Painting and Retouching - Advanced Adobe Photoshop CC - page 128

flowers and press Ctrl+J (Windows) or Command+J (Mac OS) to lift that section of ribbon to its own
layer. Then drag that newly created layer to the top of the stacking order to create the appearance of the
dried flowers being tied under the ribbon.
Review
Questions
1 What is an easy method you can use to help you align one layer with another?
2 What are two main benefits to using an adjustment layer when retouching an image?
3 Why would you create a clipping group when using adjustment layers?
Answers
1 Sometimes you need to manually align your layers, and way of doing this easily is to change the opa-
city of one the layers you want to align. When your Move tool is selected, change the Opacity by typ-
ing a value. For instance, if you type 5 , the selected layer now has 50% Opacity; type 45 , and now it is
at 45% Opacity. You can then align your layers and press 0 (zero) to return to 100% when you're
done.
2 The benefit of using an adjustment layer when retouching an image is that you can make changes to
your adjustment as long as the layer is not flattened into the rest of the image, and also that you can
essentially paint your adjustment by taking advantage of the adjustment layer mask.
3 When using adjustment layers, the adjustment is reflected in all the layers that are under it in the stack-
ing order. Creating a clipping group by right-clicking the layer and selecting Create Clipping Mask, or
by pressing and holding the Alt/Option key as you click the dividing line between two layers, lets you
make a mask of the bottommost layer and prevent the adjustment from affecting any other layers be-
neath.