Hello, I am Jean-Francois O’Kane. I am The Studio Coach today, talking about the gray layer adjustment, the overlay layer. This is a method I use very much in workshops and that many of you have asked how I do it.

So, one simple way to do this gray adjustment layer, you will use this when you need to adjust parts of your picture that need to be darkened, like the side of the windmill here and parts that needs to be lightened like the lawn here in the front. So, let us just add a new layer. And this layer, you may call adjustment and you will choose—this is the important part in the mode here, you will choose overlay and fill the overlay neutral color 50%, opacity100% and go.

So, now you have an overlay layer. And the overlay mode, the gray value, 50% gray value is impossible to be seen. So, whatever is gray is not seen. Whatever becomes lighter will make the image below look lighter and whatever is painted black will make the image below look darker. I will be choosing the brush here with an adjust diameter of the brush here for the mill here and I do choose a dark color, so my black here. You just have to press black, white here and by going on the mills on, by making some dark, you see I get some darker value on the highlight side. And you see here that my great patch is now stained with the black, making it darker. For example i want to make this little area in the sky here darker. You will see how we can get this darker. We want to put the whole sky darker, let us choose it lower opacity, lower flow here. Not to make a big change at time, but you will see how we can make this happen.

Now, with the enlighting feature, what I will do is that I will flip the colors to have the white here. You can do this automatically by hitting the X key on your keyboard. So by now being on the painting with white, here we go. so let us add some white and you will see as I paint on white, you will see the white being painted on the gray layer and you will see what is below, meaning the grass become more visible and more light.

So, this little tip here will not change the characteristic of what is below and will allow you to do on the same image, some adjustment of darkness and some adjustment of lightness. So, this is how we work with the overlay mask and you should try that whenever possible.

Here is I am Jean-Francois O’Kane, I am The Studio Coach. Enjoy working with your Photoshop.