Adobe Photoshop Tutorials

Speed up your work by saving and reusing carefully-created image adjustment settings

Most photographic images you work on tend to need a little adjustment. You might need to push up the colour saturation, or cool the colour temperature. Sometimes you can get away with hitting Auto Contrast to enhance the blacks and whites of an underexposed shot; at other times you may have to spend ages wrestling with curves to rescue a particularly poor shot. To work smarter you need to make the most of the time-saving options Photoshop offers, and when you apply an image adjustment you’ll often have the option to save your settings, so that you can apply them to similar images with a click of your mouse button.

SAVING YOUR SETTINGS:

WHEN YOU SAVE a setting, make sure it’s stored somewhere sensible, so that you can find it again easily. If necessary, create a directory or folder in Photoshop’s own directory called My Settings.

PHOTOSHOP SAVES different image settings with different extensions to help you differentiate between the different types of setting. A saved levels adjustment is indicated by the extension .alv, while a Hue/Saturation setting has the extension .ahu.

GIVE YOUR saved settings appropriate names so that you can easily find the right ones later. Our example level adjustment setting was saved as BrightenUp.alv.

AS WELL as being able to save Hue/Saturation and levels settings, you can also save settings for popular image adjustment options such as Curves, Replace Color, Selective Color and Variations.