ADJUSTMENT LAYERSADOBE PHOTOSHOP

ADJUSTMENT LAYERS

▸ Super useful, non-destructive image editing tools that add color and tonal adjustments to your image without permanently changing its pixels

▸ You can edit and discard your adjustments or restore your original image at any time

BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST

▸ Makes adjustments to the tonal range of your image. The brightness slider is for adjusting the highlights in your image and the contrast slider is for adjusting the shadows in your image.

READING THE HISTOGRAM▸ This is the current distribution of brightness

levels, or tonal values, in the image. Each imageis unique.

▸ The taller the histogram is at a certainbrightness level, the higher the number of pixelswe have in our image at that level.

▸ Where the histogram is shorter means fewerpixels in the image at that brightness level.

▸ Flat areas mean no pixels at that brightnesslevels.

The histogram's brightness levels (256 of them)

match the gradient bar below it.

PURE BLACK

PURE WHITE

LEVELS

▸ Modifies the tonal values in an image by adjusting the levels of the shadows, midtones, and highlights. It is one of the most used tools in the adjustment layer panel, and using just a touch of levels will go a long way in correcting your images.

SPOTTING & FIXING PROBLEMS

THE MIDTONE SLIDER'S MAIN USE IS TO BRIGHTEN OR DARKEN THE MIDTONES WITHIN AN IMAGE. BY STRETCHING OR COMPRESSING THE TONES ON EITHER SIDE OF IT

EXPOSURE

▸ Exposure lets you adjust exposure levels with three sliders: Exposure, Offset and Gamma. Exposure will adjust only the highlights of the image, Offset adjusts the mid tones and Gamma will adjust the dark tones only.

VIBRANCE▸ This works in two ways.

▸ The Saturation slider evenly increases the saturation of all the colors in the image.

▸ The Vibrance slider modifies the level of saturation of all the colors, but more selectively, focusing on the least saturated colors and avoiding over saturation of skin tones.

HUE & SATURATION▸ Lets you adjust the hue,

saturation, and lightness of your entire image or in a specific range of colors in your image.

▸ Here we selected the greens because we wanted to decrease the saturation of only the greens in my image to make it easier on the eyes.

COLOR BALANCE▸ The Color Balance adjustment

changes the mixture of colors in an image.

▸ In this example, we’ve made a selection of the butterfly’s wings only and adjusted the color balance sliders to bring out the reds and magentas in its wings.

BLACK & WHITE▸ The Black and White

adjustment lets you make grayscale versions of your images. The image on the left is the default setting.

▸ Changing the preset to “Custom” & adjusting the sliders, we are controlling how the reds in the wings of the butter fly are converted to black and white.

PHOTO FILTER▸ Photo Filter adds different color

filters on top of your image

▸ You can also customize each color filter by double-clicking the color swatch in the properties panel an adjusting it in the Color Picker window that pops up