Layer Type · Adjustment
Adjustment Layer
A non-destructive grade applied to everything beneath it — targetable at any PBR channel, not only colour.
An adjustment layer — hue graded across the whole material, live.
What it does
An adjustment layer re-grades whatever shows through it, without altering the layers below — hide it and the original is back. It’s the right tool when a stack is nearly right and just needs a tonal pass over the top.
What makes it more than a colour tool: you can route it to a specific channel. Knock the roughness of everything below down by 20%, or shift only the metallic — the grade doesn’t have to touch base colour at all.
The five operations
Five ways to grade the stack.
Hue / Saturation
Shift hue, push or pull saturation and value across everything below.
Brightness / Contrast
Lift or crush the whole material with two sliders.
Levels
Input/output range plus gamma — the precise tonal remap.
Color Balance
Warm the shadows, cool the highlights — cinematic colour shifts.
Gradient Map
Remap luminance through a colour ramp — thermal, duotone and stylised looks.
In practice
Warm a whole material — or just its gloss.
- Hue/Sat nudge hue warm — the whole stack shifts together.
- → Base Color the default target…
- → Roughness …or route it here instead to grade only the gloss.
- Non-destructive — toggle it off and the original is untouched.
- Stackable — layer several grades and reorder them.
- Maskable — give it a mask to grade just one area.