From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Using Photoshop adjustment layers

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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Using Photoshop adjustment layers

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- [Chris] Hello friends, this is Chris Orwig. Welcome to another Photo Tools Weekly quick tip. This one is all about using adjustments in Photoshop. Here we'll use two curves adjustments, one color balance adjustment in order to improve this photograph of my daughter Elsie. All right, well first we'll go into Photoshop. We'll click on the adjustment layer icon for curves. Now if you aren't familiar with curves, what you can do is you can click and drag on this line. If you click and drag in the upper area, it brightens those brighter tones and then in the darker area, it darkens those. This S-curve adds contrast in color saturation and already it's looking a lot better. That is adjustment number one. Adjustment number two, color balance. In color balance, you can target different tonal regions. Let's say we go to Shadows right here. We can cool those shadows off so they have a cooler tone, or we could go to our Highlights, and warm those up a little bit, add a little bit of yellow into that area. All right, that's adjustment number two, are you ready for the final adjustment? This one will involve an adjustment layer and some custom masking. Click on Curves. Here I'm going to add an S-curve like before, highlights go up, shadows go down. Then we'll go into the different channels. Click on this pull down menu, go to Red and if you drag up it becomes red. Drag away from the word red and it becomes cyan. We'll go into the Blue channel and drag up. Now we have a lot of color here, but we want to mask this into the eyes. To do that, we go to the Mask tab. Click Invert, then we'll grab our brush. We want to paint with white, with really soft edge brush, so no hardness there. We can just go ahead and paint into the eyes and I'm bringing back some of that color that we had in the eyes and brightness, too, that we have there so you can see how that adjustment brings those eyes to life. Now, you can always modify the adjustments further, if you wanted them to be even brighter, you can see how we can modify that. Or, if it's too strong, just lower the opacity right there. All right, well there are a few quick tips for using Photoshop and using adjustments to improve the image, one curves adjustment, another one for shadows and highlights and then a final there for the eyes. This one's a little too strong, so again, just lower that opacity until you get the desired results. All right, well I hope you enjoyed this tip. Thanks for joining me this week. I'll look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now.

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