| Photo Enhancement with Adjustment Layers | |
Photographic Enhancement with Adjustment Layers
Layers are analogous to the acetate sheets or cells used by animators to add elements onto a background. You create, delete or adjust various layer attributes in the Layer Palette (F4) or the Layer menu.
For straight photographic enhancement purposes the most useful layers are Adjustment layers. Think of an Adjustment layer as a filter that you view the image through not unlike a filter you might have on your camera lens. You can't actually see an adjustment layer, only the effect it has on the normal layer below it. The advantage of an adjustment layer is that it doesn't change the information in your original image so you can experiment with adjustments as much as you like without any damage at all to your photograph.
Adjustment layers come in a variety of flavors but the ones most commonly used for strait photography are Brightness/Contrast, Colour Balance, and Hue/Saturation/lightness.
There are a couple of ways to create an adjustment layer. You can select New Adjustment Layer from the Layers menu or you can right click on the Background layer in the Layer palette and choose New Adjustment Layer from there. In either case you will be presented with the Adjustment Layer type submenu.
If you've done any exploring around PSP you'll notice that most of these functions can be addressed in the various Adjust submenus but performing these operations from there will forever change your original image while doing them using adjustment layers will let you revisit or delete the changes in the future if you so desire providing you saved the file in the PSP format. This also has the advantage of archiving an unchanged version of the original photograph. In addition you have a further level of control by using the layer opacity slider to decrease the intensity of the adjustment. Lets do a little hands on.
