Adjustment layers and Fill layers are special types of layers. Adjustment layers let you manipulate the lighting, color, or exposure of the layers beneath them. If you’re mainly interested in using Elements to spruce up your photos, then you’ll probably use Adjustment layers more than any other kind of layer. They’re great because they let you undo or change your edits later on.
You can also use Adjustment layers to take the changes you’ve made to one photo and apply those same changes to another photo (see the Note on Watermarks). And after you’ve created an Adjustment layer, you can limit future edits so they change only the area of your photo affected by the Adjustment layer. You’ll find out about all the things you can do with Adjustment layers in the next few chapters. For now, you just need to learn how to create and manipulate them, which the next section explains.
Fill layers are exactly what they sound like: layers filled with a color, pattern, or gradient (a rainbow-like range of colors—see Applying Gradients). Fill layers are great when you’ve cut an object out of its background and you want to put some color behind it, for example.
One cool thing about both Adjustment and Fill layers is that they automatically come with layer masks, as shown in Figure 6-20.
Figure 6-20. Adjustment and Fill layers, like the Hue/Saturation layer shown here, always display two things in the Layers panel: an icon on the left and a thumbnail on the right. The thumbnail represents the layer’s layer mask, which you can use to control the area that’s affected by the adjustment. As for the icons, all Adjustment layers display the little gear icon you see here, while each type of Fill layer has its own unique icon, which you can double-click to bring up a dialog box that lets you make changes to the layer’s settings. With Adjustment layers, just click the layer you want to change to make it the active layer, and then go to the Adjustments panel to tweak things.
Tip
Digital photographers should check out Photo Filter Adjustment layers, which let you make the sort of adjustments to photos that used to require you to put a colored piece of glass over your camera’s lens. Photo Filter has more about photo filters.
Creating an Adjustment or Fill layer is easy: In the Layers panel, just click the half-black/half-white circle to display the menu shown in Figure 6-21. The menu includes all your Adjustment and Fill layer options (the first three items are Fill layers; the rest are Adjustment layers).
Figure 6-21. To create a new Adjustment or Fill layer, click the half-black/half-white circle to see this menu, and then pick the type of Adjustment or Fill layer you want. If you’d rather work from the menu bar, then go to Layer→New Adjustment Layer (or Layer→New Fill Layer) and choose the layer type you want.
Elements can create three types of Fill layers: Solid Color, Gradient (a rainbow-like range of colors), and Pattern. (See Applying Patterns for more about patterns, or Applying Gradients for the lowdown on gradients.) When you create a Fill layer, you get a dialog box that lets you tweak the layer’s settings. After you make your choices, click OK, and the new layer appears.
You can change a Fill layer’s settings by selecting the layer in the Layers panel, and then going to Layer→Layer Content Options, or, in the Layers panel, double-clicking the layer’s left-hand icon. Either way, the layer’s dialog box reappears so you can adjust its settings.
When you create an Adjustment layer, the layer automatically appears in your image, and the Adjustments panel appears in the Panel bin so you can adjust the layer’s settings (Figure 6-22). (The exception is the Invert Adjustment layer—if you create one of those, you see the Adjustments panel, but it doesn’t give you any settings to change.)
Figure 6-22. The Adjustments panel appears when you create a new Adjustment layer. The icons at the bottom of the panel let you see your image with and without the Adjustment layer, so you can judge how you’re changing things. You can also clip the Adjustment layer to the layer beneath it in the Layers panel, or unclip it (see page 207).
The Adjustments panel is really handy because it lets you see the settings for any Adjustment layer anytime. In the Layers panel, just click the gear icon for the layer you want to change, and Elements displays the Adjustments panel showing the settings for that layer. Click on a different Adjustment layer to see its settings instead.
You can select from the following kinds of Adjustment layers:
Levels. This is a much more sophisticated way to apply Levels than using the Auto Levels button in Quick Fix or the Enhance menu’s Auto Level command. For most people, Levels is the most important Adjustment layer. Using Levels has more about using Levels.
Brightness/Contrast. This does pretty much the same things as the Quick Fix adjustment (covered on Adjusting Lighting and Contrast).
Hue/Saturation. Again, this is much like the Quick Fix command (Color), only with slightly different controls.
Gradient Map. This one is tricky to understand and is explained in detail on Saving Gradients. It maps each tone in your image to a new tone based on the gradient you select. That means you can apply a gradient so that the colors aren’t just distributed in a straight line across your image.
Photo Filter. Use this type of layer to adjust the color balance of your photos by adding warming, cooling, or special effects filters, just like you might attach to the lens of a film camera. See Photo Filter for more info.
Invert. This reverses the colors in your image to their opposite values, for an effect similar to a film negative; Special Effects has details.
Threshold. Use this kind of layer to make everything in your photo pure black or white (with no shades of gray). See Special Effects.
Posterize. This one reduces the numbers of colors in your image to create a poster-like effect, as explained on Special Effects.
You can edit an Adjustment layer’s layer mask the same way you edit any layer mask (Editing a layer mask). The only difference is what happens when you edit the mask: Instead of showing or hiding the objects in your photo, you show and hide the effects of the adjustment, since this kind of a layer contains the adjustment instead of physical objects.
Deleting Fill and Adjustment layers is a tad different from deleting regular layers, as explained in Figure 6-23.
Figure 6-23. Deleting Adjustment and Fill layers is a two-step process. When you select an Adjustment or Fill layer and then click the Layers panel’s “Delete layer” icon (the trashcan), Elements asks if you want to “Delete layer mask?” Click Delete, and then click the trashcan icon again to fully delete the layer.
If you want to get rid of an Adjustment or Fill layer in one step, go to the Layer menu, right-click the layer in the Layers panel, or click the Layers panel’s upper-right menu button (the square made of four horizontal lines). All these routes give you a Delete Layer option.