Today’s Question: You mentioned a “layer group” in passing in your answer [in Wednesday’s Ask Tim Grey eNewsletter] in the context of targeted adjustments in Photoshop. Can you explain how a layer group can be involved in a targeted adjustment?
Tim’s Quick Answer: A layer group in Photoshop enables you to (among other things) use a single layer mask to constrain the effect of multiple adjustment layers, so that if the mask needs to be refined, you only have to change the single layer mask associated with the layer group, rather than fixing the layer mask for multiple individual adjustment layers.
More Detail: Layer groups in Photoshop enable you to group various layers together, which can be helpful in terms of keeping the Layers panel more organized. However, I find layer groups to be especially helpful when it comes to applying targeted adjustments.
More often than not, I find that if I want to apply an adjustment to a specific area of an image in Photoshop, I actually want to apply more than one type of adjustment to the same area.
Let’s assume, for example, that I want to modify the appearance of the sky in a photo using several different adjustments. I could create a selection of the sky and add an adjustment layer, then reload the sky selection and add another adjustment layer, and repeat this process for as many adjustments as I’d like to apply to the sky.
However, if I then discovered that my original selection of the sky wasn’t quite perfect, I would need to correct the layer mask for all the adjustment layers that were based on the same sky selection. You can streamline this process by using a layer group instead.
To get started, you could select the sky. Then add a layer group by clicking on the button with a folder icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. With the selection active and the layer group selected on the Layers panel, click the “Add Layer Mask” button (the circle inside a rectangle icon) at the bottom of the Layers panel. You now have a layer group that is constrained by the mask based on the sky selection.
At that point you can add as many adjustment layers to the layer group as you’d like, and all the adjustments will only affect the area of the image defined by the layer mask attached to the layer group. If you later discover the layer mask wasn’t quite perfect, you can simply modify the single layer mask for the layer group, without having to update a layer mask for multiple adjustment layers.
