From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Applying Adjustment Layers to multiple layers - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Applying Adjustment Layers to multiple layers

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- [Instructor] As you begin to work with more layers in Photoshop, you're going to want to learn how to control which layers are being affected by an adjustment layer. In this document, you can see that we have a number of different artifacts and each one of these artifacts is on its own layer. Each one of these layers also has an effect. In this case, it is a drop shadow. We haven't talked about layer effects, but we'll do so later on in the course. I want to make a change to the fossil layer. I want to desaturate it a bit. So from the adjustment panel, I'll add a hue and saturation adjustment layer and then I'm going to decrease the saturation. But when I do this, we can see that it affects all of the layers below the hue saturation layer. So in order to restrict the hue and saturation adjustment layer to only affect the fossil, I can use the layer menu and create a clipping mask. Now the hue saturation is only affecting the fossil, which it's clipped to. As soon as you create a clipping mask, you'll notice that the base layer of the mask will have an underline and the layer that is clipped will be indented, and it also has this downward pointing triangle. All right, let's take a look at the persimmons and the desert rose. So that's these two layers, and I toggled on and off the visibility of the layer using command-comma on Mac, control-comma on windows. I want to shift their hue a little bit. So I'm going to add another hue and saturation adjustment layer, and I'll use the hue slider to move it towards red. But we can see as I move this, all of the layers underneath this are also shifting, so the crab legs and the sand dollar. So in order to isolate the hue and saturation to only affect the persimmon and the desert rose, I'll need to place the persimmon and the desert rose into their own group. I can do this by dragging down to the folder icon, then I'll position my cursor in between the folder and the hue saturation adjustment layer and this is a shortcut for adding a clipping mask. When I see the square with a downward pointing arrow, I can click and that will clip the hue saturation to the group. So now it's only affecting the two items in the group and nothing else underneath them. All right, I want to show you one more way in case you prefer to do it this way. In this case, I want to darken the crab legs as well as the sand dollar but I don't want to darken the background. So I'll target the crab legs and then I'll add a curves adjustment layer and we'll bring down the curve. But we can see that the background's also being affected. Since I can't clip the curves to both the crab legs and the sand dollar without putting them in a group, I'll actually select not only the curve, but also the crab legs and the sand dollar and I'll put all three of these layers into the group. Now by default, groups have a special blend mode called pass through, which enables anything that's within that group to pass through the bottom of the group and affect the layers below it. In order to restrict that, I'll change the pass through blend mode to normal and that will stop the curve from affecting anything below the group. All right, I'm going to select the mask for the curves. Tap the B key to select the brush tool, 'cause I think I've darkened down this area too much. So with the opacity set to 30% and painting with black, I'll just dodge or lighten that area by hiding the curve's adjustment layer. It still affects the top of the sand dollar as well as the crab legs. Excellent, there's a quick way to isolate the effects of an adjustment layer so that they only affect a specific layer or layers in your document.

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