4.3 Correction Layers

Hi, welcome back, and in this lesson, I'm gonna show you how to use correction layers. So, once we have an image that we're working with, at some point, we're gonna need to tweak our colors. We could do that by going into Edit and choosing Tonal Correction, and then choosing one of these different modes here and changing the image itself. The downside of that is that this changes our image as whole, so further on down the line, if we decide we don't like those changes, that's that. We have those saved and baked into our image and we can't change it. What we could do, however, is go to Layer, and choose New Correction Layer, and then you can see we have those exact same changes, but the benefit here is that we're applying those changes as a separate layer on top. So if we decide further on down the line that we need to change the effect or get rid of it altogether, we can easily do that by just deleting the layer and then we're left with our image underneath. So if I choose Brightness and Contrast, you can see, we can change our brightness higher and we can change our contrast higher or lower. And I'll just press okay now. So that's changed my image, but if I turn off the visibility of this layer, you'll see that the image actually is completely unchanged underneath. And we can also do different things with this, so if we feel we've gone too far with this effect, we can change the opacity of the layer and bring it down and you can see that as I bring the opacity down, the effect is lessened. And we can even change the blending mode, so, the different blending modes could add different effects and add different sort of functionality to this tonal correction. If I just go through and show you what all the other layer modes do. So, if I go back, create a new correction layer, we can change the hue of our image. So, we can have a hue slider, a saturation slider, and to brighten the slider again. We have a Posterization. So what this is doing is trying to simplify our image down into simpler and simpler colors, it's choosing the most dominant colors and making it into blocks here. So The fewer gradients you have, the more it'll simplify your image. So at the moment we're at eight if we drag it all the way to the top it won't look any different because we have so many different gradients in there the image is really quite detailed. But you'll see if we'll drag it further down to three it's making it simpler and simpler and boiling it down to these basic colors. We have a Reverse Gradient, which is basically an invert. We have Level Correction, and so if you've used Photoshop before you'll probably be familiar with levels but what you can do here, this is the blacks of your image, this is the greys and this is the whites and as you drag the black towards the right it becomes darker, and as you drag the white towards the left they become lighter. You can also change your mid tones like that, so left for lighter, right for darker. We can also put on a Tone Curve. So this acts in a similar way to levels, but you can control it with a spline like this. We can put on a Color Balance. So here we can choose what part of our image we're affecting, so if I choose our highlights, I can then choose the balance of the colors in our highlights. So it will analyze the most light part of our image and I can then add more red to those. And then I can go to our half tones, add more blues to those. And then I can choose our shadows, which is our darkest bit, and say, I can add more green to that. We can choose Binarization, and that is turning our image into pure black and white image. And when we change the threshold here, it's telling Mango Studio how to read the grays in that image, so the higher the threshold, the more grays will go towards black. The lower the threshold the more our grays will go toward white and you can find a balance and see which sort of setting you like. Lastly we have a Gradient Map and this one's quite useful if you start an image in grayscale and then you want to add quick color to it. What it does is it reads your image, it finds the darkest parts and it finds the lightest parts, and then it will apply a gradient map to that. So at the moment our gradient map is set to go from black to white. So the way that's changed our image is the dark parts have gone black and the lightest parts have gone really quite far to white. We can choose one of these nodes here. We can then choose a color and change that to sort of a red like that. And then you can see, all the darkest parts have gone red, and we've retained this white for our highlights, but we can also choose this white node. Change the white, and we can change that to yellow, for example, and you can see how it affects our image. If you need more than two points, so you can see that this is effectively our black now which this is red, and our white is this yellow. If we need something in between that to our grade scale, we can add another note by clicking in this area here. You can see our cursor changes and when that note is selected we can choose the color and then choose a complete different color, like that. We have a fine tuning of these nodes, so once we've selected a node we can enter a numerical value rather than dragging it across this slider. And we have a few color options here. So, main drawing color means that we will apply our foreground color in our picker here. Sub drawing color means it will apply our background color and specified color means that it will apply this color that we've chosen in this picker here. In the next lesson, I'm gonna show you how to apply perspective ruler to a layer, to draw a quick and easy perspective drawings.