Today’s Question: You mentioned layer groups as a helpful feature for targeted adjustments in Photoshop, and I have to admit I’d never even heard of them. What do layer groups provide for targeted adjustments?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Layer groups are particularly helpful for applying targeted adjustments in Photoshop because they enable you to constrain the effect of multiple adjustment layers using a single layer mask. They can also be used to create combine more than one layer mask to constrain the effect of those multiple adjustment layers.
More Detail: Layer groups are available on the Layers panel in Photoshop, and they effectively serve as folders for grouping together multiple layers. This can be used, for example, to help reduce clutter on the Layers panel for particularly complicated images involving multiple layers.
In addition, however, layer groups can be incredibly helpful when applying targeted adjustments. That’s because you can add a layer mask to a layer group, which in turn will constrain the visibility of all layers contained within the layer group.
One of the key benefits of the use of a layer group for a targeted adjustment is the ability to use a single mask to constrain the visibility of multiple adjustment layers. For example, if you want to apply an adjustment to only the sky, you could select the sky and add an adjustment layer based on that selection. But if you repeated this process for multiple adjustment layers and then discovered there was a flaw with the sky selection you used, you would need to fix the layer mask for the sky for all the adjustment layers you used the same basic mask for.
If, on the other hand, you added the adjustment layers to a layer group, and added a layer mask based on the sky selection to the layer group, that single mask would constrain the effect of all the adjustment layers within the layer group. If you needed to refine the layer mask, you would only need to adjust the single layer mask associated with the layer group, rather than changing multiple layer masks for multiple adjustment layers.
It is also possible to put a layer group inside another layer group, with each of them having their own layer mask. This enables you to create a compound mask for targeted adjustments, such as to have one layer mask for the sky and another for a linear gradient. That would result in multiple adjustments affecting the sky, but affecting the sky in a gradient fashion.
