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Adjustment Layers in Adobe Photoshop

When you make adjustments in Photoshop, usually if you want to do it in a non destructive way where it's something that's always undoable, changeable and all that, you're gonna wanna use adjustment layers. Now, here, I'm gonna work on some images that I didn't pre ajus. Most of the time I would have pre adjusted all these images using Adobe camera raw. That's where I start all my pictures, but just to make it, so we have a lot to work on. I'm gonna work with images that haven't been messed with yet. So just realize that most of the time these would be further along before I started working on them in this fashion. But in the process, we're gonna learn all about adjustment layers and then we'll get into some very specific adjustments that we're gonna talk about doing tonal adjustments. If I ever mentioned tonal adjustments. All I mean is I'm not trying to affect the color, I'm trying to affect the tonality or brightness of the image. So let's take a look. There are two ways of applying ...

adjustments in Photoshop. One is to directly affect the original image, the layer that it's contained within and that happens if you come up here to the image menu and choose adjustments and you choose any of these choices, whatever it is, you choose, it's going to affect the layer that you're working on directly. And therefore, if you make a change that might, let's say, force some areas to black. I'm not saying that's the best adjustment. But if you were to save and close this image and open it a month later, there would be no way for me to get that detail back unless I can find a backup of the original file or something else that would not rely on this file. Sure, before I end up saving the image, I can always choose undo to get back here. But the other way you could apply it is to instead come to the bottom of your layers panel, click on this half black and half white circle and choose from this list. You're not gonna find all of the adjustments that were in the other menu here because there is a limitation on what can be used as an adjustment layer and we can get into what that is later on once we know a little more about this, but I can choose something from here like levels. And now if I end up applying this to an image, then it's not permanent. Because if you look in the layers panel, it is separate from the image which is underneath. And if I ever didn't want this adjustment. Well, it's not permanent. I could just click on the layer again and come right up here and change it back to the original settings. Or if I didn't like the adjustment at all, I could turn off or throw away this adjustment layer like that. So adjustment layers make it much more versatile than coming up here to the image adjustments. Menu. The time I do use this is when I run into an adjustment that is not available as an adjustment layer. One example of that would be shadow highlights. Well, if I need that, I'm gonna have to come to this menu. You should also know there is a second way of creating an adjustment layer and that is to go to the layer menu. And there is a choice called new adjustment layer. And this menu here is identical to the one that I showed you a moment ago at the bottom of the layers panel. There is a slight difference though in that when I choose one of these, it's going to ask me to name the layer. And so I could call this darken image overall or something like that and click. OK? And then the layer is not called levels one or whatever the it was called before. Instead, I've typed in a manual name. Well, if you prefer to use this icon down here, just hold down the option key, alton windows. When you choose something from this menu and that would cause it to ask for a name. So therefore, there's nothing that that layers menu gives you over what we could do with this icon at the bottom of the layers panel. So it's my preference to go down there because I almost always have my layers panel open. So now let's talk about working with adjustment layers and talk about some specific adjustments that are useful for changing the brightness and contrast in general tonality of your picture. There is one odd thing I'm gonna have to work around though. There is currently what I consider to be a blatant bug in Photoshop, something that makes Photoshop not do what it's supposed to do in one area. Let me show you what it is. If I apply an adjustment this way and I use, choose something like levels or curves, both of those features will give you a bar chart up here. That bar chart is called a histogram. And it's useful when adjusting your picture. Look at what the histogram looks like right now, notice there's a big empty part over on the right and there's a big empty part over on the left. Now, I'm gonna apply the exact same adjustment using an adjustment layer and you're gonna find that that histogram is not gonna display correctly. Now you notice there is no gap on the right and the gap on the left is larger I believe than it was before this histogram right now is inaccurate and there's an icon right here that's supposed to make it more accurate. But all that's gonna do is smooth out the shape here. I'll click it, but I don't know why this is not displaying correctly, but I gotta teach this class. So somehow I have to use it anyway. So when I describe what a histogram is, I'm not gonna use an adjustment layer just so that it's displaying things properly, then we're gonna use adjustment layers just because they're more versatile and it's what I would usually use. So hopefully, Adobe will fix a bug in Photoshop so that the histogram you would see when applying adjustment layer would be the same as the one you would see when you're not using one. So histograms they're easiest to understand if you start off with levels. And the reason for that is you have this bar right down here. And I really wish Adobe would display that bar of all the shades of granular image every single time they ever show any form of a Histogram because those are all the brightness levels you could possibly have in a picture. And if you were to pick one of them and go straight up, if there's a bar on that bar chart, then that particular brightness level is found somewhere within your image. And that also means that currently there is no black in this picture, there's nothing this shade of gray either, nothing that shade, either the darkest shade in this entire picture is right there. And if you go straight down from it, it would be this shade right here. The brightest shade and this entire picture is not white. No, it's this bright right here. And if I go straight down from it, that is this shade of gray, that's what the histogram tells me. Then one bar on the histogram will always jet all the way up to the top. That's just whichever one is the most prevalent. The most common you use the most of within the image, however, you want to say it, but at least one bar will always go to the top. And that just means that this shade right here and all the shades that are at the same height, which are the shades directly below that down here are the most prevalent. And then compared to whatever those shades are, these other shades take up less and less and less space and then these down here barely take up any space at all. So that's what a histogram is. I just wish when I used an adjustment layer, it would be accurate, it used to be and I don't know when that ended up happening. So let's look at what levels does and decide what all these sliders do because they all relate to this bar at the bottom and that histogram. So first this slider right here will force areas within your image to white. When I pull it in towards the middle, more and more areas are gonna get closer to white. And at some point, something is gonna become solid white. And if I pull this in until it points at the very first bar in that histogram, that means the brightest shade in the entire picture is this one right here. Well, what that slider does is it takes whatever shade is directly below it and makes it white along with all the shades brighter than that. So that just made the brightest part of the image white. This slider over here forces areas to black as you pull it in, things get closer and closer to black. And if you look straight down below it, what it's really doing is taking this shade of gray right below it in any shade that's darker than it and making it solid black. The only problem is in this photograph, we don't have any of those shades. Otherwise we would have bars on our histogram. But the moment I get this to touch the histogram now that represents the darkest shade of gray, which is the one right here and we just forced it to black. So now we have the full brightness range from white to black in the picture. And if I were to click, OK, that would actually apply this to this image. So it's been changed, then I could return up here to levels once again. And I'd see a new histogram, an updated one that reflects those changes. And now you can see the histogram has the same general shape, but now it's spread all the way across the width that was available. And now we do have a small area of white and we do have a small area of black. But let me cancel that and choose undo because I wouldn't usually apply it and then go right back in. I would have instead just stayed in there the whole time. There is a semi hidden feature in here because when I pull this in and have it touched the beginning or end of the histogram? Look at how low the histogram is, how short it is. Who knows? Maybe that's only one pixel. It could be a speck of dust in the image. So I want to be able to visibly see where specifically in the image it's becoming solid black to do. So I hold down the option key that's all in windows and then I click and hold this slider and I'm now seeing any areas that are solid black, anything in here that looks black is truly black and I might need to pull that in a little bit further before you really start to see it. There we go. I can start to see it there. Now, if I were to zoom up on the image right now, I'm viewing my image. If you look in the lower left corner at only 32% magnification. That means I can't see every little speck of detail that's in that image. My screen just doesn't have enough detail to do that. But let's back off on that. And even right here when I didn't think I was seeing any information, look in the lower left corner of the picture, right in the corner, there was stuff there and let's back off on it until we don't see anything there right about there. I don't see anything we look at where the slider is compared to the histogram. We're no longer touching it. So when I brought it over and got it to touch, it was in that corner of the image where it was and I don't think that's an important area. In fact, I might even crop that out in the end. So I'm gonna pull this over and if I'm gonna crop that out, I'll just ignore that area, I'll keep going. And what I usually want is a small area, not a speck, a blob, tiny blob. So I might go about there ignoring that little area in the corner and that's I'm gonna use for the darkest part of my image. I like having the darkest part black. Cool. Now let's go for the brightest part. Let's grab this slider. It has the same feature built in where I can hold down the option key and click on it and then pull it in in the moment. But it touches the histogram, I should see something show up and I think I do near the middle of the photograph just a little bit higher than the mill. I can see a speck. And if I continue to pull it in, you see it get bigger. But the moment that touch the histogram, I can see a speck. If I back off further, the spec goes away. And that means I'm no longer touching the histogram. So by pulling it in there, I've now made the brightest part of the image white. Well, with images in general, I usually make the darkest part black, but the brightest part doesn't always look best when it's white. So I just think of this as the farthest I would want to move this slider without losing detail in the bright area. And then I could back off on it to decide exactly what do I really think looks best in the picture? In this case, I'll just back off a little bit uh because I like that better. Then this slider in the middle, what it does is it takes the shade of gray that is found directly below it and it'll make that shade 50% brightness. So halfway between white and black. And so if I move it over this way towards darker shades, it's gonna brighten up the image because these are darker than 50% gray. If I move it to the right, then it's gonna point at these shades that are brighter than 50% gray. And if it makes one of them, 50% gray, that's gonna cause the image to darken. So I can move that one way to brighten and the other way to darken and we're just brightening or darkening everything that's in between those areas that we decided should be white or black so that you could think of it as an overall brightness control. Then down here, these are output sliders. That means after we've applied this and it's all done with that, it comes down here. And what this means is if we have black in our image, do we really want it to be black or let's say our printing process we use, if we end up printing 99% gray, it just turns black anyway because it absorbs into the sheet of paper and it just doesn't print well. And let's say in our printer, we need to be up closer to 95% gray or some other shade. Well, if I grab this and pull it in, it means make the areas that used to be solid black, make them shade of gray this points at. So if I put this halfway across now, the darkest part of the image is exactly that shade, although it is only thinking about what is black. So if I didn't have black in the original picture, it wouldn't be exactly that. And then this does the same thing for white. It says, hey, let's take white if there was some in our image and let's make it whatever shade of gray this points at. So levels can be kind of cool to use on a black and white picture because I can make sure I have a small area of black and I can tell when would I force something to white and I could back off on it. But we have similar controls to this when we're in camera. So unless you're ignoring came raw, which is what I use for every image. When I start off, you're probably not gonna need this uh all that often, but it's still very useful if I scan my signature and I just happened to have it in Photoshop, I ignored camera raw. I could pull this in and tell the white sheet of paper. My signature was on was truly white and I couldn't see the texture of the paper. Then I can pull in this slider over here and force the darker areas to solid black. So the signature itself doesn't look like a shade of gray instead it looks black. And so this is useful for all sorts of things good to know about. I'll click. OK. I simply wish when I applied it up here as an adjustment layer that the histogram would be accurate. And it's not currently, that's the only reason I didn't use an adjustment layer. Now, Adobe recently added this little bar at the bottom is known as the contextual. Let's see what it's called the contextual text bar. And there you'll also find the adjustment layer icon. And if I click on it, it will work a little bit differently. When I use that, I get this panel that pops up and at the top, I have adjustment presets and I could hover over these to see what would they do to my picture. And if I like them, I could click, then down here, I have my presets. Those are ones I actually created, you can save your own. And then down here are single adjustments. And each one of these icons that are here represents one of the adjustments that is found in this menu. I never use this because this is like looking at hieroglyphics. How am I supposed to remember what the heck that is versus that thing? You might eventually. But I find that they're just right down here and they're much easier to read as text than try to interpret icons, but just say no, that's available and that's what you get if you click on this icon, but I personally don't use this. So I'm gonna go to the little side menu and say close to get rid of that. Let's close this image and work on another one and let's talk about one of the adjustments that is simply not available as an adjustment layer. And that is if I come up here to image adjustments and I choose shadow highlight. Let's try it out in shadow highlight. We have just two sliders to start with and you'll notice the default settings are not zero. So it brought up the shadows which brought out my shadow detail within this picture. There is a preview check box. If I turn it off, you'll see the original image, turn it on and you'll see what the result and that nicely brought out shadow detail. Then we have a second slider called highlights. And if I bring it up, watch what happens to the waterfall, you'll see that it darkens the highlights. And so we can either brighten the shadows or darken the highlights, but there's a lot more to this than just these two sliders. We can have more control. Let's move it up here. We make a little more room and turn on the show more options check box. Now, if you look what used to just be one slider has become a mount that was the slider I was applying before. And now we have tone and radius tone determines how broad of a range is it gonna consider to be a shadow? And when I go to this, it's going to, if I bring this down, now it's gonna have a much more narrow range. It's gonna think that the shadows are considered only the areas really, really close to black. And so those are the only areas being brightened and as they bring this higher and higher, it starts working on a wider and wider range of tones that it is labeling now as the shadows and therefore the things that are being brightened. But then this does something a little more sophisticated than what levels could do or an adjustment like curves or any other adjustment that is available as an adjustment layer. And that has to do with this called radius. After it isolated the dark area of the picture, it's going to create a transition between that dark area where the adjustment is being applied and the medium areas where the adjustment is not being applied. And it uses this setting to determine how that transition should work. And this makes it so it's not available as an adjustment layer because this is really changing the contents of the picture. It's not just brightening and darkening tones and it works in a more sophisticated way. So I could move that around until I like that transition. We have the same for highlights. The amount is how much darker am I gonna make the highlights tone? Is what are we gonna consider to be a highlight from white down to white? If I brought it really far down, it's only gonna work on the absolute brightest areas. And then as I bring it up, it works on a wider and wider and wider brightness range, so I can tone it in exactly what range I think it needs but then there's more we have radius and that means let's affect the transition between those bright areas in the mid toes. And if I tweak that I can really control that transition until I visually think it looks good, then we do have other things down here. Here. We have black clip and white clip that does the same things as what we did in levels. Do you remember in levels when I brought the black slider over until it touched the histogram? That's what this does unless you set this to zero. This means how many of the pixels that make up your image should we turn to black? And it's just saying a tiny amount like a speck and this one means how much of the bright part of the image should we ensure is solid white. Just a tiny amount is what this is saying if I didn't want the brightest area to be white, I could change this to zero and then it wouldn't try. Then here we ha can adjust the mid toes because up here we adjusted the dark areas and the bright areas. This would be the stuff in between and we could try to fine tune its brightness if need be finally, we have color. And if we bring that up or down, you will find that bringing it up will make the image more colorful. You'll see more separation between the colors and bringing it down, the colors will more blend together. It's not the same as saturation though. If I bring it down, we don't end up with black and white. We just end up with less variation in the colors. If I bring it up, we get more variation so I can fine tune that. So this is a pretty cool adjustment, but this is not usually quite as good as what we have in Adobe camera. So I wouldn't ignore a camera. I would just use this on occasion in addition to it, if I'd already adjusted an image, but this is not available as an adjustment layer and it has to do with that setting called radius and that it actually changes the content of your image and it doesn't just brighten and darken things to show you what I mean. Let me apply it to this. If I come and choose image adjustments, shadows and highlights all of the adjustments found in adjustment layers would only be able to brighten or darken these tones, they would not be able to change what is found within this area because this started out as a solid shade of gray and it could only brighten or darken it. But here with radius, this is causing what used to be a solid shade of gray to become a transition zone across like that. And the other ra A setting is doing the same thing just in a different area. And in order to see that I would have to first be adjusting my highlights, then you'd see this, but you see how it's transforming this, which used to be a solid shade of gray into a transition and adjustment layers can't do that. Adjustment layers can only brighten and darken what you have. It cannot change the contents of an area that used to be solid. So here's another image that might be useful for doing uh shadows and highlights in here. I could brighten up where that kid is with my shadow slider. And if I think these bright areas are a bit too bright, I could optionally darken them up with this, but I don't think the highlights really need much. I might bring it in just a little bit click. OK? And if I choose undo there's before there's after, but now let's get into adjustment layers and yet let's use the most powerful total adjustment available anywhere in Photoshop. And that is a choice called curves. You're not gonna master curves in one lesson, you're not gonna master curves in one lifetime. There's so much you could know about it. But let's take a look. So in here, we have the brightness levels we could possibly have in a gray scale picture down here at the bottom, we have white on the right black on the left. Then this diagonal line represents how much light would be used by default to represent those shades of gray. So for black, this is at the bottom because you'd have no light for white. This is at the top because you'd use as much light as you could possibly use for that. And for 50% gray, you'd use half as much light as for white. It just says this is how much light you would use to make these shades. But then I can change it. What you do is you grab this little hand tool that's here and click on it. And in fact, I use that hand tool so much that I go to the upper right menu here and I choose something called auto select targeted adjustment tool. What that means is automatically turn on that hand every single time I ever apply curves. So I never have to remember to click on it and that's what I use. So what does that hand do? Well, if I move my mouse on top of my picture and I move it to an area like this go over and look at curves, do you see a circle? If you were to look straight down from that circle until you get to the shade of gray that's found at the bottom of the curve? That's the exact shade my mouse should be on top of right now. So the height of that circle represents how much light there is currently in this area. So if I move it down here to a darker area, you'll just find that it moved lower on the curved. Show me how much light is in this area. Then what I could do is I could come up here and click on this. When I click on it, watch what happens to the circle. It becomes a dot That dot is like a dimmer switch. And if I were to right after clicking on this uh area that is here, I could click and keep my mouse button held down, then it's like having a dimmer switch in my hand. And if I push it up, I'll add more light. And if I push it down, I'll use less light in that area. But when I push that down, look at the rest of the curve. Do you notice how the entire curve moved down except for at the very end? So other things in the image also got darker because this moved down overall. So let me choose undo because most of the time, what I do is I had two dots in here. What I would do is I would have first clicked on what I do not want to change. I don't want this dark area down here to change. So I click to add a dot That's like adding a dimmer switch for this area, but I'm never gonna move that dimmer switch. Instead, I'm holding it in position by locking it in. Then I can come up here and decide that I want to darken this. And so I pull it down and when I do that lower area does not become any darker because that other dot locked in its brightness. But let's see what we could do with this. I'm gonna reset this. There's this little u-turn symbol and that means start over. And so let's say I wanted to darken this shade up here a bit and when I do the rest of the curve is gonna get darker, that's OK. I'll do that. Get it about the brightness. I want, I want this to be even darker than it is right now. So I'm gonna click on it and pull it further down. But when I do that, I'm thinking this area over here is getting to be too dark. Well, just move your mouse over to it and look at the curve, look at how much lower that part of the curve is compared to the diagonal line, which is where we started. So of course, it looks darker because it's like a dimmer switch, you move down. So all I need to do is click there and move it up a bit and that's gonna brighten it so I can dial in the brightness of specific areas within my picture. But when I do it, it's not actually thinking about specific areas in my picture. The only thing it's thinking about at all is brightness levels. And so what I did is I said, let's take this brightness level, whatever is directly below that dot And let's use a little bit less light. And I said, let's take this brightness level and do it even more extreme. And then I said this brightness level, which right down there went a little too far as a consequence. So I pushed that a little bit further up, a little bit closer to where it started. But this is something that will allow you to make adjustments that would not be possible with other things like levels, uh brightness and contrast or most of the adjustments that you find in Adobe camera. This is the one that gives you the most control, but it's not the easiest to understand. Well, I applied this as an adjustment layer. So what I can do is turn off the eyeball here to see what it looks like without the adjustment, then I can turn it back on. And one thing you might notice is that the image is becoming more colorful when I turn it back on. If I don't want that to happen, there's a menu at the top of the layers panel, it's known as the blending mode menu. And we have an entire lesson de devoted to this. But you should know that with adjustment layers, all you need to do is set this to the choice called luminosity. Luminosity is just a fancy word for brightness. And what that does is it says take this layer that I'm currently working on and only allow it to change the bright of the picture do not allow it to change how colorful the image is or to change what color areas are. So now when I turn it off and back on again, I think I see things get darker but I don't see them becoming more colorful. So that's kind of a essential thing. When any time you add contrast to your image, it will look more colorful. And if you don't want it to and you're using an adjustment layer change that to luminosity. But let's try more things. Let's try different images. Uh I don't really want this little contextual bar to be here. To me, it's somewhat annoying because it covers up my image. So I'm gonna go to the side menu that's here and I'm gonna say hide bar. If you ever do that, that's gonna make this disappear. And if you ever need it back, just go to the window menu and it's found right down here near the bottom that would get her to show up again. And I'm just not using it right now and I find her to be distracting. So let's see what we could do here. Let's say I want to exaggerate the detail that is down here to do. So I'm gonna create an adjustment layer and I'm gonna use curves and that hand tool is automatically selected because remember I turned on this setting, then I'm gonna come in here and I want to exaggerate the difference between this dark area and this brighter area. So all I need to do is add two dots to my curve. That's like having two dimmer switches. I get one for however much light there is here. And I'm gonna move that straight up just a little bit to add a little bit of light to that area which is gonna brighten it. But if you look at the curve, it pulled the curve up generically just centered on that spot, but everything else kind of got a little brighter as well. Well, I want this area the darker stuff to get darker. So there's a greater difference between the two. So I hover over it, I can see where it is in the curve. It's a little lower because it has less light. I'll click and I'm gonna pull that down and I can pull it as far as I want. The further I pull it, the more of a change I'm gonna get. And if I don't like the fact that the image is becoming more colorful, I change this menu to the bottom choice called luminosity and then it can't change the, the uh color within the image if I want to see before and after I could either turn off the eyeball here on the adjustment layer or there's an eyeball icon right here. That does the exact same thing. So I just click there compared to there. That's before. This is after, before after. But I don't like when I turn this off and on what's happening to the sky. So I want to mask it. Well, every adjustment layer you ever create comes with a layer mask already attached, it just starts out as being filled with white. So what I might do is click on the layer that's underneath because that's where the picture is. And I can tell Photoshop up here to select the sky and usually it does an OK job. So now I have the sky isolated. All I need to do is click on this adjustment layer, make sure that the layer mask is active. So if it doesn't have this bold border around it, you just click on it and then I wanna fill that area of the layer mask with black because black means don't apply, it means hide this particular layer. So I'll just go up here to edit, I'll choose fill and I'm gonna tell it to fill with black click. OK? And now my adjustment can't affect the top part of my picture. I don't need the selection anymore. So I'll go to the select menu and choose deselect. So now if I turn the adjustment layer off and back on again, I no longer see that sky changing at all. But now I notice when I turn it off and back on again, this area over here is darker watch and I wish it wouldn't. Well, all I need to do is grab my paintbrush tool, make sure I'm painting with black and I probably want to use a soft edge brush. So I don't see exactly where I stopped painting and I'm just gonna paint across here with black. And when I do the mask gets filled in with black. And so now if I turn this eyeball off and back on again, I see that that area is no longer changing and I don't mind all the other areas that are changing. So that's not bad. Then I could select the sky again. And let's say I want the sky, the blue portion of it to be darker. Well, I can come in here and I can choose curves and the hand is automatically pushed in because of that setting I turned on. And the first thing I'm gonna do is click on part of the clouds to say, I don't want this area to change and I'm not gonna move the dot I'm just locking in its brightness. Then I'm gonna go to a darker area of the sky, maybe even down here and I'm gonna click and then just imagine I have a dimmer switch in my hand. And if I want to darken that I'd simply drag down what that's doing is moving the point on the curve that I just added and it's moving it down, which means use less light. In this case, I don't mind that the image became more colorful. I think it makes the sky look better. If I want to see before and after I just turn off this eyeball before after. But most of the time when I use curves, I add two dots to separate two different brightness levels. And then I'll use move one or both of them up or down, up, means brighter down means darker. And it allows you to target very specific brightness levels which you would not be able to do with any other adjustment. But one other thing that I often do is if you look at this curve, I targeted this, which represented the bright part of the clouds and I didn't move it. So I didn't want to change it. And I targeted this, which was the bluish part of the sky and I brought it down to darken it. But out of a consequence of doing that, look at what happened to this part of the curve, it moved down much further than this thing. So if there happens to be any areas that are darker than what I was attempting to adjust, they're gonna get this big change to the image. So often times I have to add an extra dot I add it somewhat close to here. But if you look at my mouse, you'll see there's arrows, it's like a little X with arrows on it and I need to move far enough away until those little arrows disappear. Otherwise, if the arrows are showing up, it would move the dot That's already there. The one that's closest to where my mouse is right now. So if I click, it just pull it over this way. But if it looks like arrows, then it's not gonna move that dot It will instead add another. So I'll click after clicking, you can snug it close to the other if you want to. But all I'm gonna do is try to lessen what's happening after that dot Just try to get that. So it doesn't droop down quite so far. I might do the same thing by clicking on the other adjustment layer and you see where this is drooping up. Well, I might not want those other areas to get so much brighter. So I might add another dot And just try to get that to not get too far out of where I want it. You don't always have to do that, but on occasion, that would be very useful. So now we have that bottom area, got more contrast and we got the top area with more contrast and that is your introduction to curves. Well, now let's talk a little bit more about how to build an image using adjustment layers because you're not just gonna be adjusting your image. Let's say I need to retouch out this little area here. Well, I gotta be careful with how I construct my image because if I create a brand new empty layer by clicking on the new layer icon and then I come over here to use a retouching tool here. I'll use the spot healing brush in order to get that to work on an empty layer. Like I have set up, I need to have sample all layers up here at the top turned on and then I can just come in here and try to retouch that out and it should work out just fine. But the problem is what if I later on decide I no longer want this adjustment to add contrast to the bottom part of the picture? I just decided I didn't like what it looked like. So I turned off this adjustment. Well, when I do, I don't know if you can see it or not, but that retouching doesn't quite blend anymore. I can see where it used to be. I can see its edge. Let me turn it off and back on again. Do you see how it just doesn't quite look right? Well, let me show you what it would have looked like. If I would have made a more extreme adjustment, I'll choose undo a few times until it's right before I applied that adjustment. Then I'll come down here to my curve and I'm gonna make it more radical. It's probably not gonna make the image look good because I was trying to do a subtle change. But let's just say it was more extreme. Then I came up here and did my retouching and then I decided just like before, I don't want this adjustment. Well, now you can tell a little bit more that, that retouching no longer matches what's underneath it. And that's because when it applied the retouching, it looked at what was underneath that layer and it saw that this adjustment was darkening what was under there. And so that was incorporated in the adjustment or the uh retouching, I should say. So how can we do this? We still have the versatility of being able to turn these adjustment layers off and on or modify by clicking here and adding dots what the actual adjustments do instead of being locked in to what's there? Well, what I would do is this let me throw away that layer anytime I need to apply retouching to a document, I always do it directly above the background and I just make a brand new layer so that that brand new layer is below these things. Then I can come in here and I can make my retouching and it works fine. But what it was doing is just looking at what's under this and it ignores in general what's above it. So then I could go to this adjustment layer and I could make it more extreme if I wanted and it would not cause that uh retouching to not match. As long as I have my retouching underneath the adjustment layers, then you could think of the retouching as being done before these other things because it's as if you're standing at the top of the layers panel and looking down and these things are simply changing your view of what's down here and I can always change them is as long as I don't have the rib touching on top of them. So you gotta be careful. You put retouching on top of adjustments to give you a more blatant version. Let me go over here and choose an adjustment called black and white. Then put a adjustment or a empty layer on top and do some retouching. Well, right now that retouching is gonna see a black and white picture. So if I come in here and retouch out some of these little specs, all that retouching is in black and white. If I hide all the adjustment layers and the images and look just at the layer that contains the retouching, it's black and white. So of course, if I throw away the black and white adjustment layer later on decide I need a color version, just throw it away. Now the retouching just isn't usable because it's black and white, but I could have had that black and white adjustment layer in there. Let's put it back in. Then I could work on this layer which contains my retouching but is directly above the background layer. And I can use my retouching tool and let's get in here and retouch these things out, it still looks just fine and then later on, I decide, hey, I need a color version of this image too. So I come in here and I turn off the black and white adjustment layer and everything works perfectly fine because it was ignoring all that stuff when it was doing the retouching since it was working on things lower in the document. And so that's how you want to construct images where you have both adjustment layers and you have retouching. The only time I would put retouching on top of those would be if what I'm retouching out was caused by these adjustment layers, maybe some sort of artifact appeared as the result of me doing this and I need to retouch it out, then I need to put it on top. So hopefully that gets you started thinking about using adjustment layers and how you can incorporate them along with retouching. As long as the retouching is done at the bottom and all adjustment layers are done on top. Also, anytime you add a new adjustment layer, always put it on top of the stack because it's thought of as whatever is below is done first and then this and then that. So you need to put it on top in order to have it work appropriately.