Photoshop Adjustment LAYERS, what you don't know | Ultimate Guide (2018)

I once heard a story about a guy who cut up logs with an axe in fact he was so good his supervisors noticed him and they decided to give him a chainsaw after a week with this new chainsaw his productivity dropped in half and the supervisor came to me with the message you know really I don't understand why what's wrong with this chainsaw and he pulls it up to see everything leaning leaning the chase was started up in the guys like oh I didn't know it made that sound so that's essentially what I'm talking about today we're gonna be talking about adjustment layers and maybe you want to make your photos look good and you want to make them look good as fast as possible but maybe you're not aware of all the things that they can do and so it's taking you longer to do things when you're not getting the most out of these adjustment layers so this tutorial right now I'm gonna show you some tips and tricks and things you can do with adjustment layers but also for those of you who don't fully understand them how to use them to make every single photo look better [Music] hey cafe crew it's Colin Smith here from Photoshop cafe.com the very best place to learn Photoshop and Lightroom so just recently I did a tutorial on how to use curves and you guys absolutely loved it so following along in that vein we're gonna look at adjustment layers there's two things that you're gonna get out of this number one I'm actually gonna show you I'm gonna break them down and show you exactly how they work so there's no guesswork in there and in fact it's a lot simpler than what you think but along the way I'm gonna show you some creative ways to use it in fact there's four different things that we gonna do with adjustment layers right now okay so if we look at this photograph here it's broken into two parts what we see right now is the final composite image but if we break it into the two parts that exist the first part is the color and as you can see the color is a very very thin layer and affecting the color doesn't change the luminance it may change the perception of the luminance but it doesn't change the luminance and in the second one as the luminance or lightness and this is the grayscale value this is what gives it a definition so by lightening and darkening this it gives our definition and our contrast and then we put our color on top and we've got our complete image if we look under here and we go image adjustments you'll see that we've got all the adjustments there now the adjustments are different and filters filters apply special effects adjustments work with color and luminosity now you don't want to apply them here because they're very limited what you want to do is go to the layers panel and then you see this little union and click on there and we'll see the adjustment layers fact these are pretty much the same adjustments as the ones in the menu with an exception and we're going to look at that in step number four so step number one right now is to understand how these were they work in four different groups if you notice here they're arranged one two three four different groups does the first one here are fills so we can fill it with a solid color a gradient order pattern so that's a useful thing the second thing here is we've got brightness levels curves and exposure here we're dealing with our luminosity yes we can do color in this crossover and all that kind of thing but essentially this is where we change the brightness and darkness of the image or different parts of the image then we go into the next part and these predominantly deal with color so here's where we gonna shift color we're gonna add color remove color do all the color work and then finally we got some different tools here that do a number of different things so what's the benefits in using adjustment layers versus regular adjustments one is it non-destructive the second part about them is that they're reusable and the third thing is it is stackable so if I go in here and I do a basic curves and once again you know I'm gonna add a link right now underneath in the show notes to my tutorial on curve so you can understand how they work so say I apply a curves adjustment there and then I want to change it later on I can go back later and say you know what I wanted to kind of open that up a little bit more oh yeah nice so if I grab all three of these and I hit ctrl G to put them into a group and we call it adjustments and I want to use these in another document I can simply drag the up here into the new document and drop it on there and look at that now we've got those curves adjustments these are stackable so I can take a second curves adjustment and notice what it does it multiplies that effect and of course we can do things with blending modes and things like that but let's go in here now and I'm gonna add a little bit of blue here so I'm gonna increase the blue to give it into the shadows just a little bit here to give it a little bit more of a cinematic grade so now we've got two curves adjustments together number three adjustment layers worked with blend modes and layer masks so we can adjust even just the opacity if we wanted to change the amount of the effect see that but let's push it right up we can also work with Bolen modes here so if we throw this in turn overlay blend mode see how it kind of effects it differently but it's also we're losing a lot of information here so what we can do is grab our layer mask I'm gonna grab a black brush and I don't want it to be in this foreground here so I can paint this away okay so we can mask these so if we look at this before the mask and we look at after the mask also we can look at it before the adjustment and after we can see we can precisely position it by using those masks now there's another thing that we can do too is if we want to protect an area such as the shadow area so what we can do is we can use bland if so if we go under our effects here choose blending options advanced blending options come up here and what we want to do is we want to not share the shadow so I'm going to pull this up and then what I want to do is just split this by holding the out of the option key and it just creates a nice a smoother transition there and then we can pull this up and we can see now that we're not applying that in the shadows and let's just do the normal blend mode here there we go and if this feels too strong once again we can just drop our opacity down and just kind of blend it in with the original and get a nice result right there tip number four working with adjustment layers is there's one group of adjustments that are available in the adjustments but not in the adjustment layers and that's the ones that extend the dynamic range of the photo and is two inside that group HDR toning and shadow highlight so what I'm gonna do now is show you a little trick how you can make them act like non-destructive adjustment layers and get all the benefits out of them so here's the trick we're gonna select both these layers and we're gonna right click and we're gonna convert to a smart object okay so we've got all of that in the smart object and now we want to apply shadow highlights so we're gonna go under our image adjustments and now when we go down to our shadow highlight works the same with HDR toning so why don't we just open up the amount we're opening up our shadows nicely and see how that's making the rocks look better and everything and we want to recover detail in the clouds and the highlights so we're gonna pull that up a little bit now let's show more options and we can play around the tone determines if we take the tone all the way to the left it's going to have no effect so what that does is it decides how much of the highlights you're gonna let in and within this case we're pulling it up so we clouds nicely it's good about there and the radius is just kind of tone maps it gives it flavor and what you want to do with that is just make sure you don't get halos around anything so you're just looking for a natural result same with shadows let's increase the tone so now we're gonna go into the very deep regions if we go here it's gonna go all the way to the mid-tones don't necessarily want that let's bring it back a little bit right there's good play around with the radius get a nice tone map looking good play around with the amount now there's two other adjustments here one is color and what this does is it just gives it saturation or reduces the saturation because sometimes when you open up areas in a photograph that didn't have any detail now you see the detail the colors can get too saturated or too much of that color so we can pull that back just a little bit right there gives it a more cinematic look and then of course we can adjust that mid-tones here you know what do we want to do with those mid-tones and I'm thinking about there looks good okay so one of the things that can happen is the image to start to look a little washed down we can change that by setting a black and a white clip let me sit the black clip to about 3:00 and notice how it gives us so much more body just by doing that because what it's doing is excluding those areas of black and it's letting those blacks stay black here's a grayscale he is black and he is white so instead of lightening everything what it's doing is it's clipping to that first little bit and then that bit is left black and then it's applied to the rest of it so as I move that clip it affects a less of the image and in by doing that it gives it the body and stops and looking washed out next one is white click why don't we just slide that up a little bit and notice we're just cleaning up those whites doing exactly the same thing then we're just gonna click OK so how is this like an adjustment layer well let me show you the functionality of the adjustment layer we double click it here we can go back in we can change our settings so that means one its non-destructive okay the other thing is if we click down here and right click we can edit the blending options so this gives us our blending modes and this gives us era pasady so if it's too much of an effect and we just want to apply a little bit of it we can dial it in to wherever we want and what about reusability you betcha if I go into this other document here make sure I convert it to a smart object first I can go down grab my adjustment layer dragged it into the window there release it drop it on top of there and look at that there's our adjustment layer even though it's a smart object it works exactly the same way as you can see part of what we're doing here involves layer blending modes and I'd like to help you with that I've created an e-book in fact it was going to sell it and I decided to give it away for free click the link underneath and you can give my layer blending modes eBook absolutely free so anyway I get a question for you because I noticed that people like to shout out where they're from so in the comments underneath give us a shout out tell us where you're from and by the way if you like this video smash that like button into dust if you enjoy these kind of tutorials every single week I do a new one press that subscribe button right now and then you'll become part of the cafe crew and you'll get that new tutorial oh by the way even if you have subscribed and you don't hit that little notification bell you need to hit that as well and then that will notify you when I upload new tutorials so anyway guys thanks for watching and until next time I'll see you at the cafe [Music]

Channel: photoshopCAFE

Views: 30,426

Keywords: adjustment layers, photoshop, screen cast, tutorial, how to, tones, color, photoshop CC, adobe Photoshop, photoshop tutorial, photo manipulation, fix photo, photo editing, photography, photoshopping, brighten, darken, filter, tool, colin smith, colin smith photography, colin smith tutorial, photoshopcafe tutorial, adjustment layer, color fix, color adjustment, photoshop curves

Id: cEQ1C2dNheg

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 28 2018