With adjustment layers the glass is always half full. You’d be crazy not to use them. Especially when you consider that they add almost no weight to the file size. Each adjustment layer is a simple instruction to move a slider, adjust a curve, or change a histogram. Because the adjustments are stored on their own layers, you have total fl...

Here are some tips that are equally applicable whatever kind of mask you are working on: a Quick Mask, alpha channel, or a layer mask Ask yourself why. Be sure to ask yourself what you are making that mask for. Depending on your intent, it may not even be necessary to make a mask. Can you select the areas of the image you want by color, by to...

In this next example we’ll see how painting in shades of gray allows you to introduce transparency effects: Darker grays conceal more, lighter grays reveal more of the layer. Or put another way, the closer you move towards black, the greater the masking effect; the closer you move towards white, the more the revealing effect. 1. O...

With blending modes you commonly arrive at fantastic results that are unexpected and unintentional. One of the great things about using layer blending modes and opacity sliders is that there’s no penalty for experimentation. Blending mode and opacity changes are nondestructive so you can experiment to your heart’s content without ha...