Paint adjustments with the Adjustment Brush - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this chapter, you'll learn how to edit a photo non-destructively. By that I mean editing in a way that doesn't permanently change a photo, and that lets you edit part of a photo without affecting the rest of it. It's all done with adjustment layers and masks. But before we jump into those big ideas, I want to introduce you to a smaller, relatively new feature that will let you get started editing even if you don't know everything about it yet, and that's called the Adjustment Brush. With this brush, you can make local adjustments to color and tone in different parts of a photo by just painting with a brush. Let's try it out. First, take a look at your photo and figure out what you want to change. I think in this case I want to make the skin lighter and maybe a little cooler, a little less gold in color. First, make sure your Contextual Task Bar is open, because most of the controls for the Adjustment Brush are in the Contextual Task Bar. Then go over to the toolbar and click on the Adjustment Brush tool. And then move into the image and you can adjust your brush size. I like to use the left and right bracket keys to do that. Or if you prefer, you can go up to the Options bar, and there's a place here where you can adjust size and hardness of the brush. Now, go to the Contextual Task Bar and click in this menu and choose the type of adjustment you want. Brightness/Contrast is the simplest of the tonal adjustments, so we'll choose that. Next, just paint over the area that you want to adjust. So I'll paint over the face, and you can see right away that there's quite a change there. Now, that's because this adjustment, like all adjustments, is using default values. And in just a moment, we're going to take the time to fine-tune those values for this particular image. But the tool has to start somewhere, and so this is its defaults. Now, this is optional, but if you're interested in what's happening behind the scenes, when you created that adjustment, a new adjustment layer was created here in the Layers panel, a Brightness/Contrast adjustment. And this adjustment floats above the actual image, so it doesn't directly make changes on the image. The adjustment layer comes with a layer mask, and where you painted on the face is white on the layer mask. Where you didn't is black. The white part is where the adjustment was made. The black part is where it's not made. And so creating an adjustment layer like that and filling in its mask is something you would normally do manually. The Adjustment Brush helps you by doing this for you automatically all in one step. So you really don't have to worry about the adjustment layers. I just wanted to show you that. So now it's time to change the default values for this adjustment to the values we want. And that's done up in the Properties panel. Notice there's a Brightness slider and a Contrast slider. I'm going to bring the brightness way down, I think it's way too high, maybe about here. And the contrast, I'm going to put back to zero. And you can always put a slider back to zero by double-clicking the little triangle on the slider. And that saves time. By the way, I hardly ever adjust contrast by that amount. Maybe just a little extra contrast. Contrast means the difference between the darkest tones and the brightest tones. And if the darks are too dark and the whites are too bright, then you'll lose a lot of detail in the image. So I think that the brightness and the contrast look a lot better now. And if you want to compare before and after, you can always click the little eye icon to the left of the adjustment layer. So this is where we started before there was any adjustment layer, and this is where we are now. So another thing that we want to do, which is adjust the color of the skin, and for that we're going to add a second adjustment layer. This time, a Color Balance adjustment layer. To add a new adjustment layer, you don't go back to the place you added an adjustment layer to start with. If you did that, it would just change your Brightness/Contrast adjustment into a Color Balance adjustment, which we don't want. Instead, you go over to the right of the Contextual Task Bar and choose Add new adjustment. And from here, we'll choose Color Balance adjustment. And that creates another new adjustment layer in the Layers panel. Again, we're going to paint over her face. And notice that the color is changing right away. The defaults are quite red. That's okay, because we're going to fine -tune that. And we'll come all the way down over her chest with the color too. And if you ever want to check where you've painted, you can come down to the Contextual Task Bar and click this little rectangle icon and it will highlight in magenta everywhere you've painted. So if you've gone too far, like I did right here, you can switch to the minus mode in the Contextual Task Bar and paint that away so there won't be an adjustment on your jacket here. And if you need to add some, you go back and click on the plus mode, which is where you want to be when you're adding in the adjustment. Just be sure that whenever you go to minus mode, you remember to go back to plus mode. That's really important. And if you don't want to keep going back to the Contextual Task Bar to do that, you can use the X key on your keyboard to switch between plus and minus. So I'm going to leave it on plus. And then I'll click the rectangle icon to remove that highlighting. Now, I'm going to fine-tune the colors in the Color Balance properties. The first slider is a continuum between cyan and red. It's obviously too red right now, so I'm going to drag this slider way over to the left. Maybe to about here. And then the next slider is too magenta still, I can see it in her skin. I want a little more green, which is the color at the other end of the second continuum, so I'm going to pull this green in maybe to about here. And this is really subjective. There's no right or wrong answer to this. And then I'm also going to the yellow-to-blue slider, and here I'm going to add a lot of blue to try to tone down the warm tones in her skin. And I think that looks better. Now, if we want to see a before and after, we can go down to the Layers panel, hold down the Option or Alt key and click on the layer that has the image on it, the woman on the train. So that's where we started. Much warmer and not as bright. And here's how we ended up. And that's it. You've made local color and tonal adjustments without having to stress about adjustment layers and masks yet, and you've improved the photo. So this is a good way to get started making adjustments. As you get better with Photoshop, you'll probably prefer the manual workflow that you'll learn in the rest of this chapter, but the Adjustment Brush tool is a great way to get going.