Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Adding Fill and Adjustment Layers

Creating an Adjustment or Fill layer is easy. In the Layers palette, just click on the black and white circle, as shown in Figure 6-16. The button displays a menu of all the Adjustment and Fill layer choices one list (the first three choices are Fill layers; the rest are Adjustment layers).

Whichever type of layer you choose, you get a dialog box that lets you tweak the layer's settings (the exception is Invert layers, which doesn't give you any choices). After you make your choices, click Okay, and the new layer appears.

You get only three Fill layer choices: Solid color, Gradient (a rainbow-like range of colors), and Pattern. There's more about patterns in Chapter 9 and about gradients in Chapter 12.

The kinds of Adjustment layers you can select from are:

• Levels.This is a much more sophisticated way to apply Levels than using the Auto Levels button in the Quick Fix or the Auto Level command from the Enhance menu. Page 163 has more information about using Levels. For most people, Levels is the most important Adjustment layer.

• Brightness/Contrast.This does pretty much the same things as the Quick Fix adjustment (covered on page 83).

• Hue/Saturation.Again, it's very much like the Quick Fix command (page 83), only with slightly different controls.

• Gradient Map.This is very tricky to understand and is explained in detail on page 335. It applies a gradient based on a map of the luminosity values in your image. That means you can apply a gradient so that the ...