Chapter 7. Making Targeted Adjustments

There's not a big difference in the procedure for making adjustments when you're making targeted adjustments. The difference is primarily in how you adjust a specific area without losing or jeopardizing the totally nondestructive work that you've done up to this point.

Much of the success of regional adjustments depends on your ability to make the mask that restricts your adjustments to one or more very specific areas of the image. Of course, you could make an adjustment directly onto the image by using any of the adjustment commands after you'd made a selection. But then that adjustment becomes a permanent part of the image, destroying whatever was previously in that area. So you really want your selections to do one of two things:

• Mask an adjustment layer so that it will only have an effect on targeted portions of the image. This is the option you should useexcept when it is impossible.

• Create a separate layer for adjustments that have no adjustment layer equivalent.

Direct Your Adjustment to a Particular Spot

This chapter isn't about how to make an adjustment. You learned about that in Chapter 6. It's about the various ways to "aim" those techniques at enhancing a particular part of the subject in such a way that those adjustments stay both intact and isolated. You'll also learn about making selections to create masks for those layers. And you'll learn a lot more about how to modify a layer mask to change the exact area and blending of a targeted adjustment.