I was going through this video tutorial and messing with a pic that my nephew took. This got me to looking at, and playing with, adjustment layers in the .psd (and masks in those layers). I had adjustment layers for curves, levels and bright/contrast.

Anywhoooo.... I was moving the adjustment layers around and I didn't notice any changes happening to the image when I put them in different orders. Does the order of adjustment layers matter? Or does it depend on the picture? I'd share the psd but it's 24MB zipped and I don't have webspace that I can get to from home.

You can load up 100meg files in my forums and link it here.

Oh yeah BTW everybody- ya can load up 100 meg files of everything but exe in my forum posts. Sure--go ahead use it all ya want.
when making a post--beneath text box is a drop down menu
"Additional options" expand it.

Ignore Scion - he's ranting as usual...

"IGNORE THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!!"

(oh - how TOPICAL! )

TOFU: the layer stacking order does matter depending on what your are doing and what BLEND properties you've got for any given layer. My advice is don't try to "figure it out", as each time you use them you'll probably use them a bit differently. Just give yourself a few moments to try different combos and different blend styles until you get the effect you are looking for.

What's that noise?

SCION! BE GONE!

rein is right about layers but dead wrong about scion

it's like math Tofu

layers are processed bottom to top (so each step is set between parentheses )
a group behaves like variables between parentheses

par example

-subtraction layer (2) (basically a mathematical substraction)
-multiply layer (3) (basically a mathmatically multiplication)
backgroundlayer (5)

would give you (5*3)-2 = 13

-multiply layer (3)
-subtraction layer (2)
backgroundlayer (5)

would give you (5-2)*3 = 9

63!

There. I win.

Golly gee thanks MooseMan and PenguinBoy! (sounded like superhero names to me)

The explanations are very much appreciated. I guess it was just a matter of the picture I had not needing much adjustment so the order didn't change things much (either that or my laptop screen and/or my eyes are shot).

Here's a quick example of how the order of the adjustment layers affects the final result. I placed a Curves adjustment layer to increase the contrast and a rather drastic Selective Color adjustment layer to change the color scheme. On the right is the same PSD file with the layer order reversed.

Since an adjustment layer works with the pixel color information from the stack below it, different order will give you slightly different results. Now, whether this is important in a real world application is subject to debate.



And, to top it off, here's a link to a lengthy article on adjustment layers: http://www.creativepro.com/img/story/120504_PS_adjustment.pdf

Excellent example Voks! That really showed some changes (I prefer the one on the right). I really think it was just my adjustments to my original photo didn't matter much for the order.

Great example, VokMan!