: Set adjustment layer to only affect certain layers without using groups? As far as I'm concerned, there are a few different ways to control which layers are affected by an adjustment layer,

@Ogunnowo857

Bit late but I'm not sure why simple Layer Masks can't do this for you.

Let's say you have a picture with foreground a person, middle ground a mountain, middle ground a waterfall, background the sky. You want to push the blues in the Sky and Person so you make a Curves Adjustment and mask out the Mountain and Waterfall. Then you want to adjust the brightness of the Person and Mountain. Okay another Curves Adjustment but mask out the Sky and Waterfall.

It's irrelevant that the Mountain Layer is not next to the Sky for example. If it were to make a difference than you wouldn't be able to see the Sky since the Mountain would be blocking it. So both objects must be visible at least partially thus Layer Mask on your Adjustment Layer can block out specific parts.

To formally answer your question though - no there's no way to have an Adjustment Layer set to affect a few specific ungrouped layers. But as I said above, I'm not sure why you'd really need to.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Mendez620

If you use Photoshop CC, just click on the clip button at the bottom of the adjustment popup. This will clip the adjustment layer to the layer below it, which means your adjustment will only affect that layer. You can have your adjustment affect more than one layer by grouping the layers, then clip the adjustment layer to the group. Likewise, the adjustment layer should be above the group to which you clip it to.!

The keyboard shortcut is OptCmdG (or AltCtrlG on Windows).

Vote Up Vote Down