You don’t need to select the Color Balance Adjustment when you change the position of the root because the adjustment is attached to the root, so it will follow the root automatically.
We have to make sure that the root layers attached to the right legs of the elephant are actually on the top of the layer stack, so change the layer stack if you have to.
This time you have to drag the root and the Color Balance Adjustment with it.
Your scene should look like this now:
Let’s work with the root of the right front leg first. Create a layer mask in the root layer and paint it with black following the instructions in the image below:
The result should be something like this:
Now go to the left front leg of the elephant. Create a layer mask to the root layer and paint the areas that you don’t want with black (see image below):
The front legs should look like this now:
The legs on the left side of the elephant are a little bit darker than the other ones, so we’re going to add a new layer above the root layer of the left front leg of the elephant and paint some shadows in it.
If you created the new layer while the root layer was selected, it should already be clipped, but make sure that the new layer you just created only applies to the root layer below it.
And here is the final outcome of the front legs.
With the back legs we’re going to do the exact same steps. Just remember to add a new layer on the top of the root layer of the left leg and add some shadows on the root.
And here is the final outcome of the back legs:
And here is my layer stack of the roots.
Your image now should be similar to this one:
Now add all this layers we created for the roots in a new group called Roots.
Right now we can see the legs of the elephant through the roots and we don’t want that, so open our Elephant group again and click on the layer mask of the elephant layer. (which we created on step 17)
Now hide the legs of the elephant following the instructions on the image below:
Your image should now look like this:
