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Simple Guide To Adjustment Layers

posted by John Owen on May 28th, 2009, in Photoshop | 2 Comments

This guide will help you get to grips with the basics of adjustment layers. I’ll be reviewing the most popular adjustments such as, Exposure, Curves, Levels and Brightness/Contrast. Most professional photographers will use adjustment layers to perfect their photos.

For the sake of this tutorial, I will use this image of a butterfly.

The Green-Banded Peacock Swallowtail

Brightness/Contrast (Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast)

(Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast)

This adjustment layer, although small in options, can provide that little boost to give it that extra wow factor. Below an image of the Brightness/Contrast options.

Brightness/Contrast

Brightness: Slide the arrow to the left and the image and the whole will darkern. Slide it to the right and the whole image will lighten.

Contrast: This is slightly different. If you slide the arrow to the left, the light and dark colors will even out, making the image look bland. When you slide it to the right the lighter colors will get brighten and become richer, whilst the darker tones of the image will continue to darkern.

Brightness: 10 Contrast: 65

Levels

(Image->Adjustments->Levels)
This adjustment layer is an upgrade of Brightness/Contrast. You are given three sliders, the darkest slider represents the dark tones, the light gray slider represents the middle tones and the white slider represents the light tones. Moving the white slider across will increase the overall contrast. Displacing the middle slider with give you darker tones or lighter tones and moving the darkest slider gives you darker tones. Experiment with this and you can achieve great effects!

Changing the blue channel will cause more blue to appear or disappear

This image now looks quite cold and serious, whilst the one above looks more vibrant.

Curves

(Image->Adjustments->Curves)

The curves adjustment layer is very versatile, it’s mainly used for more precision rather than levels. It’s structured the same, however you can change certain tones of the image with greater accuracy. This allows for greater detail.

Curves Tool

Gives a warm atmosphere

Play around with this tool making minor adjustments, they may not make a huge difference but it still adds to the quality.

Exposure

(Image->Adjustments->Exposure)

This adjustment layer allows you to alter the original settings that the camera would have used, when taking this picture. Exposure increases brightness with contrast. Offset will increase the brightness or at first, darken the darker tones, then darken the rest of the image. This can be used to block out dark areas of your image.

Click for full size

I hope this tutorial helps you when using adjustment layers.

If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment!