The 19 Adjustment Layers in Photoshop Explained

oh yes a Photoshop has got nineteen adjustment layers and in this video we're gonna take a look at every single one [Music] hey guys you're watching danske the place to be to develop your creative skills and in this video we're going to go through all 19 of photoshop's adjustment layers now these do just that you can use these to make various adjustments to your images in Photoshop you may have used them all you may have used some you may have never even heard of them and used none but don't worry in this video we're going to cover every single one so without further ado let's jump into it righty-o so we're now in Photoshop and you can see I've opened up an image we have a subject holding a beautiful bouquet of flowers a nice evening scene in the background as well and I've picked this image because we've got some nice yellows and oranges in the background we've got the reds and whites on the flowers the black on her dress we've got some shadows and highlights in the image and all of these different colors and tones gives me a great opportunity to demonstrate each of these different adjustment layers not only how they're different from one another but how you can use them in your images in Photoshop so let's take a look at the first one solid color fills rightio so first up we need the layers panel if you don't see it for any reason just go up to window and down two layers and hopefully it should then appear you can see mine has appeared here and from the bottom of that layers panel click on the adjustment icon it's this one here you've got a dark half and a light half in a circle and we can create a new adjustment layer and if I click on this we get the list of all adjustment layers and we're going to be covering these in this video first of all we're going to start at the top with solid color so let's click on that and you can see it as this as a new adjustment layer here and in this particular instance it invites us to pick a color from the color picker so we can scrub through the hue slider pick a color that we're happy with click OK and we now have this here as a separate adjustment layer we can turn this off and back on by clicking on the eye or we can double click on the thumbnail to edit the effect of the adjustment layer so we could pick a slightly different color click OK and all adjustment layers also come with a mask so if you're familiar with masks we could select some in like the brush tool we could pick black from the color picker and anywhere that I brush will hide the adjustment there and reveal the image underneath if I pick white from the color picker instead and brush onto the mask you can see it will show the adjustment layer again and hide the image underneath and I can also just grab that layer mask and drag it to the trash and they'll say do you want to delete it we'll say yes and then we are still just left with the adjustment layer itself now because this is a solid color it is hiding our image so what we can do to make this a bit more interesting is go to this drop down above click on this and pick a blending mode lots of cool effects here and with Photoshop CC 2019 we also get the live preview so you can see as I hover over each one I get a real-time preview of how that effect is going to look it makes it much easier to find the one you want a lot quicker so I'll go with overlay and I can also adjust the opacity so I could bring this down and it makes the effect more or less pronounced depending on what you're going for so I could bring this up make it a bit more vibrant drop it down make it less pronounced and there we go okay cool so next up we've got the gradient adjustment layer okay so let's go down to the adjustment icon again we'll click on gradient and this time we get a slightly different pop-up we can click here on the bar here the drop down we can pick from one of the presets we've even got rainbow here which is pretty special or we could just click on the default black to white gradient and then just double click on these swatches on the gradient slider and we'll just pick our own swatches and make up a gradient now if you want to add another swatch you just hover over here and click and it will add a swatch and you can click and drag it off and it will remove it so let's add a few more colors so remember we just have to double click on a swatch and we can then go and edit it from the color picker there we go got a nice kind of pinky red to pink to purple beautiful we can click OK now you can see at the moment we have a gradient that is so it runs from one direction to another in a straight line whether it's horizontal vertical or diagonal we can also select radial which starts in the center and goes towards the edge and we can also pick from some other ones here and of course you get that real-time preview so you can see just how they're going to look so we'll go back to linear and we can adjust the angle as well so which direction our gradient is pointing we can adjust the scale so we could make it larger this pretty much just looks like a solid color now what we could take it all the way down and it makes that divide a little bit harsh there between the different colors so that essentially is how smooth your gradient will blend together and you can choose to reverse the gradient with a single click which is pretty handy and then when you're happy just click OK and as with the solid color we can of course use blending modes to blend this into our image in interesting ways mmm yes super interesting and next up we've got the pattern adjustment layer okay so let's go to the adjustment icon once more a click and select pattern and we'll get this pop-up window appear and we can of course adjust the scale of our pattern we have one here selected by default at the moment so you can see increasing the scale makes the pattern a lot bigger depending on the pattern it might pixelate if you scale up too much but these are some of Photoshop default patterns so they're doing a pretty good job to be honest now you can check this box to link the pattern with your layer so if you move the layer the pattern will move with it or you can click snap to origin and it will reset the position of the pattern now this is the fun part we can click on this drop down over here and get lots of patterns that we can click through and I've got some custom ones I have loaded up here as well just to give you an idea of the kind of things that you can create we've got some dots some little lines and squiggles some texture oh it's just beautiful but what you can also do is click on the COG icon and you get a drop-down you can load any more patterns that you might find online or anything you download load those custom patterns in here but you also get these ones down here that come with Photoshop so let's just click on let's say artistic surfaces and it will say do want to replace the current pattern sets this one here with the patterns from artistic surfaces so we can click OK and it will wipe this palette and just put only the artistic surfaces patterns in or we can click append and what it does is add those to the bottom of the list so we could just make this a bit larger from the bottom right corner scale that up and now we've got a whole bunch more of patterns so all these different artistic surfaces so of course I could pick one scale it up when I'm happy click OK and of course again use those blending modes to blend this through and you can see that that texture that pattern blends through onto the image and I can adjust the opacity bring it down so it's nice and subtle and then you can see if I turn it off and back on that pattern now blends through onto the image ah super cool yes indeed super cool next up we've got brightness and contrast okay so we'll go to the adjustment icon click and select brightness and contrast and we can start by clicking on Auto and Photoshop will make its best guess of the brightness and contrast that is right for our image if you do however disagree with Photoshop how dare you you can of course manually adjust the brightness yourself so we could bring the slider down you can see the image gets darker drag it to the right it gets brighter and we can also adjust the contrast so we can adjust this by sliding this alone and you can see that preview change in real time so if I bring the contrast all the way up the blacks get darker the colors get more vibrant more vivid and more saturated but with all of these adjustment layers if you don't understand any particular one just grab those sliders drag them around see how the preview changes in real time and just have fun and the more you play around with these different adjustment layers the more you will understand how each one of these works so yeah just have a ton of fun and get super creative but next up we've got levels ok so let's go down to the adjustment icon click and so act levels now I have some presets here at the top and I can do things like increase the contrast or maybe lighten the shadows or I can just go back to the beginning and do it myself so from the drop down here we have RGB selected currently this stands for red green and blue every image that we see on screen is made up of those three channels red green and blue so essentially by editing in this RGB Channel I'm going to be affecting the levels for the entire image and all of the colors within it if I click on the drop down I can choose the red green and blue channel individually and adjust the channels for each of those levels respectively however I'm going to stay within RGB for the moment and you can see here we have a histogram below which maps out the levels the highlights of shadows and the mid-tones from our image and of course I can grab this little slider here and this is for the shadows and if I bring this to the right you can see adjusts the strength of the shadows in the image very very dark on the right we have highlights so I can bring this in and you can see those highlights become really blown out and more pronounced and then in the middle I have the mid-tones and this is somewhere in between the two so of course I can move these around and then adjust that midpoint between the shadows and the highlights to get the desired effect or again if I'm feeling lazy I've got the auto option here and down the very bottom I also have the blacks and the white so if I bring this up you can see they're become fewer blacks in the image or they become a lot lighter and if I bring the whites in here you can see the image becomes a lot darker there we go that was levels next up we've got something similar curves okay so down to the adjustment icon click and select curves and you can see very similar to levels we have some similar dropdowns we can choose a preset slightly different preset per presets nonetheless we can choose a particular channel or we can just work in all three which is RGB and we have the lazy persons Auto option that does all the work for us the main difference between levels and curves is that whereas levels go from left to right only horizontally curves can go up and down so I can click anywhere on this line to add a point and I can drag it up or down as well so we can go left right with the sliders that you can see around the image and up and down as well so what you can create is much more extreme but this is a much more advanced version of levels in my opinion so you can see I created a point there I can click and drag this off to remove it altogether and down the bottom I can adjust the shadows in the image by using the slider and the highlights here by using the one on the opposite side and then I can also click on these two points that are created by default err either end and I can drag these up and you can see it adjusts the blacks and the whites in the image that relate to this sidebar here so it starts at black at the bottom and runs to white at the top so you can see I can bring these down it makes the image darker so what I can do is I can move these all around click and add points in fact I can add as many points as I like and you can see that what I can create is pretty crazy as well now I could switch over to another mode here I can click on this and I can draw my own curves line which looks terrible or I can switch back to this one and just manually create it by using these anchor points and if it does all go horribly wrong you've got that auto option there just to save you now that you need saving or anything like you got this you are awesome and with that said we're now going to take a look at exposure okay you know the drill by now down to the adjustment icon click and exposure so of course we've got those presets that we can either select here or completely ignore we'll ignore them and manually adjust the sliders ourselves so we have the exposure slider at the top this of course adjusts the exposure for the image and you can see that it mostly controls the highlights you can bring this up and it will brighten up the image really increase those highlights the more pronounced if I bring it too far you can see it already blow out the highlights on the image and you can go quite extreme with this tool in fact with the exposure adjustment layer you can make very small movements on these sliders to create quite dramatic results so I'm not bringing up that far and already you can see that I'm kind of approaching that point where I don't want to go much further because I will start to lose some detail around the face and other areas in the image so we'll go a slight adjustment on the exposure there now the offset slider this controls mostly the shadows so you can see if I bring this down even a tiny bit the image gets considerably darker around the shadows in particular I can bring this up and it looks like this no shadows whatsoever all the shadows here so as I say very slight movements do give quite dramatic results and we've also got gamma correction below which largely controls the mid-tones in the image so I can adjust this here you can see that preview changing in real time but as with all these adjustment layers if you don't know what anyone does so you don't understand anyone in particular just adjust the sliders have a play see how the preview changes and ultimately just have fun exactly just have fun and speaking of fun next up we're going to take a look at vibrance okay down to the adjustment icon click and vibrance now this is a nice and easy one you have the vibrance slider at the top which can do just that it can make your image less vibrant or a little bit more vibrant just enhances those colors increases the saturation just mix the colors in your image pop a little bit more about to think of vibrance as a less extreme version of saturation because if I drag the saturation slider below you can see a hundred it becomes pretty extreme and if I drag it all the way to the left it will desaturate the entire image and essentially take all of the color out of it so if I put saturation back to around about zero and bring vibrance all the way up to 100 you can see it still isn't as extreme as saturation but sometimes a nice little left of something like this just enables the colors become a little bit more vibrant next up something similar to vibrance but again slightly more advanced hue and saturation okay down to the adjustment icon click and hue in saturation now we've got some presets here at the top of course we have we could select sepia for example and we get the desired effect well we can just go back to default now by default when you load up here in saturation master is selected this is every color in the image so any changes we make to these sliders below affects the entire image however we can click on the drop down select a particular color so yellows for example and any adjustments we make with these sliders will only affect the yellows in the image you can see as I change that there so let's go back and select master and first up we've got hue so this essentially cycles through all of the different colors the hues and it adjusts every color in the image respectively this is one of those things that isn't particularly useful in this instance really but it is perfect sometimes when you need to shift the hue of a particular color and of course we have saturation that we had before drag it all the way to the left D saturates the entire image or you can saturate it more by dragging it to the right you can see you can go quite extreme with this as well and we have lightness so we can drag this slider to the left and essentially it makes the image darker or lighter and we can also click on colorize so this will remove the existing color from the image and if we just bump up the saturation here we can drag through the hue slider and it just applies a single color overlay to the entire image and we can control the saturation of that color overlay the lightness and we're happy we can even go and apply a blending mode and you can see with those real-time previews how that looks right so next up is one of my favorites this is color balance okay down to the adjustment icon again and this time we're going to look at color so here we can pick a particular tone from the image from this drop down we have the shadows mid-tones and highlights so if we go to the shadows first of all the shadows in this image of course around the side of her face around her hair we have the dress here the black dress with lots of shadows shadows in the background so there are lots and lots of shadows and now we have shadows selected here we can control the color of the shadows so if I wanted to make the shadows a bit more blue I can of course adjust the sliders here and you can see it only affects these shadows in the image if I then go to mid-tones I can adjust the color of the mid-tones and of course as I drag it towards a particular color with these sliders it becomes more like that color so if I wanted the highlights for example to be more blue I just drag more towards cyan and more towards blue if I wanted it to be more green I drag it more towards green and maybe bring blue back down or more towards yellow obviously this is a very extreme example but if I were to do something slightly less extreme you can use this to make some really really nice and subtle shifts in color to an image so maybe I could do something like this and if I turn this off and back on you can see that's one way that you can use a color balance adjustment layer and you can also use a color balance adjustment layer to take one image another image and color match them together so pretty useful stuff but next up we're gonna take a look at the black and white adjustment layer okay once again down to the adjustment icon click black and white and of course we've got our presets here we could go for maximum black or let's say maximum white and you get lots of different presets we'll go back to default and maybe give our Auto button a click now previously we just grabbed the saturation slider dragged it to the left in it stripped out all the color from our image essentially this is a much more advanced and more effective way of creating black and white effects in Photoshop so what I can do now is I can adjust how right or how dark each color in the original image is so if I just go and turn this adjustment layer off for a moment you can see I've got some red here in the flowers and there's specks of red all throughout most of this image but mostly in the flowers here so if I turn this back on if I go down to the red slider and I adjust this you can see any red that is present in the image is being adjusted in a black and white mode so I could bring this all the way up and those red flowers become incredibly bright drag it down they become incredibly dark so essentially these sliders depending on the colors that are in your image enable you to fine tune a black and white effect that you are happy with and of course we've also got the tint option up here so we can check this box and pick a particular color tint scrub through the hue slider and apply a particular color overlay to our image and click OK and there we go so it doesn't have to just be black and white you can also use this to apply tint but if I just disable the tint I can then keep this as a black and white adjustment layer or I can go to the blending modes drop-down and just blend this through onto the original image and you can get something like this so there's a look at the black and white adjustment layer and there's lots of different uses there beyond just settings for black and white now this next one is pretty useful for making subtle changes to photos this is photo filter okay so down to the adjustment icon click and photo filter so what this enables us to do is pick a particular color so we have these three at the top here these are filters that will warm up an image to kind of give it more of an orange a yellow kind of tone to it or we've got some cooling filters here that will be a bit more blue they will kind of cool down your image so you can adjust image temperature using these filters and you can adjust the density here to make it more or less pronounced we've got some other colors down here as well we've got sepia that we've seen in a few other adjustment panels you can of course increase sepia effect by adjusting the density and we've also got some other ones so deep emerald for example adds like a little bit of a green tint to but you can also check the color box and pick your own color from the color picker if you like click OK and then adjust the density depending on how pronounced you would like that photo filter to be okay next up let's take a look at channel mixer okay so let's go down to the adjustment icon click and select channel mixer and of course we've got some presets at the top that we can use and the output channel below we can choose red green or blue so if I select red you can see red is at a hundred percent and the green and blue channels below are at zero and the important thing to pay attention to is the total below which is a hundred percent now in this panel you want to try and avoid going too far above a hundred percent because when you get as close to a hundred percent as you can you tend to get the best color reproduction in your image and essentially get the most out of this layer so if I bring the green up for example two thirty eight you can see the total is now one hundred and thirty eight and I get this warning triangle that says the total is greater than 100 so I can go and adjust these bring certain ones down essentially mix these three channels together to trying get as close to a hundred as I can and I just get a much more balanced result so if I hover over one of these you can see what it does this modifies the influence of the red channel within the overall mix so for example I could go to the output channel now go down to blue and I could start making some adjustments to this and you can see how the color changes and we've also got the constant down here as well this slider adjust the brightness of the result and is saved to the output Channel so it's saved to this particular Channel so I could go and adjust this and you can see how it changes that image I can maybe switch to another channel and make some changes there so you get the desired effect and as with all of these adjustment layers if in doubt just play around with the sliders have fun see the preview change in real-time until you get something you're happy with and then you can even go to the channel mixer adjustment layer and from the blending modes drop-down go and pick a blending mode and get even more creative rightio next up let's take a look at color lookup okay down to the adjustment icon click and color lookup and we can get a profile from a few different places here I'm going to click this one load 3d lut and I can navigate to a lot if I've got one Lutz LUT stands for lookup table so essentially this is a color lookup table and I can click on this drop down and there's lots of presets here that come with Photoshop a lot of these are very similar to what you get in something like Premiere Pro and that I used for video and think of it as like a color preset so I can click on foggy night and it just applies that color profile so let's pick a few more we've got futuristic bleak horror blue let's find another one tension green fantastic so essentially you can see it's like just using a color profile preset and very similar to using Luntz in something like video when doing color grading righty-o next up we have invert okay so let's go down to the adjustment icon click and select invert and yeah basically this just inverts the color in the image so I mean you could go to the blending options and try and blend this into the image in an interesting way I guess but yeah so invert can be incredibly useful but the adjustment layer itself just doesn't have any settings as such but this next one is pretty interesting this is posterized okay so let's go down to the adjustment icon click and select poster eyes and we get a slider here for levels we can click and drag this but if we drag too far to the right it doesn't really make any changes with this image that I'm using so I'll leave this at the left in fact I prefer to click in the box on the value and then use the up and down arrow keys on my keyboard to adjust the levels so to increase and decrease that it's a little bit more gradual and a bit more precise than using the slider and of course we can't go lower than two levels now with this posterized adjustment layer we have our image it's RGB made up of three channels we have the red channel the green Channel in the blue Channel now currently we have our levels set to two so that's two levels per channel so in this preview here we're seeing an image with about six colors so Photoshop tries to take all of that color information and match it as closely as it can depending on the number of levels that we are allowing with this particular effect so as I say if I increase the number of levels now using the arrow keys on my keyboard you can see that as I increase the number of levels I'm allowing Photoshop will bring in more and more color and more detail from the original image in fact it gets to the point where you increase the levels so much that it's bringing in exactly the same amount of information as in the original photo so as you get so far through the levels slider it actually doesn't make any difference but of course when you're back down here it looks pretty interesting and indeed it does next let's take a look at threshold okay so let's go down to the adjustment icon click and select threshold and you can see I can adjust the slider here and I get a preview in real time and what this does is essentially make everything affected by this adjustment layer the black and white but you could control how much of that detail is brought through now you can do this with the slider where you can click here in the threshold level box and enter a specific value and press return if you like so we want to try and retain some of the detail err on the face if I drag this too low you can see it starts to become a bit lost but the main problem I've got with this image is that the subject and the background is just there's not enough contrast and it's all just boring together so some images might work better than others but what I'm going to do is right click on this layer and select delete layer and the latest version of Photoshop I can go to select and down to subject and this is a really quick way of doing it Photoshop will make a selection of the subject and I can go back to the adjustment icon click and select threshold again and now when I make any changes I'm literally just doing the subject on her own so I can do one for the subject and then I might do one for just the background for example and then I can balance the threshold of the subject and the background separately and just find a balance that works or I could just keep the subject in this black and white effect leave the background as it is and then go to a blending mode and just see how this looks if I were to blend this threshold adjustment layer into the original image okay so this next one is probably my favorite adjustment layer is super creative and it's called a gradient map okay so let's go to the adjustment icon click and gradient map this is definitely one of my favorites what this enables me to do is click on the gradient slider and map a gradient to the whites and the blacks in the image so if I double click on this color here I can go and pick like a t leap turquoise e minty green kind of color and I'll double click on this swatch here and then map like a purple or something I can go and add more colors but I find some of the best ones that create something a little bit like a duotone effect is when using two colors and you get a nice smooth gradient in between so you can see this is how it looks I can click OK and then I can also click and reverse it and then you get something like this so when using a gradient with two colors you always get one that makes it look as though the image is inverted and then one that makes it look more like the image but this is something that happens that you love and we can even go and add more colors I'll show you just how it looks if we go and add another random color we could add something totally bonkers and you can see some of the effects that you can create with the gradient map adjustment layer are pretty creative and laughs but by no means least let's take a look at selective color okay so let's go down to the adjustment icon and click and choose the last option selective color this is our last adjustment layer this is similar to the hue and saturation adjustment layer but slightly different so whereas before we were able to select these top six here we can now choose to modify the whites and neutrals in the blacks and the main difference is now that our sliders don't adjust hue saturation and lightness but cyan magenta yellow and black so we're currently targeting the blacks and we can adjust the amount of cyan and the black so you can see all the blacks in the image just become a bit more bluer more towards two color cyan and I could maybe select the Reds for example and increase the magenta and you can see it kind of adds a a bit more of a pinky tone reminiscent of the color magenta so this is like being able to adjust the colors in the hue and saturation adjustment layer but this is much more advanced and you get a bit more control over the colors you can pick and the types of colors that you can change those colors to using these specific sliders and as I've mentioned throughout this entire video if in doubt just select all manner of craziness with these sliders until you get something bonkers and then go and pick a blending mode and just cross your fingers and yeah see what you get it's a ton of fun and it can be incredibly creative as well and there we go there's a look at all 19 of photoshop's adjustment layers guys I really hope you found this tutorial helpful if you've got any questions or comments please do drop them down below as always like this video if you enjoyed it take care and I'll see you next time [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Dansky

Views: 166,637

Keywords: adobe photoshop tutorial, photoshop tutorial, photoshop cs6 tutorial, photoshop cc tutorial, photoshop cc 2019, photoshop cc 2019 tutorial, adjustment layers, adjustment layers tutorial, photoshop adjustment layers, photoshop adjustment layers tutorial, gradient map photoshop tutorial, posterize photoshop tutorial, threshold photoshop tutorial, levels photoshop tutorial, curves photoshop tutorial, what are adjustment layers

Id: d3dHr5x8Y9I

Length: 33min 15sec (1995 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2018