Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [144]
Adjustment panel options
Brightness Contrast
A basic brightness and contrast tone adjustment.
Levels
Used for setting the black and white clipping points and adjusting the gamma.
Curves
Used for more accurate tone adjustments.
Exposure
Primarily for adjusting the brightness of 32-bit images.
Vibrance
A tamer saturation adjustment control.
Hue/Saturation
A color adjustment for editing hue color, saturation and lightness.
Color Balance
Basic color adjustments.
Black & White
Used for simple black and white conversions.
Photo Filter
Adds a coloring filter adjustment.
Channel Mixer
For adjusting the balance of the individual color channels that make up a color image.
Invert
Converts an image to a negative.
Posterize
Used to reduce the number of levels in an image.
Threshold
Reduces the number of levels to two and allows you to set the midpoint threshold.
Gradient map
Lets you use gradients to map the output colors.
Selective Color
Applies CMYK selective color adjustments based on RGB or CMYK colors.
Adjustments panel controls
Figure 5.17 shows the default Adjustments panel list view, where you can click on any of the buttons to add a new image adjustment. The button icons may take a little getting used to at first, but you can refer to the summary list on the page opposite to help guide you here, or mouse down on the Adjustments panel menu to access a named list of adjustments. You can also use the adjustment presets list to quickly access the pre-supplied image adjustment settings, or your own preset settings for the various image adjustments. Just click on a preset name and this adds a new adjustment layer with the preset settings. It is easy to get carried away with this feature as you can soon end up with a dozen or more adjustment layers. One way to avoid this is to use the Undo command before you select a new adjustment preset. So the routine would be: select an adjustment and see if you like the result. If not, use the command to undo adding the adjustment layer and select another preset instead and so on. The Adjustment layer clipping mode button lets you determine whether new adjustments are applied to all the layers that appear below the adjustment layer, or are clipped only to the layer that's immediately below the adjustment layer (see Figure 5.19).
Figure 5.17 The Adjustments panel adjustment list options.
Figure 5.19 This shows the two clipping layer modes for adding a new adjustment layer. The one on the left is for applying an adjustment to all layers below the adjustment layer. The one on the right is for clipping adjustments only to the layer below.
Saving files with adjustment layers
Images that contain adjustment layers are savable in the Photoshop native, TIFF and PDF formats. Adjustment layers add very little to the overall file size.
Use Tool Tips
If you have the ‘Show Tool Tips’ option selected in the Photoshop Interface preferences, this displays the name of an adjustment as you roll the cursor over the button icons.
Undoing adjustment steps
There is a Reset button at the bottom of the controls mode Adjustments panel, but you can also use the Undo command to toggle undoing and redoing the last adjustment and use the shortcut to progressively undo a series of adjustment panel edits.
Once you are in the Adjustments panel ‘controls’ mode (Figure 5.18) you can still access the adjustment presets from the menu list at the top. The difference here is that you can run through the list of presets selecting each in turn, to see what each effect does, but without adding a new adjustment layer. Note that when you are in the ‘controls’ mode, the Adjustments panel menu allows you to