Techno Teacher

Photoshop Tutorial on:

1) Duplicating a layer

2)Changing lighting levels

Whenever you first start editing any photo the first step you always do is duplicate a layer.  This is important because you can adjust and edit one layer without changing the original photo.  To do this you find the layer viewer at the bottom right on the screen 

Then click on duplicate layer.  After you have made another layer it will show up in the layer box.  You can easily see how many layers you have and which layer you are working on just by looking at the layer box.   You can now see there are two layers.  The first is background, and the second is titled background copy.  The eye beside the picture informs you which layers you can see, and which ones you are not currently looking at.  In order to edit a certain photo you need to be sure you have that layer selected.  In this example background copy is the one currently selected, therefore all editing I do is done to the background copy, not the original.

When you have a photo that is to dark, like this one, or one you want to enhance the color you can manually change the levels.

To do so in your menu bar find the enhance tab, then the adjust lighting and levels.

To adjust the levels you move the little arrows to wherever you want them to be.  You can make your image to dark, light, or perfect.

(levels box)

(too light)

(Perfect!)

These are some quick and easy tools to use as you first start editing your photos.