Friday 22 January 2016

Adjustment Layers


I gave myself the challenge to do a painting of a night time scene. I chose to paint a moon bear sleeping under the moon.
I had planned to finish this painting in a week but now I'm well into week three and I am ready to start this painting over again!
I had a really hard time trying to get the right colors and values. I finally decided the try adjustment layers in Photoshop Elements to solve these problems and I'm pretty happy with the results.
I thought that it was important to use desaturated  colors in a night scene but I ended up with a painting that just looked like it had a white film over it. I used two adjustment layers. One for the color (which made the most dramatic changes) and another for the contrast and brightness.
The end result really gave me a much better value range but some of the colors look a bit strange and harsh so I decided that I should just use what I've learned as a guide and repaint the painting. I need to make a few compositional changes anyway.
I'm curious to know how others use adjustment layers in their digital painting . So let me know if you find adjustment layers to be a helpful tool and at what point in the process do you use them?