Another Demonstration of Adj. Layers

These things are sooo cool, so I'm going to try another demonstration. Feel free to save the image and experiment with it yourself.

1. Here's what I started with--I like the look of the birch grove, but there are too many colors and not a lot of contrast.













2. I've decided to follow a blue color scheme (you could easily do a different color), so I created a black-to-blue Gradient Map. Basically what this does is desaturate the photo (making it grayscale) and reassign values of blue to different areas.









3. I also used Levels to adjust the contrast and lightness a bit.

Here's a screenshot of my layers palette after I finished















4. Here it is--much more stylized and sureal than the original. At this point, you could apply a filter, but I chose to leave it.













All this was done with Adjustment Layers--other methods would also work, but they would be difficult to change. Oh, and I keep mentioning that AL's are supremely editable, but I haven't explained how to edit them. In each AL there will appear a little graphic showing what kind of layer it is. Just double click on that, and you can change whatever settings you need to.