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The Lifesaver Adjustment Layers – Basix
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The Lifesaver Adjustment Layers – Basix

on Jan 26th 2011 with 42 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Program: Adobe Photoshop
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Estimated Completion Time: 8 Minutes

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Download Source Files
This entry is part 8 of 29 in the Photoshop Basix Session
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Are you new to Photoshop? Have you been trying to teach yourself the basics of Photoshop but have found the amount of educational material available on the net a bit overwhelming? As the world’s #1 Photoshop site, we’ve published a lot of tutorials. So many, in fact, that we understand how overwhelming our site may be to those of you who may be brand new to Photoshop. This tutorial is part of a 25-part video series demonstrating everything you will need to know to start working in Photoshop.

Photoshop Basix, by Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor, Martin Perhiniak includes 25 short video tutorials, around 5 – 10 minutes in length that will teach you all the fundamentals of working with Photoshop. Today’s tutorial, Part 8: The Lifesaver Adjustment Layers will explain how to apply non-destructive tonal and colour changes. Let’s get started!

 
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By

Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

Martin is a Hungarian graphic designer, digital artist and an Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor (Design Master). He is currently teaching and working in London but usually travels around the UK and share his love for Adobe products and graphic design. You can follow him on his blog or on Twitter.  

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  • AbdullahWeber

    Awesome !

  • vlasnn

    good tips, I like the way to work with masking layers.

  • http://somedesignblog.com Some Design Blog

    I remember when I first learned about adjustment layers. What a revelation that was. It’s always good to build as much flexibility as possible into your workflow!

  • Carolina

    Great tutorial! How did you get the Rule of Thirds template to show appear when you selected the crop tool and selected the entire image?

    • Ben

      Once you select an area to crop in the options bar at the top of the page there is a drop down list labeled “Crop Guide Overlay.” Rule of thirds is an option.

  • Trevor

    Great Tutorial once again, thanks and keep them coming.

  • http://www.designpanoply.com Design Panoply

    I remember when adjustment layers were introduced! It opened up a whole new world of non-destructive editing.

  • rospiz

    great tips! keep on posting!

  • http://navi847.deviantart.com/ navi847

    Very Good tips! Added to bookmarks :)

  • http://rankjanx.com AEVION

    Good stuff.

  • zip

    The best tutorial series I’ve ever seen! Awesome! Keep up with the great work!

  • Dave R

    At last a set of tutorials for photoshop for the complete novice,clear concise helpful informative .
    Brilliant,keep up the good work.

    • http://psd.tutsplus.com/ Grant Friedman

      Thanks Dave! Glad you’re enjoying them. We’ve still got about a bunch more to publish.

      • Kasia

        Yeah… keep on doing a great work! :-)

  • http://www.designioustimes.com Doink

    The black & white adjustment layer is a real head-scratcher, but it’s like a 3 in 1 adjustment layer. I just set its opacity to 10-15% and control the color tones from the sliders. Saturation is controlled by the opacity of the layer or its blending mode.

    I’m looking forward for the next clip, with the advanced curves! :D

  • aNDRéS

    this is so practical and yet so easy to use!!!! Thanks for this great tutorial. :)

  • nylife

    It’s like the tiger is coming to life! Looking forward to the next video.

  • http://www.suruha-freespirit.com Su Hall

    Great series! If anyone asks where to go learn Photoshop, I feel good about sending them here. This is such an awesome idea! It helps that the tuts are very well done, too!

    Thank you!

  • http://www.graphiics.com Graphiics

    wow its cool tips for beginners. Looking forward to the next video.

  • http://kyleshevlin.com kyleshevlin

    The video doesn’t seem to be working anymore? Or is it just me? Help, please.

    • http://psd.tutsplus.com/ Grant Friedman

      It seems to work for me. We just made some changes to our settings so you might want to try again.

  • http://www.helloeverything.co.uk David

    Great tips! thanks for posting…

  • Robbie

    This is a QuickTime video while the others are Flash. Which codec does this video need?

  • http://www.freebiejeebies-free-gifts.com klaudio

    simple and very useful tutorial. thanks a lot

  • Gma-X

    Hey, great tutorials so far, couldn’t have wished for anything more. Just one prob though, this video doesn’t seem to work, making me incapable of following up on the next “classes”. Any ideas?

  • samy mohamed

    good tips, I like the way to work with masking layers

  • Débora

    Really, really, great. Amazing the difference before and after the adjustments! It’s hard to believe I was satisfied with much lesser colors.

  • JD

    These are about the best tutorials for free I’ve seen anywhere. Amazingly well done.

  • Tyndrgn

    I am unable to view this tutorial, is there a issue with it that I should adjust should be taken if so?

  • MARK

    Tried several others before getting to these tutorials, and these are the best by a long way for me. Thank you very much. Superb.

  • John

    Great video series – thanks for sharing. BTW you might need to uninstall Quicktime to play the video – worked for me!

  • Faragona

    Oh, could anybody write this tut out, plz? For some reasons I cannot see the movie, but the final result is what I looked for a long time, really! So anyone could help?

  • Rebecca

    Great video! Its a good refresher for people who have used these techniques. Plus, there were some things I was unaware of with curves. I’m currently a student at IPFW for graphic arts so I <3 tutorials that help me better understand Photoshop cs5 techniques. I'll be checking back for more tutorials since this was so great! ;)

  • http://serhanuygur.nl/ Serhan Uygur

    These Layers AAAAALWAYS Save my life, what I do usually is I make a Group Folder called “Finishing” and in here I add my FX and Finishing Touches, together with most of my Color Balance, Gradient Map and Curve layers! Saves me ALOT of time when the customer (or friend :P) doesn’t like the color or darkness!

    Great hints for the new guys! Keep up the good work beginners! Just keep trying! :D

  • Maqbool Ahmed

    Hi!
    I am using Photoshop cs3. I have tried this but when iam working on the black and white masking i able to colour the image but unable to do the correction(means if i go something wrong with the brush unable to re colouring the image to black and white).

    Please mail me or leave the msg on this comment section.

    Thank U!

  • Rho

    i’m not able to do selective colouring like the one he did after de-colorizing it. my brush simply removes the pixels in that area. i have tried to set all settings like in this video but still cant figure out..

  • James

    I cant get this to run? all the others so fare work just this one?

  • Carol Little

    Question – Once you make all the adjustments and you are happy with the results, how do you save the file? If I flatten the layers, doesn’t that mean that I could not go back to the original image?

    Comment – Fantastic tutorials!
    Carol

    • http://www.therealmusician.com Andrew

      Carol,

      Once you flatten the image for saving (as JPEG or whatever other format) I believe if you just undo the action, the images will unflatten (but your file will still be saved!)

  • http://www.therealmusician.com Andrew

    Yeah no kidding about these tutorials. I’m so incredibly impressed with Martin! His voice is very easy to understand, and he talks at the perfect pace so that I can pause and follow along (wish I was at home with my 2nd monitor, would make it even easier!)

    I’m planning on going through all of these if I can as a solid foundation to using photoshop (8 down, only 21 to go!)

    But I just can’t get over how great of a learning resource this series is. Anyone who uses photoshop should use it, as Martin’s tips help out so much. There are always little tidbits of information that he puts in there that really add a lot of value to the presentation. This thing should cost money heheh…They could use these lessons to teach a college course for goodness sakes!

  • Rubcho

    I want to cry. Thank you so much. Coming back everyday until I finish all the tutorials. :-D

  • http://www.facebook.com/ichigo.kun.90 Alyusser Ahmed Sebihi

    COOOOOOOOOL that a lot martin