"For example, you have an apparently untouched background layer, in front of which is a "Spot Touch" layer, which I would guess was some initial image cleanup. Is that layer a full background copy with changes or is it just the changes."
The layer thumbnails provide this info: users.rcn.com
In the layers palette, you can see the whole image in the "Spot Touch" layer thumb. Above it, "Sharpening", is simply the pepper without the background (the layer thumb is white with the pepper only, indicating nothing but a chile). "Sharpening" is just a copy of the pepper that I took from one of the layers. Once I had my selection (see either of the two masks) I wanted to reuse the selection rather than making a new one, to ensure a perfect match. Put your mouse cursor inside the white area of the mask, double-click. Now you have an exact dupe of the mask area. Go to a layer with the pepper, copy, paste into a new layer.
"E.g., if you had two kinds of initial cleanup -- say a dust and scratch filter and some manual touch up, could you isolate the changes on new layers so that you could see the background plus either or both initial adjustments or would you have to just have a background copy with both adjustments or two copies, one with one adjustment and the other with both?"
This depends on a few issues. Fixes such as "levels" or "brightness/contrast" are adjustments and are independent of blending or opacity. Layers beneath them will always show through.* "Dust & Scratch" is a filter and those types of changes are blending/opacity dependent. For your instance of dust/scratch and manual touchup, the topmost layer will be the visible one in the circumstance of blending=normal and opacity=100%. All other cases will allow varying amounts of the under layers to show. In the case of "sharpening" here, I've set the blending to "soft light" and opactiy=67%. (Yes, it's sharpened too much, for purposes of demonstration). If you don't want to mess with blending and opacity, you could make a touchup layer, a dust/scratch layer, and a merged layer of the two, then select which of the three you like.
"Above that I see you have two new layers, HSB and levels. I think I have looked at both so I know what button to push to create it, but I have only rarely felt like I was actually doing anything useful. I.e., I might be able to create an image like the one you did, but not one that looked sensible."
The sensibility is in the usage, not the tools. <gg> For a more "real world" use of levels, for example, I thought the image had an overall blue cast (the dirt, for example, is should be a richer brown). I thought the orange pepper was washed out, too. The original, in all its ugliness is: users.rcn.com So, look at the layers palette here:
users.rcn.com
A masked levels layer restores the orange. The other levels layer takes out the blue cast. Note that the blue cast levels layer thumb is all white — no mask.
*: This assumes you are using an adjustment layer for a levels edit as in my previous post, rather than a destructive edit out of the "Image/Adjustments" menu. |
