Powerful 1-CLICK Photoshop Edits Are Here [What's New In Photoshop Feb 2024]

So I pretty much do all of my photo editing in the Lightroom, either on the desktop over here or on my iPad or iPhone. And that's because Lightroom pretty much offers all of the tools that I need for my editing workflow. But I also know that Photoshop adds an even more powerful layer of editing control thanks to its layer-based workflow, its extensive blending and masking controls, and the convenient adjustment layers. And that's what I want to talk about in this video. In the latest update to P

hotoshop, version 25.5, that was released a few weeks ago, Adobe added an even more flexible way to work with adjustment layers called adjustment presets. Basically allows you to add a bunch of adjustment layers in a single click. Best of all, these adjustment presets can be shared with any other Photoshop user the same way that you would share a preset or a profile in Lightroom. So in this video, I'm gonna show you how that works. All right, so the first thing you'll wanna do obviously is make

sure you have the latest version version of Photoshop installed so you can do that by going to the creative cloud app that's installed in your computer then click on the apps icon here and then click on this manage updates button you'll see that the latest version I have installed is 25.5.1 for Photoshop and you can see right there in the description that this update enables you to save import and export adjustment presets so with that installed let's go ahead and just go go straight to Photosho

p over here. Now we should probably start with just explaining what an adjustment layer is and how you can access it because it's always best to start at the kind of basics and not assume that everyone just knows what I'm talking about. So the easiest way and kind of the historical way that I've always accessed adjustment layers is by going over here to this icon under the layers panel. It looks like a little contrast icon down here. So when you click on it you can see this is the list of of adj

ustment layers that you can apply. So for simplicity sake, I'm gonna click on the brightness contrast adjustment layer. And what you'll see here is this new layer has been applied on top of our image layer and it's titled brightness contrast one. You'll also see here, there is a properties tab. This is where you will control whatever adjustment layer you apply. Now, if you don't see the properties tab, you should, but if you don't, you can always go to window and then make sure that properties o

ver here is checked. But as you can see, we have two sliders, brightness and contrast. So I can go ahead here and increase the brightness. I can increase the contrast, or of course I can make it darker, whatever you want. Basically, these are the controls for that adjustment layer. And one of the best parts about an adjustment layer is that when you add it, you'll see that a layer mask over here is automatically added to it. So with a layer mask, what you can do is control control which parts of

the image have that adjustment layer applied. And the easiest way to do that is to just go to your brush over here or press the B key on your keyboard. Make sure that in this case here, black is your foreground color. And then with your brush sized accordingly, you can paint out areas that you don't want that brightness slash contrast effect to be applied to, or you can press X to change your foreground color to white and you can paint that back in. That's basically a really high-level way to s

how you how layer masks work. On top of layer masks, you also have the ability to use layer properties to control how this adjustment layer blends with the one below it. So if you double-click here, you'll see you have this layer style window, and then you have down here, for example, this very powerful section under the blending options called Blend If. So what we can do is control how this layer blends with the underlying layer. So for example, if I want to remove the blending from the darkest

parts of the area or from the brightest parts of the area, I can do that with this and we're not going to spend much time beyond what I just showed you on this. This is an entirely separate video altogether. Leave a comment if you'd like to see how blend if works, but that's basically another way that the adjustment layer can interact with the layer below it. And so with that, let me just get rid of that adjustment layer. Now, that is a very high level of what an adjustment layer is and how it

works. But there's also another way that you can access adjustment layers. And that is by going over here to the window menu up here and then selecting adjustments. Now you will see this new panel called adjustments. And under the single adjustment section here, you'll see all of the same adjustment layer options that you have over here when we clicked on this button. So it's just an easier way, it's also more visual because you have these little icons next to it if you want to add an adjustment

layer. But you also have built-in presets, these adjustment presets here that were provided by Adobe. And so if you hover over any one of them, you'll get a preview of what that preset will do. You can also click on this more button over here and you'll see these various categories that are included. So for example, there is a landscape category over here and I can hover over these to get a preview of what that preset does. If I click on one of these presets you can see here we now have this gr

oup over here called landscape which was the category and the preset name which was warm contrast. But more importantly in that group you can see the two adjustment layers that were used to create this preset. Now here's where things get really powerful because what I can do is I can click on this curves adjustment for example and then I can go down here i'll make this a little bit larger and i can further refine this so even though the preset has settings already baked in i can go ahead and non

-destructively apply this and then change it as i see fit. And so that is how you can work with the built-in adjustment presets that come with Photoshop. I'm going to go ahead over and then delete the preset that I applied by dragging the group to the trash over here and now we're back to our original photo. Now let me walk you through building your own custom preset. But before we do, just give me a few quick seconds to tell you about my brand new course called Lightroom Landscapes. As you can

see, I love taking and editing and sharing landscape photos and I also mentioned that I do pretty much all of my editing in Lightroom. So this course is broken down into over seven hours of easy-paced lessons, and it will really open your eyes to just how powerful and how many things you can do to your landscape photos just using Lightroom. It also breaks down my five-pillar approach to editing landscape photos so that you get a sense and a certain order to how you should approach editing your l

andscapes. Again, I'm very excited about it. I hope you check it out and I'll leave a link in the description below. All right, let's get back to it Okay So now we need to build our own custom adjustment preset and so to do that We need to add some adjustment layers to fill that preset So to start I'm gonna go ahead here and add a brightness contrast adjustment layer And I'm just gonna go ahead and add a bit of brightness. Now I'm not gonna add contrast because The way that I prefer to add that

kind of contrast is by using a curves adjustment So I'm going to click here and you can see, we now have another adjustment layer on top with a curve. And so I'm going to add one of my favorite types of curves for contrast, and that's called an S curve. So I basically put a dot over here and over here, and then a dot here for the mid tones to adjust that right around there. I'm also going to add a little bit of gray in the darkest part of the area to give it that kind of faded look. And I've got

this video here, if you wanna learn all about the tone curve, I show you how to use it in the Lightroom, but it works pretty much exactly the same here in Photoshop as well. The other thing I'm gonna do is change to the blue color channel, and I'm gonna add a little bit of orange in the mid-tones, just to warm it up, just a tiny bit, not too, too much. I'll keep going here, and I want to add a Vibrance Adjustment layer to give me just a bit of an overall color kick. And then I'm gonna wrap thin

gs up with what I consider to be one of the most powerful adjustment layers here and it's called color lookup. The reason why I love color lookup is because I can load a LUT file to drastically adjust the look of the photo. Now that's not to say that you don't have LUT support in the Lightroom. You actually do but I. You don't add LUTs directly to a photo in Lightroom. Instead, if you've ever worked with creative profiles in Lightroom, so if you go into Lightroom's profile browser or even in Cam

era Raw, those creative profiles are built on top of LUTs. So you have that functionality, it's just a bit more powerful in Photoshop and I'll show you why. And so I'm gonna go ahead here and with this 3D LUT radio button selected, I'm gonna click over here and then click again on Load 3D LUT. And on my desktop I already have a folder of LUT files that I've created before so I'm gonna go ahead and click on number 10 and then click open and so you can see that this LUT was applied to the image no

w as you can see also it's way too strong and so here's where things get pretty cool because first I can go ahead and adjust the opacity of this layer here so I can dial this back but we can do that in Lightroom because when you apply a creative profile there there is an amount slider. So you can kind of do that there. But where things get really cool is that I can go ahead and also change the blending mode. So I can control how this layer blends with the other layers. So I'm gonna go ahead here

and click on normal, and then I'm gonna scroll down, and I'm gonna select soft light. And so you can see if I toggle that layer. It's a lot more subtle but it still has a really cool effect on the photo. And so now you can see we have these four adjustment layers. And imagine if I want to apply the same treatment to another photo, maybe a similar photo from this shoot. Before I'd have to go and basically re-add those layers and customize the settings and it's just a bit more cumbersome. Now wha

t I can do with these layers is save them as a preset. preset. There are a few things though that I want to talk about when you save a preset. So in order to save an adjustment preset, you want to select all of the adjustment layers that you want to make up that preset. So you can see I have the four layers selected over here. Now, before I show you how to save it, I first want to tell you what will be saved in an adjustment preset and what will not be saved. You can see on the color lookup I ad

justed the opacity and the blend mode. Those will save in the preset. So when you apply this preset, it'll apply all of the adjustment layers. It'll apply this color lookup with the LUT that I applied. And for this particular layer, it will apply a 32% opacity and the soft light blending mode. But what will not be saved to an adjustment preset are things like the layer mask. So if I used a brush to remove the effect from an area of this photo. This layer mask will not be saved in the preset. Or

if I were to go into the layer styles here by double clicking on the layer here and let's say I adjusted the blend if section here and then clicked okay, that will not be saved in the preset. And you'll know that there is some sort of a layer style applied because there is this little icon here on the right of the layer. So I'm gonna go ahead here, I'm just gonna get rid of this blend if, and then click okay. And now I know that everything that I see here in these adjustment layers will be saved

in the adjustment preset. Again, layer masks and layer styles will not, but opacity and blend modes will. So let's go ahead and save this preset. What I'm going to do is scroll up here and then you see there is this section called your presets. To save the preset, remember you first want to select all of the adjustment layers that you want in that preset and then click on the plus press icon. And here you can name your preset. So I'm gonna go ahead and call this warm, I don't know, faded. And t

hen I'll click save. And so there is our preset there, warm faded. And you can see I hovered over it and it's giving me a preview as if it were to apply on top of what is already here. That's why it looks extra strong. Now let's look at some of the properties here of this preset. So if I go to the ellipse here and I click, you see there are some options here. I can rename the preset, I can delete it, I can export this individual preset, or I can export all custom presets. Now, here's an importan

t point. You can remember how when we went into this more section and you saw that there are all of these categories here of different adjustment presets. Currently, we don't have that option in Photoshop for our presets, which is kind of a bummer, and I hope Adobe adds that. Right now, all of your presets will always be in one flat list. And so if you go here and you select export all custom presets it will export every custom preset that you have saved over here another important point to make

is that the thumbnail of the preset will be whatever the image is you have loaded at the time that you save it so you can see that it has my image over here in the thumbnail. Alright, so let's go ahead and let's get rid of these adjustment layers so I can show you what it looks like when you apply one of these adjustment presets. I'll go ahead and all I'm going to do is hover over it. You can see this is the preview and then I'm going to click. You can see there is the group with the name of th

e preset called warm faded and you can see a few things. First, I can click on each of these adjustment layers and have access to to all of the adjustments that I made, but also on the color lookup, you can see there is the opacity and the blend mode that I had specified when I saved the preset. Also, you can see that the LUT that was used is included in that preset. Now let me walk you through exporting and importing. So let's go to this preset over here. Actually, what I'll first do is drag th

e group over to the trash so we get rid of it. Now I'm gonna go to the preset, click on the ellipse, and I'm gonna click on Export Preset. You can see that the name of the preset is already in the file name. I'll just save it to my desktop and click Save. Now, if I hide Photoshop, you can see there is the preset file here. It's warmfaded.psap, so that's Photoshop Adjustment Preset. Now, let's go back to Photoshop over here, and I'm gonna delete this preset. So I'll click on the ellipse, click De

lete Preset, and then Confirm. Now, you might think that maybe importing would be part of this plus icon or something else, but it's not. You're going to click on the hamburger icon right over here. It's on the adjustments tab. So I'll click here. And then towards the bottom, you will see there is an option for import presets. I'm going to select the preset that we just saved to the desktop and then click OK. And there is our adjustment preset, which I can now click and apply. And if I want, I c

an share this preset file with any other Photoshop user and they can just repeat that import process to import it into their version of Photoshop. So with that, if you want to continue learning how to edit your photos, especially with Lightroom, check out this preset here. It's got a bunch of great videos. If you found this video helpful, as always, a thumbs up would be great. Be sure to subscribe and click on the bell icon to get notified of all future videos as well. Thanks a lot.