non-destructively.

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