Your image processing skills will never reach their full potential until you understand how Adjustment Layers and Layer Masks work inside of Adobe Photoshop. If photo processing with Adobe Photoshop is new for you than this tutorial is absolutely essential!
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Adjustment Layers are the best way to change the color, brightness, or the level of saturation in a photograph in Photoshop. Adjustment Layers allow us to make sophisticated non-destructive improvements to our images. Working with Adjustment Layers is a great way to protect your Background Layer. Adjustment Layers remain editable from one Adobe Photoshop editing session to the next as long as you save your work using either the .tif or .psd file formats.
Best of all, all of the different types of Adjustment Layers in Adobe Photoshop automatically use Layer Masks for their targeting system. The colors on our Layer Masks in Adobe Photoshop are symbolic. On a Layer Mask, the white areas reveal and the black areas conceal the changes that this particular Adjustment Layer creates. This visual language can be hard to grasp at first but with practice this symbolism becomes easier to understand.
An all white Layer Mask, for example, means that all of the changes that this Adjustment Layer creates are visible everywhere on you image. An all black Layer Mask, on the other hand, means that none of the changes that this Adjustment Layer creates will be visible in your final composite. Thus, the secret to creating precise changes to one particular part of your image is to paint with white and black over the appropriate regions of your Layer Mask.