Photoshop Adjustment Layers
The problem with editing any image is that you sometimes get half way through and decide you have gone too far with the old touch up brushes and levels, It's too late to go all the way back to the beginning, cos you just got too many stages in the history. OK, so you start again, right back to the beginning but this time you're going to be clever and save each change as you move along.
Now you have 43 duplicates of the original image saved on your hard disc and you're too scared to get rid of them in case you change your mind, or someone on the Studio criticises the image you posted and you feel the need to go back and change a few things.
Well that's OK of you are very organised, and a couple of days later you return to the 43 edits and delete them all. On the other hand, if you are like me, very disorganised, you forget they are there and before long you have 296 10Mb TIFF files on the disc and everything slows down.
Well, help is at hand my disorganised, but very artistic friends, I say that because artistic people tend to be a little disorganised, or in my case, very disorganised.
Layers or more precisely, adjustment layers……. And they are? I here you say…….
As you will see, adjustment layers are a way of manipulating and editing your image without actually changing anything. Fat lot of good that is, you say, well yes it is, in fact it is the only way I edit my images now and wouldn't have it any other way. All the adjustments you make to an image, Levels, colour, sharpness etc, can be done on a separate layer from the original image. Not only does it not alter the original, until that is you tell it to, you can return to each layer at any time to “tweak it a little”, or even delete it and start again, without affecting the other layers, assuming of course, you have more than one.
OK, enough with the clap trap, let's cut to the chase. (Bloody impatient, artistic people……….)
Let's open an image and get on with it…..
You can either use an image of your own or you can download the one I am using from <a>here</a>. Once your image is open you need to ensure you have at least the two tool palettes open that show on the screen below, that is the LAYERS palette and the NAVIGATOR, plus the tool bar on the left. If they don't show, go to WINDOW and choose LAYERS, NAVIGATOR and TOOLS. You should have a screen much like mine.
Notice all the little symbols at the bottom of the Layers palette? The one we are interested in first is to the left of the bucket, the black arrow marks the spot. Above, you should have a little thumbnail of your image and background written next to it. Place your cursor on the thumbnail. Press and hold down the left mouse button and drag it down to that little symbol at the bottom, now let go.
OK, if your image and the thumbnail have vanished, you missed the symbol and hit the trash can…… ooops. Start again. No, I am sure you didn't, but just in case.
You should now have two thumbnails above, the original background layer, and a duplicate background layer. You have? Magic……..
The second symbol were are interested in is the one that looks like a circle with half black and half white, it also has a tiny down arrow to the right of it, if you can't see it, go and find you glasses……. Now left or right click on the symbol or the arrow, and you should see a drop down menu.
Now click on the LEVELS.
What will pop up is the levels histogram where you can adjust the levels of the shadows and highlights. If you have never used this before, it is worth experimenting with. The left side shows the shadows and the right the highlights. The ideal is the arrows just under the “curve” should be under where the histogram starts and ends, as seen on this one. Move the about and see what they do. Once you have adjusted them you can click OK on the levels palette.
You should also notice that you now have a third layer on the layers palette. This is your levels adjustment layer, and, as with all the layers, we will use, you can return to them at any time by LEFT double clicking on the little box in the layers palette, just to the right of the eye.
We are now going to return to the half circle symbol at the bottom of the layers palette and chose SELECTIVE COLOUR from the drop down menu.
What you do with this layer is a matter of taste and judgement, and if you are slightly colour blind, as I am, there is an element of luck involved, or you call up another useful tool (for me it's called the wife tool) and ask advice….. yes she pick out my ties so they match my shirts, if I do it myself, she laughs at me and says things like “you're not going out like that?” Anyway, I digress.
This layer is a little more complicated, you don't have to use it of course, and you may not need it with every image, all I am doing here is demonstrating what can be done. There are, however some very subtle and effective changes to be made with this layer. Once you have finished, click OK and yet another layer appears in the layers palette.
Now we are going to choose the CHANNEL MIXER from the layers symbol. This is another interesting and subtle tool.
You will see that this is very similar to the last one, except you will notice the red output comes up and there is already showing 100% red. So you can adjust the amount of red in the RED area of the image and you can also add other colours to it. The same can be done with the Blue and green channels.
Another box on this one that isn't on the others is the MONOCHROME tick box. This is one of the most useful adjustment layers in the box. You can convert the layer image to B/W and adjust the tones, contrast and levels all at the same time. However once this layer is converted to monochrome, anything you see later will be in B/W. All is not lost, however. To hide the monochrome layer, just click on the little eye next to the channel mixer icon in the layer palette and it will be turned off.This is true of all the layers we have added up to know. If you want to see what the original was like, turn off the layers. The original image remains in tact.
OK, so we have changed quite a bit on the original image, if we have made a mistake we can simply dump the layer and start again, or we just open the layer up and re-adjust. No need to go back though the history or start the whole thing from scratch….. Let's do one more layer before we finish.
Down to the layers symbol, you know where that is by now, and choose BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST
This one stands for itself; you can make any final adjustments, if you want.
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At this pointy You can then save your image as a PDS file, thus preserving all the layers and leaving the original file untouched. If you want to return to it later, your original adjustments are still there and you can tweak them to produce a better shot if necessary. The one thing you don't have is hundreds of images, all at different stages of edit cluttering up your computer.
I have then added a little burning and dodging to the image. Reduced the image to the size I want and cropped. Lastly, always last, show the image as 100%, so I can see what is going on and sharpen it up a bit. This can then be saved as a jpg for the web, or whatever you want.
Look out for other editing tips later.
