How to Use Adjustment Layers in Photoshop | Day 4

adjustment layers are you are better than yeah welcome to 30 days of Photoshop we are on day 4 adjustment layers hey there welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE you can find me on phlearn comm where we make learning fun and here in our 30 days of Photoshop series we are talking about adjustment layers which were one of my favorite ways to edit photos in Photoshop so to start off with what our adjustment layers adjustment layers are used to make changes to your images without affecting the original image data making them completely non-destructive you can change things like your exposure colors and light levels on either a specific area photo or the entire image in this video we're gonna go through the most commonly used adjustment layers and show you how easy it is to improve a photo with just a couple layers we got a great tutorial let's jump into Photoshop so here we are let's go ahead and open up our sample image we are on adjustment layers don't forget you can actually download this on phlearn calm just follow the link right down below so let's go ahead and hit open and we're gonna click on f4 full screen so to start off with there are a few different ways to make adjustment layers in Photoshop you could go to layer down to new adjustment layer and here you have a list of all the adjustment layers you can make you can go to window and down to adjustments and here we have all the adjustments with little icons and you can also go right down to here to this little circle looks like a moon cookie circle that's half of its light half of its dark and here we have all of our adjustments as well including some fill layers up at the top like solid color gradient and pattern now for the sake of keeping everything consistent we're just going to go through our main menu here so layer and then down to new adjustment layer so brightness and contrast let's go ahead and hit OK now this is one I don't use a ton because we can basically do very similar things with curves and levels adjustment layers but if all you want is a simple brightness or contrast adjustment this is a great way to do it so very straightforward you can click on the auto button if you'd like it's gonna go ahead and calculate everything about your photo and give you what it thinks would be the best case scenario now I'm gonna go ahead and hit undo here and that's gonna put it back to its original state so as you can see you can adjust your brightness of the photo as a whole and your contrast of the photo as a whole now I'd actually think that Otto did a really nice job here so let's go ahead and go back to Otto and take a look at what we've done so this adjustment layer creates a layer it creates an adjustment layer that we can turn off and on at any point in time so let's go ahead and do that I'm gonna just turn this off and back on and we can see how it affects our photo now the other nice thing we can do is change our opacity so if we like this effect but maybe wanted to have it a little bit less we can simply lower the opacity and it's going to just have less of an effect on our photo of course we can use a layer mask as well to have this only be visible in certain parts of our image and we're going to use that as we move forward now moving on to our next adjustment layer we'll go to layer new adjustment layer and over to levels now levels are incredibly powerful along with curves we actually have an entire episode coming up soon on just curves and levels so we'll go through relatively quickly here because we're going way in depth very soon so with our levels basically let's go ahead and expand out our property window we have options to change our black point which will basically make anything to the left of this area plack our white point which will make anything to the right of this completely white and our midpoint which will take your central values and either make them darker or lighter and you can see for instance here I have some more definition in my sky and I could use this along with a layer mask to add some information in the sky so let's go ahead and do that now I've made my central areas a little bit darker I'm gonna go ahead and use my layer mask but I don't want this visible everywhere so we're gonna hit ctrl or command I which is gonna invert our layer mask it's gonna go from black to white or white to black so now it's a black layer mask meaning it's completely invisible even if I turn the layer off and on you can't see it so if I use my brush tool let's go ahead and use our brush tool and paint about 20% there we go as I start to paint white right here on my background you're gonna see I'm able to get back a little bit more that detail in the sky all right and if there's anywhere you don't want it to be visible simply paint black on your layer mask incredibly easy to do so black where you don't want it to be visible and white where you do want it to be visible okay and there we go we just added a little bit more information to the sky super super easy to do all right let's go over our curves adjustment layer which is coming up next so we'll go to layer down to new adjustment layer and over to curves now curves and levels are actually very similar they're just two different ways of editing the same information so here I can take my black point and I can make it a little bit lighter if I want I can take my black point and make it darker I can take my white point and make that a little bit brighter or I can make my white point a little bit darker and of course I can take my midpoint and make that a little bit brighter or a little bit darker now with curves and levels both I can also edit different color channels so for instance I can go to my red channel and add more reds to my image or take away reds I can do the same thing with my green Channel add more greens or take away greens and I can do the same thing with my blue add more blue and take away some blue all right well in this case let's work on our sky a little bit again we're gonna add a little bit of blue to the sky and this time we're just going to hit ctrl a command I on the layer mask there and with our brush tool I'm just gonna paint white on our layer mask and this is again just going to add some blue to our sky that's gonna color the trees just a little bit which is fine with me because we're actually gonna color them completely in just a few minutes there we go so we can see we've made our sky both a little bit darker and a little bit more blue okay let's go back to our blue channel you can change these at any time by the way any time you want to make a change simply click right here on your adjustment layer in this case you can just go back to your blue Channel and I can even say more blue or less blue very very easy to do okay moving on we're gonna go to layer down to new adjustment layer and we're going to go to the vibrance now vibrance is really great because it includes both a vibrant slider and a saturation slider the vibrance slider will basically increase the saturation of your images but it's gonna avoid skin tones so if you have an image with people in it you should use the vibrance slider if you don't have people in it then you can use this saturation slider but you'll see if I go to saturated you'll see how the Reds and the skin tones start to look very unnatural in this image that's why anytime you have people in your image you don't want to use your saturation slider there we go you should use your vibrance slider instead and here we go go ahead and crank up that vibrance looks really cool alright looking really good and of course you can mask it in or out I'm just gonna use my layer mask here to just mask it out from my sky a little bit because we actually already made our sky a little bit more blue so it was kind of going a little bit too much so I'm just painting black on the layer mask here where I don't necessarily want this vibrance to be visible so you can see I'm kind of stacking these adjustment layers up each of them can be used for different areas of photo or just affect your entire photograph by itself okay moving on we're gonna go to layer down to new adjustment layer and now we're moving to hue/saturation let's go ahead and hit OK now hue saturation allows us to change colors in our image and you can see it's extremely powerful and most of the time you don't want to just change all the colors in your image so let's go ahead and target a color I'm going to change from master we're gonna go down to yellows and then I'm gonna choose our little eyedropper here to actually click on our subjects pants so it's gonna change that color okay now moving over here I actually want to pull this a little bit more towards this side okay make them a little bit read a little bit magenta now in this case you're gonna see that it's going to affect quite a bit okay it's affecting much more than just our subject so what we're gonna do is click on our layer mask and I'm gonna hit ctrl I command I to invert the layer mask then we're just gonna paint this visible on our subjects pants so we're just gonna paint with white on our layer mask making this area visible so again white will make things visible on a layer mask black will make things invisible so we targeted the orange in this case it's not going to try to affect colors like you know the sidewalk and things like that but because the skin of our subject is very similar to this orange color there we go it is going to try to color that so we have to make sure that we're not coloring everything in the image that's where this layer mask comes in handy so we can just say all right this is the only area we want to affect there we go allowing us to just paint this area in with the layer mask and have just the color change right over here all right and you can see this really doesn't take that long because I've targeted that color there we go fantastic I don't have to be incredibly precise with this mostly I just have to avoid our subject skin because her skin is a similar color there we go hand right down here now if you do paint over your subject skin a little bit like I did not a big deal just hit X on your keyboard to switch between black and white and now I'm just painting black on my layer mask to hide this adjustment layer okay so white to show adjustment layer and black to hide it fantastic so we've changed that color a little bit now I want to do one more thing here I actually want to change this I want to bring these colors of like the plants to be a little bit more vibrant as well but in this case I think I've went a little bit too far so let's go back to our reds maybe I'll just bring our saturation down a little bit and bring it a little bit more this way okay now let's grab another hue/saturation adjustment layer so let's go to the layer new adjustment layer and over to hue/saturation again okay and this time we're gonna choose a color I'm gonna grab my eyedropper and go up here and then we're gonna change our hue and saturation of that color up there and we're gonna see it's kind of affecting everything again but that's okay again we're just gonna invert our layer mask by hitting ctrl or command I and now we're just gonna paint it visible right up here all right very very cool so you can see basically you just fade that in a little bit basically I'm able to color a bit of the background and a bit of my subjects shorts to be relatively similar all right there we go and let's go ahead and make them a little bit lighter - pretty cool all right I'm having a fun time now we're gonna make one more we're gonna go to layer down to new adjustment layer and hue/saturation this time I'm gonna go to my greens let's choose our little eyedropper tool and go to the greens and we're gonna crank up the saturation of that because it's maybe bring our brightness down and the saturation up a little bit more we're creating like a super saturated fun image so I thought it'd be fun to do the greens as well all right there we have and I'm just gonna make sure I turn all these layers off and on and make sure each of them is affecting our image so we've gone through about half of our adjustment layers and our image it looks really cool we've actually done quite a bit let's go ahead and turn these off the best thing about our adjustment layers is you can turn them off or on at any time and change all these settings so let's go turn these all off there we go here's our before and as I start to turn these back on you can see each one of the individual changes that we've made I think we're looking really good so we're gonna go to layer down to new adjustment layer and we're moving on to color balance now color balance you can adjust colors in your shadows mid-tones and highlights for instance if I want to take my mid-tones maybe towards a little bit of cyan maybe a little bit of green and a little bit of yellow we can change this to a little bit more of like a warmer type image or if I just hit undo go to a little bit of blue and a little bit of magenta maybe a little bit red there we go I can change this image to a little bit more of a red image and of course I can do the same thing with my shadows I want to bring my shadows towards blue a little bit and maybe my highlights towards yellow a little bit I can get a little bit of a duotone image out of it okay I kind of like that but it's too strong so we're going to just change our opacity go down to about 50% there there we go that looks really cool so let's continue going down the list layer down to new adjustment layer and we're gonna go to black and white now here in black and white it does what it says it makes your image black and white but the cool thing here is you can choose the light levels of the different colors in your image so you can for instance make just the greens really dark or the cyan x' really light or dark so you have a lot of control over the different colors in your image and how they appear in your black and white now of course just like everything else you can lower the opacity okay so maybe if you wanted like a kind of D saturated image you could just do this now in this case I'm just gonna turn this off because I kind of like all the color in this image but of course I just want to show you these adjustment layers next we're gonna go to layer new adjustment layer and down to photo filter which is a really fun way to just add a simple adjustment you have a lot of filters built-in like these warming filters and you can increase or decrease your density we're gonna go to our cooling filters let's just cool your image down a little bit turn that off and on so you can see the before and after and then you have some other fun ones that are built in like a green or a deep red all right I think that green was actually kind of nice so you can turn this off and on and see how it affects your image and of course I recommend keeping things on the side let's go to layer down a new adjustment layer and we're gonna go to our channel mixer now this is one of the least commonly used adjustment layers in my opinion it has a very strong effect but it's a little bit tough to use so basically you can choose your different color channels and you can choose how much for instance in our red channel how much you're going to shift the green channel towards red or the blue channel towards red now you can make some big adjustments to your image here really really interesting stuff but it is a little bit difficult to get the hang of so if you're just turning off maybe play around with this but this isn't one of my go-to obviously you can see who make some big changes but generally I'm able to do everything that I want without using a channel mixer I use this more for like special effects and things like that let's go ahead and turn that off we'll go to layer new adjustment layer and we're gonna go down to color lookup this is where we can actually load some different looks so we have different looks that are loaded within Photoshop okay we can go ahead and click down the list of here these are also known as Lots ok or LUT s so these basically create different completely different looks by processing different colors in different ways now you can actually download lots on phlearn com they're included in a phlearn pro subscription so if you're interested in getting more of these we have tons of them available on phlearn ok now generally I like to do my own coloring so I don't use lots a lot but if you do like let's say you just like oh cool I like the crisp form look well this is something you could just add to everyone at your photos and get that look alright moving on we've got a couple more here down to layer and new adjustment layer invert is pretty straightforward it literally just inverts your image which can be kind of fun especially for like graphics and things like that ok moving right along we've got posterize and this will actually reduce the amount of levels in your image pasteurizer posterized you can say it either way this will reduce the amount of color levels in your image so if you go up you'll get more and more detail and if you go down and down and down you'll get less and less detail and this can be fun for creating graphics and things like that let's turn that off down to new adjustment layer we have our threshold which basically does something very similar but just with black and white so it takes a point and makes everything to the left of that point completely black and everything to the right at that point completely white okay good for graphics and it's also helpful for analyzing complex compositing as well okay let's go to our new adjustment layer almost on here gradient maps are incredibly fun they're a great way let's go ahead and just click on a few gradient Maps here they're a great way where you can actually colorize and color telling your entire image and we have a tutorial later in this series on using gradient maps to color tone so in this case pretty crazy here but if I were to lower the opacity of this you can see we are actually able to color tone our image in a really interesting way you just pretty much don't want to use these at full value so there are a lot of a lot of gradients that come pre-loaded into Photoshop and here we have some of the ones that we've made specifically for color toning and other gradients that come with Photoshop alright so you can see these are pretty cool for things like color toning okay layer down a new adjustment layer and last we have selective color here's one can take specific colors like my reds and I could say give it more or less cyan magenta yellow and black so if you want to do subtle adjustments to your colors this is a great way to do it for instance we can affect our greens I can say more yellow or less yellow and my greens and you can see it is pretty subtle but it is making changes in my image so especially things like skin color where I want to maybe just change it ever so slightly selective color is a great adjustment layer for doing that so we've loaded every single adjustment layer let's go back through them here I'm actually just gonna group all of these so let's hold shift and click on all of them hit ctrl or command G to group them all together and we're just gonna call this adjustment layers now I can turn this entire group off and on and see the before and after and the cool thing about all this is because it's non-destructive if I maybe want to just lower the opacity of the entire group I can get something that's like halfway so it's a little bit of the before and a little bit of the after creating a little bit more of a realistic effect and I actually like that quite a bit I think it's done really nicely and a great fun use of adjustment layers thank you so much for watching 30 days of Photoshop if you haven't already done so go ahead and sign up you can do so by follow with a link right down below you'll get a calendar with a list of events daily email reminders of all the topics here in 30 days a Photoshop said well as our sample images and you get exclusive bonus material just for this series I hope you are enjoying it so far let me know in a comment right down below thanks again i'll phlearn you later bye everyone [Music]

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 205,175

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, Adobe Photoshop, Class, Course, Learn Photoshop, adjustment layers photoshop, adjustment layers, curves, brighten photo, photo too dark, color grade photoshop, contrast photoshop, what are adjustment layers, add color photoshop, edit photos in photoshop, how to edit photos

Id: pUv7npHOk7E

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 05 2020