My Blog

Premiere Pro CS6 – Adjustment Layers

Written by

joshuaaweiss

in

Borrowing from it’s sister application After Effects, Premiere Pro CS6 has added the hugely powerful concept of Adjustment Layers directly into the editing environment.  This new feature is an amazing advancement for tasks such as color correction, but its uses are infinite.

After Effects help defines an adjustment layer as:

“When you apply an effect to a layer, the effect applies only to that layer and no others. However, an effect can exist independently if you create an adjustment layer for it. Any effects applied to an adjustment layer affect all layers below it in the layer stacking order. An adjustment layer at the bottom of the layer stacking order has no visible result.

Because effects on adjustment layers apply to all layers beneath them, they are useful for applying effects to many layers at once. In other respects, an adjustment layer behaves like other layers; for example, you can use keyframes or expressions with any adjustment layer property.

Note: A more accurate description is that the adjustment layer applies the effect to the composite created from all layers below the adjustment layer in the layer stacking order. For this reason, applying an effect to an adjustment layer improves rendering performance compared with applying the same effect separately to each of the underlying layers.”
The same of course is more or less true for Premiere Pro’s implementation, minus of course expressions.  If you have several layers stacked on top of each other you can use adjustment layers to apply the same effects to all of them, without the hassel of nesting.  You can can also use track mattes to effect only parts of the image, use blending modes, and try several different options of effects on different adjustment layers.

Credits: Thanks to John Gumaer for doing the intro sound design.

More posts