Adjustment Layers

An adjustment layer holds no content. In place of strokes it carries an effect stack, and that stack applies to everything composited below it rather than to artwork of its own. It is the way to grade, blur or tint a whole scene at once without touching any individual layer, and to keep that grade editable afterward.

Layers composited above an adjustment layer are unaffected by it. This is what makes the position of an adjustment layer meaningful: it divides the stack into what it adjusts and what it does not.

Creating one#

An adjustment layer with an empty effect stack does nothing at all. It is not a no-op that tints or dims — it is skipped entirely until at least one effect is on it.

Nothing in the layer row marks a layer as an adjustment layer. Its row shows a depth number like any plane layer, so the name you leave it with is what identifies it in the stack.

What "below" means#

Adjustment layers are order-dependent, and the order that governs them is the composite order, which is not the same as the reading order of the panel.

The scene composites farthest-first by depth. "Below" therefore means greater depth — farther from the camera — and not merely "lower down the panel". Where two units share the same depth, the one nearer the top of the panel composites last, and so composites on top.

A new adjustment layer is created at depth 0 and inserted at the top of the panel. In a shot using the default three planes — Foreground at depth 0, Midground at 450, Background at 1200 — a fresh adjustment layer shares depth 0 with Foreground. Because it sits at the top of the panel it composites last among the depth-0 units, and so it adjusts the foreground, the midground and the background together.

The consequence to remember: a layer at a negative depth composites after the adjustment layer and escapes it entirely. If artwork is not being adjusted as expected, its depth is the first thing to check.

The paper is included#

"Everything below" includes the paper — the shot's background fill. The paper is laid down before any layer composites, so it is part of the scene the adjustment layer's stack reads.

This surprises people, and it is worth being concrete. An Invert on an adjustment layer inverts the paper along with the artwork, turning a white background black. A Fill covers the entire frame, paper included, rather than only the artwork below it. A Gaussian Blur has a flat paper to blur into at the edges.

Where you want an effect to reach only one layer's artwork, put the effect on that layer instead of on an adjustment layer. The exception to the paper rule is a render with a transparent background, where no paper is drawn at all — see rendering.

Controls#

Effects on the stack apply from the top card down — the topmost effect in the Effect Controls panel runs first, and each one after it reads the result of the last. Reordering the stack with the card chevrons therefore changes the outcome.