Applying Adjustment Layers & Levels Effects in Photoshop

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jimmy Hartman on behalf of Expert Village. In this clip we'll be showing how to add a simple adjustment layer and to apply the levels effect to bring out a certain color in our image. Ok, the next thing I want to do is kind of bring out some of the greens here in the side of this hill. The easiest way to do that is to apply an adjustment layer. Using an adjustment layer, the great thing about those is they are non-destructive filters in effects so they don't actually modify the pixel data of the layer so you can always go back to that no matter where it is in the stack on your layers, you can always re-edit it, change the values, come back later if it doesn't look right, you can kind of play with it and then turn it on and off if you don't like it. So I'm going to click this button here which is our adjustment layer button and that's going to go ahead and bring up this menu we'll select levels to bring out our green levels. Go ahead and get that up there. Now this is the levels histogram, it's a pretty crazy palette that we have here so we don't want to get too much into it, but if you can take the time to learn it, you should, it's very valuable in color correcting. We're just going to go to our green levels here from our channels menu, select green and we're going to take our input white slider, we're going to go ahead and bring that down or to the left actually. If you look on the screen as I do this, you can see that these greens are going to be coming out a bit more. The whole image starts to get a bit more green. Alright, we're not worried about the whole image, I'll show you how to correct that later. And then this right here is gray slider, is your gamma. Gamma is basically light multiplication so we kind of want to bring that up a little bit more, get a little bit more green, that might be too much. And we can always click our preview button to see the changes we've made and then select ok. Alright, now that doesn't look too good, we've added green to our entire photo, so great thing about these adjustment layers is here this symbol means its an adjustment layer and then it has a mask as well, layer mask. Now the mask decides what parts of that layer are showed and what parts aren't, so what we want to do is make the entire, we just want this section here to show."