Datis Design Weblog

Photoshop by Farshad

Maybe you have heard destructive and non-destructive editing in Photoshop, but what they really mean ? Advanced Photoshop users always try to use non-destructive editing. This method of editing means that anytime you can change these edits or remove them easily. This method is differ from History Palette , this method is always available for you to edit even when you close and open your file in future but History Palette is only available when you are working on your file and when you close it, the history will gone !

How can we use non-destructive method ?

One of the most common used features in Photoshop is Adjustments, if you use it from Image menu and select one of the Adjustments from there, you will use destructive method, because after adding some of those adjustments then you cant come back and reverse them. But there is a nice way to do it in non-destructive way, for doing, go to layer palette and at the bottom you will see some icons, look at this picture :

As you see there is 3 icons that I have put their names, for using adjustments select your desired layer and select Create a new fill or adjustment layer, after doing this you can always come back and edit the changes you have made to your layer or remove them so easily without losing your original file. But note that not all of the adjustments are included in this way !
One of the other icons is for Add layer mask, this is one of the another useful methods in Photoshop, when working with images usually we need to remove some parts of image or select some part of it and edit them, we usually chose eraser tool or selection tools to edit such things, but with clicking this icon we can easily add a layer mask to our image and edit it as we like without losing our original image.
Another icon represents Add a layer style which we can easily add effects to our layer and edit or remove them later.

One of the powerful features that has been added from CS2 version is ability to work with smart objects. With this powerful tool you can convert your layers to smart object and resize or transform them without losing their original quality. Also you can easily bring Illustrator file into Photoshop which will known as smart object and when you edit the original file in Illustrator and save it, when you come back Photoshop will automatically update it.
For making a layer a smart object you can go to layer menu, select smart objects and select convert to smart object. Or you can choose your layer in layer palette and right click on it and choose convert to smart object.
After converting it to smart object a small icon will appear in layer thumbnail, look at this picture :

If you double click on this icon you can easily edit the original file, if it is from external program, the related program will be open and then you can edit it, if you convert it inside Photoshop, then a file with .psb extension will be opened and then you can edit it and save it, when you come back to your file it will be updated automatically !

At the end always remember that doing your edits in non-destructive mode make your work take longer time, but at the end you have this ability to always come back and edit or remove your effects or adjustments or anything else…