How to use the Inverted adjustment Layer to fix over-saturation

Have you ever seen Stranger Things on Netflix? It is one of my wife and I’s favorite shows to watch when the kids go to bed. We have far surpassed all the episodes and are longing for the next season. We are babies of the ’80s after all.

One thing I noticed in that highly addictive Netflix show is how much it can teach us about photo post-production. There is this alternate universe in the show, a very ugly place, that routinely finds itself seeping into the ordinary world. That got me thinking about the Invert Adjustment Layer in Photoshop.

When you first use it, it can be an ugly place, and quite frankly it does nothing fantastic to portraits, babies, or beautiful landscapes. However, there is important data in that upside-down world and if we can learn to harness it, we can unlock some incredible knowledge about our photos.

The Inverted Adjustment Layer flips the colors to their complement. That’s all it does when we see it on the Color Wheel, it is evident, but when we see it on our image, it just looks like a mess! However, that data can be used to our advantage!

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to use the Inverted Adjustment layer set to the Color Blend Mode with an Opacity of 50% to assess whether or not our image is oversaturated! It is a pretty powerful technique to evaluate your colors, but don’t let that keep you from making artistic color decisions either!

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Blake Rudis
f.64 Academy and f.64 Elite are the brainchildren of Blake Rudis. While he is a landscape photographer, he is most passionate about post-processing images in Photoshop and mentoring others.

For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
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