Adjustment Layers

This is really cool. Have you ever wanted to make an adjustment to your photos that you could edit and manipulate later on? Normally you'd have to click "undo" forever, losing almost all your work. With Adjustment Layers, you can stack up your effects on the photo, and delete or edit them later as needed. I'm assuming a basic knowledge of layers and effects, but I'll try to make it clear.

1. Here's my original photo. It has little depth of color or contrast, and has a very green color cast. You might also notice that in the right upper corner there's a bit of the lens showing--clone stamp takes care of that.













2. So I obviously need to make some changes. At the bottom of the layers palette you'll find this little icon. Click on it and select the adjustment you want to make. For this picture, I chose "Brightness, Contrast," "Selective Color," "Color Balance," and "Levels."















3. Each adjustment gets it's own layer. Thus, we can delete them, hide them, change the opacity--whatever you want! And we don't have to worry about our mistakes being permanent. There's no set rules on what a photo needs--just experiment until you get what you want. That's what I did and here's the final product.













I think we can all agree that this is a whole lot better than the original! The best part is that it didn't actually change the original, and I can always revert back. Well, there's a quick intro to a very powerful and convenient way of altering your images--hope it helps.