Help with layering and lighting

[simonh16306878]

Hi, there!

I was just playing around a little bit, trying out a couple of things in Photoshop when i came across a problem i have yet to solve.

I was working on and editing an image with lighting as my main intention but couldn't really layer it properly (what I think has to do with layering at least).

Imagine a person sitting on a stair. I wanted to change the background lighting to give it more feeling. So I decided to use the "Quick Selection Tool" to cut and separate the background from the person sitting on the stairs so the changes I made to the background didn't affect the person at all. At first it worked when I adjusted the hue and saturation. The background was the only thing being changed, which was my intention. But when I wanted to further adjust the lighting and the coloring properties, the person sitting started to be affected as well. This was when I, after successfully changing the saturation, tried to adjust the exposure as well to the background, but couldn't because then it would adjust the whole image.

Note: I'm kinda new to Photoshop.

Any help would be appreciated!

[Mylenium]

Well, *eek*. If you trouble yourself creating a selection, why not split out the selected parts to a separate layer right away? A simple copy&paste or duplication and deleting the respective unwanted parts. Solves all your issues. And without meaning to be all too snobbish about the matter: You really, really should watch some tutorials on those essentials like working with layers and their duplicates, saving selections, grouping/ linking layers, adhustment layers and all that could stuff or you'll spend forever doing the simplest things. The keyword is "nondestructive editing".

Mylenium

[JohanElzenga]

Can you describe how you made the edits? It sounds like you made a selection, and then perhaps used an adjustment layer to do the edits. When you add an adjustment layer while a selection is active, then that selection becomes the mask of this adjustment layer. However, the selection itself is now gone, so if you add another adjustment layer, you won't get the selection as mask anymore, and so the entire image is adjusted.