How to Use Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

Three Ways to Add Adjustment Layers

Layer > New Adjustment Layer, the half-dark circle icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, or Window > Adjustments for the icon grid. Each adjustment loads its controls into the Properties panel; double-click the layer thumbnail at any time to bring those controls back and change your mind.

Adjustment Layers Always Come With a Mask

This is what makes adjustment layers so useful. A white mask means the effect is visible everywhere. Fill the mask with black (Edit > Fill, or Ctrl/Cmd + I to invert) and the effect disappears, then paint white with a soft brush exactly where you want it – lightening the bottom of a frame, brightening a face, coloring only the sky. Every adjustment panel also has buttons for visibility, reset, a press-and-hold preview of the previous state, and a clipping toggle that limits the effect to the single layer directly below.

Exposure and Tone Adjustment Layers

Brightness/Contrast is the simplest option. Levels sets black point, midpoint and white point from the histogram and can also work per color channel. Curves does everything Levels does with more control – add points anywhere along the line to shape specific tonal ranges. Exposure offers exposure, offset and gamma sliders, though most people reach for Curves instead.

Color Adjustment Layers

Vibrance raises color while protecting skin tones – use it instead of Saturation whenever people are in the frame. Hue/Saturation shifts hue, saturation and lightness overall, or targets one color family with the eyedropper. Color Balance adds cyan/red, magenta/green and yellow/blue separately across shadows, midtones and highlights. Photo Filter warms or cools an image, or applies any color you choose. Selective Color makes very subtle per-color adjustments, which is what makes it excellent for skin. Channel Mixer is enormously powerful and correspondingly heavy-handed – great for bold artistic looks. Color Lookup loads LUT files for instant cinematic grades.

Black and White and Creative Adjustment Layers

Black & White is the right way to convert to monochrome, with a brightness slider per color range. Gradient Map maps a gradient across your tonal range – darks take the left color, lights take the right – and at reduced opacity it is one of the nicest color-toning tools available. Invert flips everything with no options at all.

Analysis Adjustment Layers

Posterize reduces the number of tonal levels and Threshold forces everything to pure black or pure white at a point you choose. Neither is usually a finished look – they are for reading an image, and Threshold in particular is how compositors check that light levels match between two elements.

Adjustment Layers Quick Reference

• Adjustment layers are non-destructive: toggle, re-edit, restack, change opacity and blend mode any time
• Every adjustment layer arrives with a layer mask
• Ctrl/Cmd + I on the mask hides the effect so you can paint it back in
• Clipping toggle limits an adjustment to the one layer below it
• Stack several to build a look you can experiment with freely