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Using Adjustment Layers
Then there's another kind of layer when can use, and it's called an adjustment layer. Most of the time, when you wanna adjust a picture, an adjustment will only affect one layer at a time. If you ever want an adjustment to affect more than one layer, then you need to use an adjustment layer. So, let's figure out how they work. I'm gonna go to the bottom of my layers panel, and that's where I'm gonna find an icon that is a half black and half white circle. That's the adjustment layer icon. Now before I click there and do anything, look at what layer is active. Whenever you make a brand new layer, it always a appears directly above the active layer. So, I'm about to create a new layer directly above this texture. I'll go to the adjustment layer icon, and I'm gonna choose hue and saturation. When I do, I get a new layer. It appears directly above the layer I was working on, and this is a special layer called an adjustment layer. An adjustment layer literally contains an adjustment. Just a...
bove my layers panel, here I see the properties, which are the settings for that particular adjustment. And what I'm gonna do is turn on a check box in there called colorize; that'll add color to our texture. Then, I can adjust the hue, which is the basic color. And get any colored background I want. And then we have saturation, which controls how colorful it will be. So if I brought it way, it'll be very colorful, or if I bring it down, you'll barely be able to tell it's had color applied. And then if I wanna brighten or darken the texture as a whole, we have lightness, so I might end up making this really dark. So, really make those photographs standout. And then maybe fine tune the basic color. And how colorful it is. But that is working on this texture, only because I turned on a check box called colorize, and that would add color to a black and white picture. All right, now let's look in our layers panel. Here we have the adjustment layer that I created. The way adjustment layers work is remember it's as if you're standing at the top of the layers panel looking down. If that's the case, would you not see this photograph as being closest to you? And then, below that, you would see another, and another, and another, and you would only see this adjustment layer after you've already seen all these other pictures. And an adjustment layer is kind of like sun glasses. It's as if you're looking through it, and it changes your view of what's underneath. So this adjustment layer right now is only gonna affect the layers that are found underneath it, because it's as if you're standing at the top looking down, and you see all this stuff before you see the adjustment. If I were to click on this adjustment layer, and move it up in my layers stack, then it's going to start affecting additional layers, because if you're looking from the top of the layers panel down, now you're looking through this adjustment layer to certain layers that are found underneath. But any layers that are on top are not affected. So, adjustment layers only affect those layers that are underneath. I'm gonna make it so the only layer that's really underneath is that texture. All right, now let's apply some more adjustments. When I look here, I notice we have two blue skies, but they're not the same color of blue. The one on the left looks to be a little bit more purplish, I think, and this one more bluish. I want the blue skies to be close to matching. So I'm gonna find out what layer is this because I wanna change that layer. Well, this is when auto select layers is useful. If auto select layers in my options bar is turned off, it's never gonna switch layers on me without me asking for it to. And the way I ask it to do so is I make sure the move tool is what I'm currently working in. I hold down the command key, control in Windows, and I click my mouse. And it just changed which layer is active. To confirm it's the layer I want, I'll turn off the eyeball next to the active layer, just to see if what I was expecting to disappear does. Then, with that layer active, I'm gonna create an adjustment layer called hue and saturation. And in hue and saturation, there's a feature we haven't used yet, but it's this little hand icon. If you click on the hand icon, then, if you move your mouse on top of your picture, and you click, it's gonna attempt to isolate the color you click on, so that's the only color you're changing. So, I'm gonna click right here. And I don't know if you noticed or not, but in my adjustment, this menu changed. It used to say master; it now says blues. So it attempted to isolate the blues. Then I can change the look of that area by moving these sliders. Hue will change the basic color. So if I make this, swing this wildly, you'll see the blue sky change to a different color. Or I make it green or anything else. Now, notice, though, that the image to my left is not changing. Let's figure out why it's not changing. And that's all because layers act as if you're standing at the top of the layers panel, looking down, and only the things that you see through this adjustment layer are affected by it. And therefore that means only the layers that are found below this would be affected by it. And if you look at what's down there, all we have is the one layer I wanted to change. We have another adjustment layer and then the texture that's there. If there happened to be any blue in the texture, it would be shifting around. If this adjustment layer was higher in my layers panel, it would have affected more layers. Then, any other layers that had blue in them would be shifting too. So I'm gonna adjust the hue and see if I can get it to look a little bit more like the image that's to its left. (silence) The image to the left might be the slightest bit less colorful, and if that's the case, I could adjust saturation to make this more or less colorful. And it might be a little bit brighter in it. So I could bring up the slider called lightness to try to get this to look a little bit more, by fine tuning these sliders, like the image that's next to it. (silence) But this adjustment layer is only gonna affect the layers that are found below it. Well, what if below it, there was a bunch of those other layers? Let's zoom out on this image. I'll type command zero, and I could always move these two layers. I'll select them both. And I'm just gonna move them to the top of the layers panel. 'Cause at the moment, it doesn't matter where they are, because they don't overlap over things. But now that it's at the top of the layers panel, when I turn off this adjustment layer, and turn it back on, you might notice that other layers are changing. Look at the blue skies in them, and you'll see that they're shifting around a bit, especially if I look at the bottom, near the right side of the picture. So what if I have an adjustment layer which would usually affect all layers that are found below it, and I only want it to affect one? Well, we can end up doing the same thing we did to get a photograph to only show up inside some text. Because that caused the photo to only appear where there was something in the layer directly below. Well if I do the same thing with an adjustment layer, it'll make it so the adjustment layer only shows up, or in this case, applies, to the layer directly below. So the way I did that before is I went to the layer menu, and I chose create clipping mask. And that's what caused the down pointing arrow to appear on the layer I was working on. So watch in the layers panel. Look at the layer that's active. And when I choose create clipping mask, you see that down pointing arrow, which indicates this is only applying to that. Now there's actually another way of doing that, and that is when you're working an adjustment layer, and you see the settings for your adjustment, you're gonna also find an icon at the bottom of the properties panel. This one right here, which has a down pointing arrow, and it does the exact same thing. Right now if I turn it off by clicking on that icon, you'll see the down pointing arrow goes away. Click it again, and it turns on. So adjustment layers only affect the layers that are found underneath them. If you need them to only affect one layer, you clip it to the layer that's underneath by either going to the layer menu and choosing create clipping mask, or-
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Ronny Carlsson
There are many Teachers with fantastic knowledge, but there are NO ONE that can compare with Bens pedagogic skill!