Photoshop Friday - clipping layers

Main idea: You can choose whether an adjustment layer will affect only one layer, or all visible layers below it.

In Connecting Flight, my Paul model was shot in blue daylight. I wanted him to appear as if he was being lit by a streetlamp, and also to pick up some greens since these colors would be in the foreground lighting.
I created a layer and filled it with a gold-to-green gradient, shown here with other lighting effects layers above it visible.

I set the gradient layer’s mode to multiply and took its opacity down to 67%. This was the effect I wanted for the flesh tones, but I wanted the background to stay exactly like it was before. Now it’s all murky. The adjustment that made Paul look greeny-gold only intensified the greeny gold of the background. That's not what I want.

This is solved by clipping the adjustment layer to the layer I want to affect. In the layers menu, hover the cursor between the two layers and alt/op-click. Your cursor will change (to a box in CS6 or two circles in CS5—my screen capture isn’t picking up the cursor symbol change).

Once you’ve clipped the layers together, you’ll see a downward pointing arrow on the left to indicate the clipping.

Now it's clipped, and the background's contrast is back the way I want it. Here's the final cover:


You can also clip a photo into text this way.
Type your text:



Place a photo layer above it

Clip the photo to the text. The text remains editable. The photo can be
repositioned too. This was how I did the gore-filled lettering effect in
The Starving Years.

I suspect this will work with layer groups, however I don't usually group my layers because it messes up my blending modes.


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