Tutorial - Layer Adjustment in Photoshop

An often overlooked method of working with imagery in Photoshop is the use of Adjustment Layers. This provides the means to retouch an image in a non-destructive way. When you select an image and adjust its Levels or Curves you have altered that image, but using an Adjustment Layer for that identical process provides the same results but without altering the original image. This allows the ability to step back to the original image for any reason.

Let's look at an image from a recent trip to Guadalajara.



As you can see the image is somewhat washed out. There is not a wide enough spectrum of lights and darks in the picture. So lets create a new Adjustment Layer to work with the levels of the image. At the bottom of the Layers Palette, click on the icon of a black and white circle (or you can use the menu Layer > New adjustment Layer > Levels) and select Levels.



This creates a non-destructive way to adjust the levels through a layer that you can turn on/off.



Here you can adjust the overall parameters for the level of the image. But if you want finer control, and don't we all, you can adjust each of the channels (RGB). In the drop down select the Red Channel (command + 1). The settings before we manipulate them appear below:



What we want to do is tighten up these settings. We move the outer sliders in on both sides to just where the graph begins:



We follow suite with the Green (command + 2) and Blue (command + 3 ) channels. The Green before:



Green Channel after:



Blue channel before:



Finally the Blue Channel after:



Once we have performed these actions our picture now looks like this:



Through the use of channel operations we have altered our image, but can always step back to the original. Non-destructive editing allows us to manipulate the image in multiple ways while maintaining the original image's integrity.