It’s sometimes easy to underestimate the importance of a good tag and filtering process. If done right this can be a huge time saver. It’s also handy for archiving; when you return to these photos after weeks, months or years have passed you are immediately able to see the original tags you applied.

1. Loupe View
The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure you’re in Loupe view of your photos. This allows you to easily view each individual photo as you scroll them. To do this, simply hit the E key on your keyboard, or go to View > Loupe. Now, starting with the first photo in your series, you can simply use the left and right arrow keys to scroll through the Filmstrip (the scrolling list of photos at the bottom of the screen).

2. Flags, Stars and Colors
Lightroom offers you several options to tag and filter your photos. One thing to keep in mind when sorting through these filtering options is whether or not the tag is global. If it is global, it will be recognized by Lightroom regardless of what folder, collection or catalog the photo resides in. If it’s not global, the tag you apply will only be visible within the folder or collection that you are viewing at the time.

• Flags – Quick and easy way to indicate whether a photo is to be kept or deleted. Not global.
  • Flagged (Hit P key) – Marks photo as a keeper
  • Unflagged (Hit U key) – Removes any previously applied tag.
  • Rejected (Hit X key) – Marks photo as rejected
• Stars (Hit 1-5 on keyboard, or 0 to remove stars) – Fairly straightforward way to indicate whether a photo is “meh” or if it’s “AWESOME”! Stars are globally recognized.
• Colors (Hit 6-9 on keyboard) – Nifty way to assign a group to a set of photos. For example, all Green photos need to be cropped, all Red photos need to be changed to black and white, etc. Colors are globally recognized as well.

One thing to keep in mind is that Photoshop can also recognize global tags. So, if you have just flagged a photo in Lightroom and opened in Photoshop for editing, when you save the photo it is automatically added to your Lightroom catalog but it will not retain the Flag that you had previously applied. Photoshop does retain all Star ratings and Color labels that you have applied, but not Flags.

3. Filtering Fun!
Now that all the “hard work” is done (bless your soul), it’s easy to use the filter options in the toolbar to display only certain sets of photos. Simply click on the filtering method of your choice to display only the photos with those tags.

Tagging and filtering has become the very first thing I do with my photos after they are imported. It’s especially useful if you are importing a large amount of photos at one time as it helps you narrow down the best photos to a manageable list.

Other articles in this series

• Adobe Lightroom Workflow – Part 1 – Importing Photos

Many people deal with white balance by simply setting their digital camera to Auto White Balance (AWB). While cameras do fairly well at achieving good white balance automatically, there are a few steps you can take to insure more accurate depiction of colors.

The absolute easiest way to get accurate white balance is incorporating a gray card into your workflow. With a gray card, you simply take a photo of the gray card in the lighting scenario you’re working with; you then have a solid reference point for middle gray, usually defined as 18% gray (though some claim that camera and light meters see closer to a 12% gray).

Get a Gray Card
My favorite gray cards are the WhiBal range of cards from RawWorkflow.com. When I first started practicing photography with a gray card, I got a 4×5″ card that didn’t fit in my camera bag so I always forgot to take it on location sessions. To remedy this, I picked up a card that I keep on my keychain for $18. Now I’ve got a handy gray card with me wherever I go. I simply setup the scene and then snap a photo of my subject/model holding up the keychain-sized gray card.

Balance It Out
After you’ve captured a gray card in your photo, it’s incredibly easy to set the white balance inside Photoshop. The easiest way is to open the photo inside Camera Raw.

Simply choose the White Balance Tool in Camera Raw (the eyedropper icon toward the top left corner of the window) and click on an area of the gray card.

As an experiment, I purposely messed up the white balance so that the gray was wasn’t anywhere near actual gray:

One click on the WhiBal gray card instantly corrects the color of the image:

This illustrates the effectiveness of the gray card and shows that it works even if your camera’s white balance setting was inaccurate.

This method works great with both RAW and JPEG images, so regardless of your shooting preference you can be sure to end up with accurate color through custom white balance with a gray card.

This isn’t a problem when it comes to printing your photos. In fact, the more pixels you have the better your printed photos will look. The problem arises when we just want to share these pictures on the web or email a few of them to a friend or relative. You see, the more pixels an image uses, the larger its file size will be. Large file sizes mean longer downloads for your friends and family, and can also be the reason why your emails won’t go through (many email servers won’t accept messages larger than 10mb).

So, we are often left with the task of resizing these images so that they are “web ready.” That is, reduced in dimension (how large they appear on screen) and in file size (how much room they take up on your hard drive). Resizing images is a simple task, but it can quickly become a boring and tedious task if you have more than just a few images to resize.

There are a couple of little known features in Photoshop, called Batches and Droplets, that allows us to perform an Action (or a series of Actions) on many photos at once. If you often edit hundreds of photos in a given month, this feature will save you hours of time.

Before we get into the details about automating Photoshop with Batches and Droplets, we need to take a quick look at Photoshop Actions. Actions are used to record anything you may do to an image, such as applying a favorite filter or resizing, and assigning it to a keyboard shortcut. For example, if you find yourself resizing your images to 800px wide and then applying the Unsharp Mask filter, you can create an Action to do these processes, and then execute them by simply pressing a key on your keyboard. You can record just one edit/process, or record many edits within a single Action.

Create a New Action in Photoshop

To create a new Action, click the New Action button within the Action window. If the Action window isn’t on your screen, click Window > Action from the main menu or press Alt + F9 (Windows) on your keyboard.

When you create a new Action, a dialog box will appear. You can choose where to save your action, what to name it (use a descriptive name) and what key or key combination to assign to the Action. Click Record when you’re ready to begin recording your new Action.

At this point, apply the edits that you routinely do to your image: resizing, applying filters, save to web, etc. Don’t worry about trying to do things quickly. Photoshop is only recording what you click, not how quickly you click around the screen. When you’re done, click the Stop Playing/Recording button in the Action window. Note: you’ll want to include saving the file as part of your Action if you intend to use the Action in a Batch or Droplet.

Now, anytime you want to apply that action to an image you’ve loaded into Photoshop, either highlight your Action and click the Play button, or simply press the key you assigned to the Action. Your edits will be made in the blink of an eye!

Edit Multiple Pictures with a Photoshop Batch

Now that you’ve seen how handy Actions can be, lets see how we can apply them on a large scale. You can apply any Action you’ve created to a Batch of photos, which can save you lots of tedious work.

To apply your Action to a Batch, click File > Automate > Batch from the main menu.

A new window will appear that shows all of the Batch settings you’ll configure. The most important settings are which Action to apply, where the images you want to edit are stored, and where to save the edited images. Note that you must apply a Batch to all photos within a folder. You cannot selectively apply the batch to particular images (but you can with a Droplet, which I’ll discuss in a moment).

Once you’ve configured your Batch, click OK at the top and sit back to watch the magic. Photoshop will apply your Action to every photo in the chosen folder and save them to the folder you indicated in the Batch settings.

Using a Photoshop Droplet to edit Multiple Pictures

A Droplet is simply a Batch that you’ve saved to your computer. When you set up a Droplet, you’re actually setting up a Batch job and then saving it. This creates a special Droplet icon that you can drag and drop a folder or selected image files onto. So, the next time you have lots of photos to edit, you can just drag and drop to the Droplet Icon and your job is done.

Creating a Droplet is very similar to creating a Batch job. Click File > Automate > Create Droplet from the menu.

From there, configure the droplet settings, which you’ll notice are nearly identical to the Batch setting you saw a few moments ago. The most obvious difference is that you must designate a place to save the Droplet icon, and that you won’t choose a folder that contains images you wish to edit (because you’re going to drag and drop the photos you wish to edit onto the Droplet icon).

When you’re done setting up the Droplet, click the OK button at the top of the window. You’ll find that a Droplet icon has been saved to where you’ve indicated. Now, any time you want to apply your common edits to one or several photos, just drag and drop them onto the Droplet icon. You don’t even need to have Photoshop open, it will open for you automatically.

Something you should realize about Droplets is that every time you use them, your edited images will be sent to the same place. It’s best to set up a temporary folder for the droplet to send your edited photos to and then move them to a more permanent place afterwards.

One more thing to remember is that you can have lots of Droplets! Set up a Droplet for each of your common edits and let Photoshop do all the work!

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The thing about black and white conversion is that one process doesn’t always work the best for every photo. There are several different methods because sometimes certain methods work better than others for the picture in question.

What we’ll cover here is a quick way to to create an Action that will automatically add the most popular black and white conversion techniques to your photo. We’ll combine this action with Layer Comps to give you an easy way to run through each of the conversion options to get a glimpse of what works best with your photo. I tend to lovingly refer to this technique as, Not Yo Mama’s Black and White Conversion.

1. Document Setup
The first thing to do is open your photo inside Photoshop and then go to the Actions panel (Window > Action). If you haven’t played around with actions before, you may only see the Default Actions set inside this panel. Click on the little folder icon in the bottom right corner of the panel to create a new set and give the set a name. I named mine “Bo’s Actions”.

2. Create Your Action
Click on the little paper icon to the right of the folder icon to create a new action. This will bring up a dialog box where you can name your action, designate which set you’d like to store the action in (make sure the set you created in step 1 is selected) and assign a keyboard shortcut and color to the action if you wish. These last settings are optional, so once you are ready to continue hit the Record button.

It’s worth noting that Actions are not time-based recordings; the action will only record changes you make to your document. So, no need to rush through this. Take your time and focus on getting the steps setup correctly.

3. Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer
We’ll be adding on a series of adjustment layers. First up is a Hue/Saturation layer. In the Layers panel, click the icon at the bottom of the panel to create a new adjustment layer and choose Hue/Saturation from the list.

In the settings for your Hue/Saturation layer, simply drag the Saturation slider all the way to the left (-100) to completely desaturate the image. That’s all that is needed for this adjustment layer, so return to your Layers panel and click on the eye icon next to the Hue/Saturation layer to hide it.

4. Gradient Map
Still in the Layers panel, click the create adjustment layer icon again and choose Gradient Map from the options. Simply make sure that the gradient is the black to white gradient which is the default. Now like you did before, return to the Layers panel and hide the Gradient Map layer.

5. Black & White Adjustment Layer
In the Layers panel, click the icon to add a Black & White adjustment layer. There’s no need to change any of the settings or options for this layer as it does a pretty decent job on its own. Simply return to the Layers panel and hide the Black & White adjustment layer.

6. Channel Mixer Layers
Back in the Layers panel, click to add a new Channel Mixer adjustment layer. From the main drop-down menu you’ll see an few preset options. For this first layer, select the Black & White Infrared option. Then return to your Layers panel and hide the layer.

Repeat this process for each of the Channel Mixer presets:

• Black & White with Blue Filter
• Black & White with Green Filter
• Black & White with Orange Filter
• Black & White with Red Filter
• Black & White with Yellow Filter

This may seem a little tedious right now, but keep in mind that you’re only going to have to do this once and your action will do all the heavy lifting from here on out. Simply make sure that after you create each new adjustment layer and select a preset that you return to the Layers panel and hide that layer. When you are done, your Layers panel should look like the illustration to the right.

7. Layer Comps
At this point, we’ve got all of our adjustment layers added to our document. However, it would be tedious to have to flip through each of the layers one at a time to see the effects of the adjustments; this is where Layer Comps come in.

While your action is still recording, go back to the first Hue/Saturation adjustment layer you created in the Layers panel and click on the eye icon to show that layer–your photo and the Hue/Saturation layer are the only two layers that should be visible at this poing. Bring up the Layer Comps panel (Window > Layer Comps) and click the little page icon in the bottom right corner of the panel to add a new layer comp. Type in “Hue/Saturation” as the name of the comp and hit OK.

Now go back to your Layers panel, hide the Hue/Saturation layer and then click on the eye icon for the Gradient Map layer so that your photo and the Gradient Map are the only two visible layers. Return to your Layer Comps panel and add a new comp called “Gradient Map”. Return to the Layers panel and hide the Gradient Map again, then repeat the process for the rest of the layers. By the end of the process, your Layer Comps panel should look like the illustration to the right.

8. Top It Off With Curves
Just one last adjustment layer to add for a bit of flare. In the Layers panel, click to add a new Curves adjustment layer and choose Medium Contrast from the presets drop-down. Now return to the Layers panel and hide this layer.

9. Stop and Play!
At this point, you can stop your action from recording by returning to the Actions panel (Window > Actions) and clicking on the stop icon at the bottom of the panel.

Now you can review the benefit of your hard work by pulling up the Layer Comps panel and clicking on the little box to the left of your comps to make that comp visible. You can easily scroll through each of the comps to see which black and white adjustment looks best for the particular photo you’re working on at the time.

10. Fine Tune with Curves
If one of the adjustments gets close but not quite there, there’s some fine tuning we can do. You can now make your Curves layer visible at any time. Since we added the Medium Contrast preset, it will intensify the shadows and highlights in your black and white layer. If it’s too much contrast, simply lower the opacity of the Curves layer. Still not satisfied? Pull up the Curves adjustment panel and choose another preset or manipulate the curve on your own.

Adding a vignette (darkening or lightening around the edges of the photo) is easy these days with the introduction of Adobe Lightroom and Camera Raw. However, the tools in these utilities are limited in flexibility and customization.

The following is a quick and easy way to create either a dark or light vignette for your photo and give you the ability to have virtually limitless control over the effect.

1. Duplicate the Image
Open the image in Photoshop and duplicate it (Cmd/Ctrl + J) to a new layer.

2. Set the Blending Mode
If you’re wanting to darken the edges of your photo, set the duplicate layer’s blend mode to Multiply. If you’re wanting to lighten the edges, set the blend mode to Screen.

3. Make the Selection
For a vignette that is more even around the edges, grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and make your selection and leave an equal amount of padding between the selection and each edge of the photo.

For a more custom and unique shape, grab the Lasso Tool (L) and draw more of a blob shape, or do a rough outline of the subject in your image.

4. Feather it!
Now we will feather the selection by going to Select > Modifiy > Feather and setting the amount to 250 for higher-res photos or around 150 for lower-res photos..

5. Put On Your Mask
Go to Layer > Layer Mask > Hide Selection (or click the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel) to mask your selection. This gives you the greatest flexibility of your vignette.

6. Set Visibility
If you are using the Multiply blend mode to darken the edges, you can vary the intensity of the effect by dropping the opacity of the vignette layer.

If you are using the Screen blend mode to lighten the edges of your photo, you may find it necessary to duplicate the vignetter layer (Cmd/Ctrl + J) once or twice to change the intensity of the effect. You can then change the opacity of the duplicated layers for further control.

Well, believe it or not this is easily doable, and it works across multiple browsers as well…though, it might not work through RSS feedreaders; if you’re reading this post through your feedreader, you might want to click through to our site to see the full effects of the transparency.

Step 1 – Modify Your CSS File
We first need a way to control only specific images. In our CSS file, we’ll insert this value:


.transparency {
    filter:alpha(opacity=50);
    opacity:0.5;
}


That’s it! That’s the only code you need to insert into your CSS file. To explain the attributes further:

Filter attribute
- Compatible with Internet Explorer
- The value for Alpha(Opacity) can range from 0 to 100

Opacity attribute
- Compatible with Firefox, Chrome
- The value for Opacity can range from 0 to 1 (where 1 equals 100% opacity)

Step 3 – Modify Your Image Tags
Now let’s look at your page’s content. Inside the <IMG> tag, we’ll need to specify an class of “transparency”, as well as add values for onmouseover and onmouseout.

<img src="/images/opacity_test.jpg" class="transparency" alt="example" onmouseover="this.style.opacity=1;this.filters.alpha.opacity=100" onmouseout="this.style.opacity=0.5;this.filters.alpha.opacity=50" >

This code will make the opacity of the image 100% when you mouse-over it, then change it back to to 50% opacity when you mouse moves away.

Step 3 – Method 2: Reverse It!
You can actually reverse the effect by simply modifying your <IMG> tag–no need to specify the id value or change your CSS file!

<img src="/images/opacity_test.jpg" alt="example"
onmouseover="this.style.opacity=0.5;this.filters.alpha.opacity=50" onmouseout="this.style.opacity=1;this.filters.alpha.opacity=100" >

Simply adding this code to your image will shift the opacity to 50% on mouse-over and the image returns to full opacity on mouse-out. Below is an example of how the image transparency will work on top of a colored background.

Further Reading
Check out Jared’s post on CSS Basics – 5 Steps Toward Mastery.

I watched in mild horror as the ladies dipped my son’s hand in the blue liquid paint and attempt to press his hand flat against the construction paper. Only, my son closed his hand to make a fist. They had to pry his fingers open and feebly press down on the paper while he screamed and struggled to get away.

Afterwards, it looked like someone had spit a mouthful of blue paint onto the paper. It barely resembled a handprint at all. And even after the kind ladies scrubbed on my child’s hands to get the remnants of the paint off, there was still a slight hint of blue on his hand all day long.

I figured there had to be a better, easier way to get a handprint and footprint of a child. Here is what I’ve come up with.

Items you’ll need

• Crayola Washable Kid’s Paint
• A sponge – Any sponge will do. I found a rather large one in the automotive section in Walmart. Just make sure it’s big enough to cover a child’s or human’s foot.
• A white sheet of paper – The heavier the paper, the better. You can use regular printer paper, but the area around the footprint might start to wilt or warp over time.
• A child with a foot – This exercise is not limited to children, but within the scope of this article we’re focusing on a child’s footprint.
• Damp washcloth

Step 1 – Avoid the Hands
As I witnessed first hand (pun not intended), you want to avoid dealing with the hands if you’re doing this. The child is either going to ball up their hand, make a mess in an infinite number of ways, or stick his or her hand directly into their mouth. Bad idea, buddy.

So, just stick to the feet. Much cleaner and easier.

Step 2 – Apply Paint to the Sponge
Pop open the paint color of your choice and pour out a little onto the sponge. Don’t go overboard here, simply apply quarter-sized dollops of paint and spread it over the sponge until you have a paint spot big enough to cover the child’s foot.

Step 3 – Step In It
Now simply take the child’s foot and press it gently on the paint spot on the sponge. Because you’re using a sponge, the paint should be applied evenly so you won’t have dobs of paint on the final footprint.

Step 4 – Step On It
Press the child’s foot firmly against the sheet of paper. Try to press straight down and then lift straight up without moving or dragging from side to side.

Step 5 – Rinse and Repeat
Using your damp washcloth, wipe the paint off the child’s foot. If done correctly, the paint should only be on the child’s foot for under 10-15 seconds, so the paint should come off very easily. Now you can easily switch to the other foot or do the same foot again.

Step 6 – Display Your Work
There’s no official drying time indicated on the Crayola paints, but the paint seems to be dry enough to touch after 1-2 hours. Since there are no dobs of paint, you should be able to instantly hang the footprint on the way without risk of running lines of paint.

If you have a scanner, you can easily scan the sheet of paper (make sure the paint is dry!) for easy digital archiving or for use as design elements and compositions. Keep the size of the footprint at 100% (don’t resize) and it should print out as actual size.

The starting point of any workflow is the importing of the files. (Yes, I know the actual starting point is the creation of the photos, but for the sake of staying within the scope of this article, let’s agree that our starting point begins with the import). This is the foundation of your workflow, getting your photos imported to relevant locations on your hard drive and named accordingly.

This article details the steps I take when importing files in Lightroom. There are no definitive right ways to import your files, so I am by no means preaching the gospel here. I’m just offering suggestions on what has helped me over the past few years in organizing my photos for effective use and archiving.

Select Files to Import
One way or another, you’ve got to tell Lightroom which files you want to import. There are several different ways you can do this. If your photos are still on your digital camera’s memory card, you can either connect your camera directly to your computer or connect your memory card to a USB card reader. Simply connect your camera or card reader, pull up Lightroom, and go to File > Import Photos from Device…

If your images are already on your computer’s hard drive, you can easily import them as well by going to File > Import Photos from Disk… and selecting the folder where they are located.

Master the Import Dialog Box
Once you’ve selected the files you wish to import into Lightroom, you’ll be presented with a rather large import dialog box. While it may seem intimidating at first, it’s actually a very straight-forward and logical arrangement of options for importing your photos. Let’s take a closer look at each of these options (please refer to the image to the right).

1. File Handling and Location
The first option is asking how you want Lightroom to handle these files. Here you have a few different choices to make:

• Add photos to catalog without moving – Imports the photo information into Lightroom but leaves your existing photos where they are on your hard drive.
• Copy photos to a new location and add to catalog – Copies your photos to a specified location and imports them into your Lightroom catalog.
• Move photos to a new location and add to catalog – Moves your photos to a specified location and imports them into your Lightroom catalog.
• Copy photos as Digital Negative (DNG) and add to catalog (Recommended) – This option copies your photos as DNG files to a specified location and imports them into your Lightroom catalog.

The Copy to option allows you to specify where you want the photos to be copied or moved to. I typically target my My Pictures folder on a Windows PC, or my Pictures folder on a Mac. This is the most intuitive place to store photos since these folders are pre-designated by either operating system.

2. File Organization
This drop-down menu gives you several options to choose from. My personal favorite is:

By date: 2005/2005-12-17

This setting automatically organizes my photos by the date they were taken. So, there’s no room for error by manually typing in a date. In my particular scenario, the photos I’m importing will be put in the following directory:

Pictures > 2008 > 2008-12-16

Another advantage of organizing your photos in this way is that you can view a list of all your images by the date they were taken and determine what is to be imported. Using the checkboxes beside the dates you can select which photos you want to import. By selecting a specific date you can view all photos taken on that date and select individual photos to import. Right-clicking on a date will also allow you to rename the target directory.

3. Backup Option
Speaking as one who has lost images before (either due to hard drive failure or hasty file deletion), I want to emphasize the importance of backing up your files. Selecting this checkbox allows you to create a copy of all imported files to an external hard drive. This way you immediately have a backup of your files before you even start working with them. While you’re configuring a backup scheme, you may want to consider a remote backup service such as Mozy Remote Backup.

4. File Naming
Again, Lightroom gives you several options of pre-defined templates you can use as your file naming structure. What I recommend is going to the Edit… option and defining your own.

I personally have my file naming structure set as YYYYMMDD_001.dng (where the “001″ represents a three digit sequence number). This allows me to quickly see the exact date the photo was taken.

Once you’ve defined your custom file naming template, you can save it and that template becomes the default for the next time you import the files.

5. Information to Apply
In this section you can designate the information that is applied to each image that will be imported:

• Develop Settings – A list of presets (black and white, sepia, antiqued, etc.) that will be applied to all photos. This is the one option I’ve never used in the import dialog simply because I like being able to easily view the original version of each photo and apply the preset I think most appropriate.
• Metadata – Similar to the File Naming Template mentioned in the previous step, this allows you to create a metadata template to embed certain information into each photo. I usually setup a template for copyright information that doesn’t change often and leave that template set as the default option.
• Keywords – Specify keywords to be embedded into the photos. One thing to keep in mind is that these keywords will be applied to all photos imported. You can always add and change the keywords once the files are imported into Lightroom.
• Initial Previews – The size of thumbnails that are imported with the photo. Minimal is the default setting and is the fastest method for importing photos; however, while browsing through the photos you may experience lag time because Lightroom may be having to recreate the photos at a larger size as they come into view. Standard means a longer export time but makes browsing medium-sized thumbnails much easier and more fluid. My suggestion? Start with Minimal. If browsing your photos afterward is making your computer lag then step it up to Standard. There is also a 1:1 option, but the import takes even longer and the previews take up more disk space. I’d suggest avoiding the 1:1 setting unless that’s what works best for your workflow.

6. Image Size and Selection
The buttons in this section allow you a quick way to either select all images or deselect all images. The slider bar changes the size of the thumbnails displayed in the window, but has no effect on the information that’s embedded into the photos.

Once you’ve made the appropriate import settings, simply hit the Import button and Lightroom will do the rest!

Over the next few articles we’ll be taking a look at the next steps in the photography workflow inside Lightroom. It’s important not to overlook the import step as it sets the pace for your workflow and overall photo organization.

This technique can also be used for elements other than eyes. You can effectively change or enhance the colors of any object or photo inside Photoshop. For our purposes here, we’ll stick with stick with the eyes. Just keep in mind that you can apply these steps to any object to change its color.

1. Add Hue/Saturation adjustment layer
First, open the image that needs the color change. In the Adjustments panel, click on the icon (indicated in the image to the right) to add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. If the Adjustments panel isn’t visible, you can open it by going to the Windows menu option and choosing Adjustments.

2. Make adjustments
Toward the bottom of the Hue/Saturation panel, make sure the Colorize box is checked. Now start dragging the top Hue slider until you get the desired color. You’ll immediately notice that everything in your image is having the color applied to it. Don’t worry about that, we’ll address that in the next step.

After you’ve found the color you want, adjust the Saturation slider to give the color more or less saturation. Leave the Lightness slider at 0…like, always.

3. Apply layer mask
When you add an adjustment layer, a white layer mask icon is automatically added to it. This is how we will be limiting where the color is applied to your image.

Since the layer mask is white, it is exposing the effects of your hue/saturation adjustment layer to everything in your image We need to first switch the fill color of the layer mask to black. To do this, simply click on the layer mask thumbnail to make sure it’s selected and press Ctrl + I (Cmd + I on Mac) to invert the layer mask. This will hide the effects of the adjustment layer.

4. Paint in the color
Now grab the Brush Tool (hit B key), make sure you have a small, soft brush, set white as your foreground color, and paint in the iris of your subject’s eyes. As you paint you’ll begin to see the color adjustments you’ve made being applied to the eyes.

This is the point where you can change the color of any object in your image. Instead of painting in the eyes, simply paint over whichever object you want to change the color for.

Need to change the color of multiple objects? Simply create a new Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer for each new color you need. You have practically an unlimited number of adjustment layers that can be added to your image.

5. Fine Tuning
At this point you can drop the opacity of your adjustment layer to reduce the intensity of the color; conversely, to made the adjustments more dramatic you can increase the Saturation in the Adjustments panel.

It’s easy to let things get out of hand with these adjustments. It all depends on the level of realism you’re wanting to achieve with your image. With any image adjustment, it helps to get the image to where you think it looks good, then walk away from your computer for a few moments. When you come back you’ll have a fresh perspective on the image and the adjustments you’ve made.

Check out the image to the right to see a comparison of the original, the slight adjustments, and the extreme adjustments.

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Once you understand what masks are and how they work, you’ll have a much easier time blending together layers, filters and effects, and you’ll be able to work with your images non-destructively.

First, let’s look at what a Layer Mask is: it’s an editable mask that is attached to your layers that controls the transparency of the layer. They contain only black and white tones, no color information. The white areas of your mask reveal your layer’s contents; the black areas conceal your layer’s contents.

Think of placing a sheet of transparency paper over a printed photo. Because the transparency paper is clear, you’re able to see your photo perfectly. Now, start painting over your transparency sheet with black paint. The areas with black paint conceal your photo.

Layer Masks work in much the same way. By default, a Layer Mask is white which is like the transparency sheet. As you add black to your Layer Mask, you will start concealing your layer’s contents.

Layer Masks take things a step further than the transparency paper, however. When you add black to the Layer Mask, you are hiding that portion of the layer and that portion becomes transparent, exposing the other layers beneath.

Allow me to illustrate this. Check out the image to the right. In my Photoshop file I have two layers: the bottom layer is an image of Leopard’s default wallpaper. The top layer is Tiger’s default wallpaper. I’ve added a Layer Mask to the Tiger wallpaper layer and created a black and white gradient across the image. Where the Layer Mask is white you see Tiger’s wallpaper; where it’s black you see Leopard’s wallpaper. Where the Layer Mask is gray you only have partial transparency; that’s how we’re able to get a smooth transition between the two layers. Keep that in mind as you continue to work with Layer Masks is that you don’t have to use only pure white and pure black.

We can view the actual Layer Mask by pressing Alt/Option and clicking directly on the Layer Mask thumbnail. As you can see we have a simple gradient, but as a Layer Mask this can give us some very cool effects.

To add a Layer Mask to your layer, simply click the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette (Alt/Option + Click the icon to add a black layer mask) or you can go to the Layer menu and choose Layer Mask > Reveal All (or Hide All to add a black layer mask).

After the Layer Mask has been added, make sure its thumbnail is selected in the layers palette and use the editing tools as you normally would to manipulate your image. You can switch to your original layer whenever you’d like by clicking on its thumbnail in the layers palette. This enables you to edit the contents of your layer separately from your Layer Mask. Just click on the Layer Mask thumbnail again to switch back to it.

While you’re working on your image, you may want to see what your image looks like without the Layer Mask applied at all. To hide only the Layer Mask, simply Shift+Click on the Layer Mask thumbnail in the layer’s palette. A red X will appear over the mask and you will be able to see all the contents of your layer. Shift+Click on the Layer Mask thumbnail again to reactivate it.

One of the main benefits of using Layer Masks is that you are doing non-destructive edits. At any time you can hide or delete your Layer Mask and your original image has remained untouched.

As you can see, Layer Masks are a very powerful and integral part of Photoshop. They help make your Photoshop work faster and easier and meanwhile make it easier to return your image to its original state by working non-destructively.