ADJUSTMENT LAYERS

Created March 17, 2004© Copyright Moon's Designs
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This is my creation, any similarity to other tutorials on the Internet is unintentional.
Please do not copy or place this tutorial or any graphics to any other place without written permission directly from me. Thank you.

This tutorial is written in and for PSP8.10 and assumes you have a working knowledge of PSP at a Intermediate level, however I do try to write my tutorials so that even the beginner can do them.

YOU WILL NEED:
JASC's PSP8 (30 day free trial) - You can get it HERE

My tutorials are only guidelines to help you accomplish a certain creation. Please feel free to be inventive and take whatever liberties you would like. I encourage each of you to do your "own thing" and make your creation yours! Your finished creation is yours to do with as you please.

Screenshots are resized and compressed for faster loading. Don't forget to SAVE your work often.

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One of the seldom used features of Paint Shop Pro is Adjustment Layers. You can do some amazing things to your photographs by using them along with several other features available in the Adjust menu. In this tutorial we will show you how to use the adjustment layers and there is also a lesson on the new Working Smarter, Not Harder in PSP8 CD where we transform a scene into an artistic, surreal image.

What are adjustment layers? Adjustment Layers are correction layers that adjust the image's color or tone without modifying the image's pixels directly. Adjustment Layers are similar, yet different, than regular layers. You cannot paint on Adjustment Layers, although you can lessen the effect of the Adjustment Layer. The Adjustment Layer applies a specific effect to the underlying layer, giving you a preview of what your image will look like when you merge them together. You can use Blend Modes and adjust the Opacity on Adjustment Layers. You'll see how this works shortly.

All Adjustment Layers have equivalent commands on the Adjust Menu. To apply an Adjustment Layer you need to go to your Layers Menu/Add Adjustment Layer. You cannot add an Adjustment Layer from the Layer Palette, as you can with most other layers.

I am using a photograph that I took of the California countryside on a recent road trip. The image below is small for faster loading, if you would like to just a larger version for practice click on the image and save the larger, md-scenic.png, image to your hard drive.

Step 1:
Open your image and duplicate it by going to Window/Duplicate or Shift+D on your keyboard. Close out the original. The reason for working on a duplicate image is in case you want to use the original again and forget to change the name when saving. Save your duplicate image and remember to save frequently.

Step 2:
Go to Layers/Add Adjustment Layer and choose Invert, turning it into a negative appearance.

You will get a Layer Properties dialog box. Change the Blend Mode from Normal to Difference.

Your layer palette will look like this.

Your image will look like this. Remember the invert layer only shows you what your image will look like if the two layers were merged.

 

If you look at your Materials Palette you will see that the color palette turned to a grayscale pattern while on the Adjustment Layer.

The reason for this is because you cannot add colors to an adjustment layer. However, you can remove part of the adjustment layer where you do not want the effect to be applied ~~ similar to when using the Show All Mask, learn more about this in my Mystery of Masks tutorials. Let's remove the invert adjustment effect over the grass part of the original image. We will do this by using the Airbrush tool.

Step 3:
Activate your Airbrush Tool. On your Tool Options Palette go to Presets and press the curved arrow to go back to your default settings. The only thing I then changed was the Hardness, which I set to 15. Depending on the image you are using you may want to change the size, other than that I left all settings the same. Set your foreground material to Black and airbrush over the grass area. You will see the grass area start to show through as green, removing the purple from the adjustment layer.

Step 4:
The rest of the image is a lot brighter than the grass now, but this is easily fixed by adding a Color Balance Adjustment Layer. Go to Layers/New Adjustment Layer/Color Balance In your Property Dialog Box you will have 3 options - Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights. I adjusted all 3 options for this particular image. Again, this is something that you need to play around with to find which tone balance and the amount of color balance you would like to use. Below are the screenshots of the settings that I changed.

Midtones 0-60-0

Shadows 32-0-0

Highlights 42-0-43

Notice that when you choose another tone balance you will only have the color balance numbers for that tone, however what you have chosen before applies also.

Below is my image after adding the Color Balance Adjustment Layer.

Step 5:
I still want the grass a bit brighter and we will do this using a Levels adjustment choosing the Green Channel. First we need to merge all of the layers in order to use the Levels. Go to Layers/Merge/Merge All (Flatten). Now go to Adjust/Brightness Contrast/Levels. You will get this dialog box.

Again, I played with the sliders until I had my desired result.

Step 6:
To give the photograph a bit of a softer look I added a Soft Focus. Go to Adjust/Soften/Soft Focus. I played around with the randomize die and used these settings.

To finish up my creation I added a couple of borders and inner bevels. Of course you could also add a frame. Let your imagination be your guide.

I sure hope you have enjoyed this tutorial as much as I have creating it for you. If you have any problems, comments or questions please do not hesitate to E-mail me.

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Tutorial written and created by Patti Wavinak for Moon's Designs. These Tutorials are copyrighted by law. You may LINK to them only. You may not remove any of the graphics, zip files or html within these pages to reproduce these Tutorials, without the expressed permission of Moon's Designs. These pages may not be removed from this website and sent via e-mail, nor saved, stored or archived in files in YahooGroups or other mailing list sites, nor may they be translated and placed on another site.
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