Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Adjustment and Fill Layers

Adjustment layers and Fill layers are special types of layers. Adjustment layers let you manipulate the lighting, color, or exposure of the layers beneath them. If you're mainly interested in Elements to spruce up your photos, then you'll probably use Adjustment layers more than any other kind of layer. Adjustment layers are great because they let you undo or change your edits later on if you want to.

You can also use Adjustment layers to take the changes you've made to one photo and apply those same changes to another photo (see the Note on Adding Fill and Adjustment Layers). And after you've created an Adjustment layer, you can limit future edits so they change only the area of your photo affected by the Adjustment layer.

You'll find out about all the things you can do with Adjustment layers in the next few chapters. For now, you just need to learn how to create and manipulate them.

Fill layers are just what they sound like: layers filled with color, pattern, or gradient (a rainbow-like range of colors—see Applying Gradients).

Tip

Digital photographers should check out the Photo Filter Adjustment layers, which let you make the sort of adjustments to photos that you used to do by putting a colored piece of glass over your camera's lens. The Sharpen Tool has more about what you can do with photo filters.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Adjustment Layers for Batch Processing

Processing Multiple Files shows you how to perform batch commands: simultaneously applying adjustments ...