Adjustment layers are yet another advantage to shelling out the serious coin for full blown Photoshop over it’s free and cheaper competitors. These special layers allow you to apply special effects to the layers under them. For example you can adjust the curves, add a custom black and white effect, adjust the brightness and contrast, the saturation, and much much more. The advantage to this method is obviously that the effect is completely reversible. Not so obviously, you can also go back and reedit the adjustment parameters at your discretion.

This will be a bit of a short entry. I just wanted to write a few lines about quick masks. A quick mask is a specialized layer mask that is used just for making selections. I don’t really like them but they are nice for some applications. Once you press the quick mask button, a soft salmon colored film covers your image. You can eliminate the film by painting it white, and reapply it by painting it black. Once you toggle the quick mask off, whatever was not covered by the film will be selected.

Quick masks have three main advantages over other selection techniques. First and most importantly, you have all of the flexibility of your brushes instead of using your standard selection tools. Secondly, a quick mask’s film is mostly translucent, so that you can see the image which you are trying to select. Finally, it’s quick to toggle on and off. I would personally use a layer mask myself for any final product, but may use a quick mask for quick and dirty selections.

My goal here is to pretty simple. Briefly gloss over what layer modes are, show you three nice tricks, and encourage you to play around with them, and see what you can make happen.

So to begin, what are layer modes? Well layer modes are the different ways that the content in a layer can interact with the content in the layers under it to display its data. By default, layers display in normal mode. This means that the content is unaffected by the layer contents under it. However, with the other layer modes this is not so. Your options are slightly different depending on the program you are using, but in the GIMP your options are: Normal, Dissolve, Multiply, Divide, Screen, Overlay, Dodge, Burn, Hard Light, Soft Light, Grain Extract, Grain Merge, Difference, Addition, Subtract, Darken Only, Lighten Only, Hue, Saturation, Color, and Value.

I thought about including a screenshot of how each of these would affect a layer, but I think it would not be much more explicative than just asking you to play with them yourselves. Obviously, some of them are pretty self-explanatory for example, dissolve, darken only, and lighten only work pretty much as you would expect (however for dissolve to appear, you need to reduce the layer opacity which in fact increase the amount that is dissolved). From there, those of you with actual photography knowledge and / or color wheel knowledge might be able to sort through the rest of them, particularly dodge, and saturation. So the last thing you need to know is how to play with them. Well, in your favorite graphics manipulator select the layer you wish to edit, and there will be a pulldown box in the layer dialog window which says “normal” just change that to whatever you want. Keep in mind that without a colored layer behind the current layer you will not get a sense of the effect for most of these. So enough about that, let’s try it out and see some tricks.

1. I’m not sure which blog I found this trick on but it’s one of my favorites. If you take a photograph, like this beautiful one taken by my wonderful mother, duplicate the layer on top of itself and change the top layer’s mode to “soft light” you can remove the gray from a picture which actually adds a great bit of emotion and dynamism to a picture. You can actually duplicate that top layer again and again for a more dramatic effect, or you can adjust the opacity of the soft light layer to soften the effect. Be careful though if you plan on using this method with human subjects because certain colors can look unnatural.

   To see the difference simply hover the mouse over the image
2. Overlay and some others of these layer styles can be of great help when trying to add texture to a picture. In fact, you will run into this method in photoshop tutorials all the time. I think that texture is one of the single most obvious indicators for the professionalism of the artist when it comes to digital works.

   To see the difference simply hover the mouse over the image
3. Fade to black and white. This is actually a very interesting look that can do a lot of things for a piece. It’s so cool to me because it can do really things that are so contradictory. For example, you might add a sense of explosive motion to the picture, or you can slow motion to a stop, you could add an air of progress, or a shot of nostalgia. This method just relies upon the saturation layer mode and a layer filled with either black or white combine with a radial layer mask which we learned about last week.

   To see the difference simply hover the mouse over the image

So that’s enough talk out of me, you guys should try it yourself. Experiment experiment experiment, and best of all. As everything in our non-destructive editing series it leaves the original layer completely unharmed. Thanks to anyone who has friended me on Facebook, as always, I like to put a face with your name so that’s great. It has also inspired me to create a flickr group for you guys to publish your creations for others to see, as you add these new methods to your repertoire. Feel free to upload anything you try there, it doesn’t have to be wonderful, anything can inspire each of us to try something new or different. So I hope that some of you will take me up on that.

Layer masks are a wonderful creation where you can selectively apply transparency to a layer. So while this may at first seem the same task as the eraser tool, you should not confuse them. Actually, if you want to get more work done faster at a higher quality, you should actually consider abandoning your eraser all together (I’ll explain more about that later). Layer masks should in most cases be considered as part of an existing layer, and for this reason all graphic editing software I have ever used display them side-by-side with the layer that they are affecting. There are a lot of ways to explain them, like that they are the opposite of an actual layer, but instead of losing everyone, I think I will just jump to showing you what they do.

I understand that the above is likely hard to read, thus it links to the full size picture of layer masks. I right clicked the layer in the layer manager which brought up the context menu where there is an option to “Add Layer Mask.” Based on your selection in the next dialog box, you will end up with a white or black or other box that looks like a layer, but it’s place conspicuously next to the layer you clicked. Simply click the layer mask preview, to switch to editing the layer mask, not it’s corresponding layer.

Now, in layer masks, black means transparent, and white means opaque. In other words, white means that you can see that area of it’s affected layer, and black sections are turned invisible much like if you erased them.

There are a lot of reasons why this is nice. One, you can use gradients from black to white and vise versa to make awesome fading effects like you can see demonstrated in the picture. This is actually a very common need for web designers, and layer masks are the optimal way to do it. Two, as the series suggests, they are non-destructive, this means that if you are either painting black with a brush of any type or using a gradient and you are not happy with any of your work, you can simply try it again and again until you get it perfect with no loss to the image because keep in mind that you are only editing the layer mask, not the layer it is attached to. Finally, layer masks, once finished can be applied to the layer which actually makes permanent any changes in transparency which actually simulates an eraser, but with a hundred times the precision and flexibility. Layer masks can usually be deleted, applied, added, and hidden all from a context menu when you right click them.

I have included the two final logos of a fictional florist, the top with the layer masks turned off, and the bottom with the layer masks turned on. You can see a big difference, but you might be saying to yourself that you could have done that with an eraser and other permanent tools. That’s true, but if you want to see the full benefit of layer masks, I have included the GIMP file for download and see what you can do by maybe turning my smooth line layer masks into gradients, or changing my linear gradients into radial or shaped ones. If you take a second to think about how much time and effort that will save you, you will fall in love, as I have.

With layer masks

Without layer masks

PupilsIris.xcf (GIMP)

Non-destructive editing, as the name implies, means editing that does not alter the original work. The payoff to us is that it is work that can be undone or change, and redone. The most basic delivery of non-destructive editing may be the simple addition of layers. Instead of drawing a black line directly on the digital image, forever obliterating those sacred pixels which once there resided, one might create a new layer and draw the black line on that which can now be removed, changed, or made invisible, all the while leaving the original image unaltered.

Here’s the rub though. Non-destructive editing takes more time, more finesse, and more creativity, than does its ruthless counterpart. Most of the time it’s not as reflexive as adding a new layer, nor as obvious. Take for example a simple size change. Objective: Remove red-eye from a digital portrait and downsize it to be sent quickly in an email. Once you have removed the red eye and you approach the home stretch it might be easy to simple go for the image size adjustment, save it the size you need and leave. However you would have perpetrated an enormous blunder. The proper procedure would be to edit the red-eye (hopefully with layers), save that project (layers and all), shrink, save as a copy, and then decline to save changes to the original. In this way, you have retained maximum raster data at minimal cost, in fact only the tiny bits of time, mental focus, and hard-drive space (for which prices are currently free-falling nearly through the floor). Now I would hope that the benefits are self-evident, but maybe are not convinced… What if you decide after all that you left a distracting and now illegible billboard blob in the background? What if you decide you made it too small to be printed at 5×7 size? Now these minimal costs seem like a bargain when your data is lost. Hopefully you saved the original, so you can repeat all your editing to get it just right. And this was an incredibly mundane example. Imagine your examples, your logo, your website, your business cards. Non-destructive editing should be a constant pursuit for anyone who works with pictures.

Fortunately for us, non-destructive editing is the way of the future. Things like layers, adjustment layers, layer masks, layer properties, blending options, layer styles, smart objects, and paths all make it easier to change your mind. So next image you are working on try to do one extra thing in a non-destructive way, and then make it two… It will change your editing world.