Adjustment layer Question

[Ferlin]

I made a circle fill -put a layer mask on it and used a circular gradient to make a glowing circle with whitish center. With that selected I put a curves adjustment layer above it and it looks nice. There are masks on each layer and I cannot get these layers to merge. I've tried everything discarding masks unlinking masks,and everytime I try to merge I lose adjustment layers effect. I must be missing something but I have never had this problem before. }P }P Ferlin

 

[Erik]

Are you shure you didn't have the mask from the adjustment layer active instead of the layer itself?

 

[Ferlin]

I don't know what you mean by active. I had a selection going from my base layer so that the adjustment layer only targeted that area of the base layer. So I turned selection off and I had masks on both layers. This hasn't happened before. Maybe i'll try again in a new document.Don't want this to be a big hassle.Ferlin

 

[Ferlin]

Maybe the gradient orb is to sutle for the adjustment layer to kling on to -- get it Klingon to because the adjustmenmt layer works on a solid circle just fine. Erik , make a painting.Ferlin [excited]

 

[theKeeper]

Ferlin...

This is because the effects of the Curves filter are just an illusion. An illusion based on the fact that your bg is dark. Normally that filter will not work and an object/layer with just one brighness value -- such as a white dot.

But when set against the dark bg, the filter has room to create the varying shades of grey that it need to perform it's functions correctly.

This is why the effect dissappears when merging down.
Try this... put a circle beneath the white one that is filled with black... then merge all three layers.
Set the resulting layer to Screen mode and you can now move this layer anywhere you want in the overall document and have it blend well with anything below it in the palette.

:B

 

[Ferlin]

Mark,
That worked. I made a selection from the original orb and control J to a new layer which simply copied my orb gradient layer (guess I could have made a dup layer) and moved that down to 1st layer. I guess there was enough darkness there for the curves to merge. I have to try screen because I see situations where I will need it. Thanks Ferlin

 

[MsOz]

Another way is to create a new empty layer, and then Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E, which merges all visible layers and places it onto the new Layer as a separate image, similar to a snapshot...