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Day 4: Best Practices II – Working Non-Destructively

welcome back to thirty days of photo shop today we're going to focus on two very important things changing your mind and why and how tow work non destructive and they kind of go hand in hand one of these you'll discover very quickly the more use photo shop is sometimes the best way to do things just to try it and see what happens but you need to be set up in such a way that you're not going to paint yourself into a corner that you can't get out so first we'll talk a little bit about kind of the way you can change your mind from a standpoint of undoing in history and then very quickly I'm going to switch gears and talk about how I would suggest we set ourselves up to work in this non destructive manner now you may have heard that term it's thrown around a lot work non destructively but a lot of people don't actually say why and there's two main reasons why we talked about working on destructively certainly one of them is the ability to change your mind but the other one is the ability t...

o reuse and repurpose stuff you've already done so for example will will look an example of how to add an effect toe one photo in a way that if you down the road decide to use that same effect on a different photo you khun do that very easily by copying what you've already done and then tweaking the end results and that's really much more likely to be possible easily if you work in this non destructive manner but first of all let's talk about changing your mind in photo shop we have one undo but we have multiple abilities to step backwards on some programs called multiple undoes technically in photo shop you're actually stepping back one at a time at any operation you've done here's what I mean so I've got a document open and I mean just grab my pink brush and make my brush bigger and for now I'm just gonna set my default color to black and if I paint and let me quickly add before we go any further I would normally never do this paint right on the background there but for the purpose of demonstration on lee I'm showing you this so you can see how this whole undo step backward things work all right so back to our story here is that one brushstroke and of course if you go the edit menu there's the one that says undo brush tool fair enough what if I do three brush strokes now when I go to undo the brushstrokes and undo the third one and now I own on ly have the option of redoing putting the third one back so how do I go back to the beginning I used step backward so each time I do that's going to go one further step backwards and won and if I keep going far enough it'll go right back to the beginning now if I do that again keeping in mind once again I would not normally do this directly on the layer over here we have this panel called history and it said my work space is one of the little pop up things that I use and here this is a history of what I've done so far first I opened the document then I use the brush tool the brush tool the brush tool so this is exactly the same no as using this command step backward what's happening as I'm stepping backwards stepping backwards stepping backwards was exactly the same thing it's just more visual and the advantage of using the history panel right at this moment is if I want to go all the way back the other direction always put everything back again I could just jump right down to this level here now that appears to be a really good concept that whole step backwards thing but folks here's the reality and that is history is on ly useful while this document is open and that's really really important because I've seen people run into problems because they open a document and think they'll go back to something they did yesterday and it's not there when you close a document you also close the book on the history so the next time you open it the only thing that'll be in the history panel is open you won't see anything else so that's why in a few moments we'll talk about this whole working non destructively concept that's why we do things in that way so that it's like ongoing history it's history that never ends basically the ability to change our mind so back to this for a second you'll notice that at the top of the document is a little thumbnails is called a snapshot this is in the history panel showing me the equivalent of going back to when I open it the reason we would do this I'm going to do a whole bunch of brush strokes to the point where now if I go back in history I can't see anything else this would be the equivalent of saying revert to the saved version so that's one option the other one would be if you don't even have the history panel open this assumes you're working on a document previously saved we always have the option her file of choosing revert now just call revert but you have to imagine it says revert to saved because that's what it'll do it'll revert back to the saved document the last time you say that so if you just opened a brand new document nothing would be there under revert so again history is okay and I don't want spend too much more time on it because honestly I think there's a better way and that's doing things in a non destructive manner thanks to the layers panel now just to put this in perspective here this session is all about working in this non destructive manner and why we should do it and I'm going to show you examples but this is not intended to be time for you to learn how all these things work is right after this class tomorrow there'll be one all about layers and we'll do three separate sessions just on layer so don't go into this with the expectation of writing down all kinds of notes and knowing how to do these things is just to kind of show you the concept of why we worked non destructively setting you up that way because I think as I mentioned one the ways we learn the most about photo shop is by experimenting and it's much easier to experiment if you're setting yourself up for that by the way you create your documents so let's look at a simple example here in that last scenario where I painted one two three if I really wanted to be safe I would have made a new layer and put a want on it and then made another new layer and put a two and put another new layer and put a three then I would save this as ah photoshopped document photoshopped document is rule number one in terms of working non destructively and here's the way it works is very simple if you have layers and again don't worry we'll go more into layers very soon layers are unique to photo shop another well probably better way to say it they don't exist in other formats like jay pick so if I took this document and try to save it as a j peg the only way photoshopped could do that would be by flattening all those layers and they'd be gone so I'll be right back to square one of painting directly on the background layer doing any work directly on the background layer is always something I would consider very carefully now if you had a big speck of dust on the background layer than fine you might want to work directly on there to get rid of it but any time you're building something that has even the remote possibility of you trying to trying something different changing her mind then I would definitely be building with layers and saving out of psd so let's look back here for a second you'll see I'm currently have layers it's automatically know what started as a j peg it's assuming psd watch what happens if I decide I do want to say this is a j pig knows this it'll check box down here that's saying save us layers or save with layers as soon as I picked j peg it says well you can't have layers so it's automatically doing this thing called flatten and I would lose this ability changed my mind so here the difference is very important when I painted on the background layer directly I had that history brush now I got layers so aiken in effect step backwards but the other benefit of this is it's much more non linear in other words if I decide I just don't want the layer with the two on it I can just hide that one and take it out of the mix even though I didn't do it in order and that's one of the many benefits that working with layers gives us so what do we mean by work non destructively well let's talk about that for a second nondestructive really means for the most part layers and to a second degree anything with the word smart innit photo shop has ah whole lunch of functions called smart filters and smart objects which we will talk again and more detail later on throughout the thirty days but getting ourselves to think that way is very important right off the get going to some degree that means anything from how we open the document to how we build things and how we structure the document so let's go and open a document so I'm going to show you an example here of kind of what I would call the old way the more destructive way and then the nondestructive way so let's say for the sake of argument that I want to put a vignette I want to darken the outside edges of this photo well what I would call the old way which still works my new but is very permanent or I should probably not say that it's less flexible really is the important thing so I'm gonna add a new layer and on that new layer I was going to fill it with black so the whole layer turns black and I don't want the whole thing to be black I just want the outer edges so I'm going to take one of my selection tools and again don't worry we'll go through all of these things in more detail later and in this case particularly don't worry about it because this is the old way we don't want to use but if I simply press the delete key right now you see it has a very hard ed so I'm going to press undo go back that one step and one of things in photoshopped into is a function called feather now the problem with feathering is there's it's really guesswork there's no preview you can't really tell what gonna do there's no guidelines he just pick a number like fifty and then when you press ok you'll see that what were very sharp corners now look round of us so I can't really tell what I get until I press delete and then I can d select and there's my vignette effect now because on a layer I could alter it slightly but things I can't easily alter and this is again very important is I can't easily change how much the feathering is at this point at least so if there's anything about this I don't like that maybe I look at it and I say I wish I had made the opening smaller or I wish I had feathered it more this is where I'd have to either use the history panel or step backward step backward step backward step backward right to this point to be ableto feather and that's why this type of method although it works is a little clumsy and b it's kind of hard edited after the fact and as we'll see in a moment when I show the alternative it's also hard to reuse this on another photograph unless is exactly the same size so let's do this let's just get rid of this layer completely and I'll show you the alternate way that I would use again recognizing that my intention here is not to teach you everything about things like adjustment layers it's just to get us started so I'm gonna add an adjustment layer called curves and all I'm going to do here is drag this triangle straight down to the point where it looks like it's filled with black so at this point it has the same effect of looking like it's filled with black but I've done it in a way that as we'll see is much more editable now I'm going to make a selection and this is the area that I don't want to be black now this part is going to throw you off a little bit frankly because until we learn about what layer mass do this is kind of a mysterious thing so just bear with me at this point even though it might kind of might kind of find yourself going say what now don't worry about that because this again tensions to show you the difference between destructive and non destructive so for now just take my word for it that if I fill that area on the layer mass with black it has the desired effect except it's not a soft edge well I can do that again interactively member per previously I used the commander called feather but it was with my selection that was fairly permanent here I have feather on a slider so as I move it two different amounts I can decide what I want so at this point one of the important things to note and this is a definitely of what would the world be a hallmark maybe of working on destructively is any time you're working somewhere in photo shop and you don't see on ok button that means it's not destructive let's look back at this example I just move the feather up to what is that sixty five I did not click okay I just leave it that way so now when I go back to my layers that's the effect that I want I save it as a psd I won't actually bother but let's pretend I did and I come back a month later and I look at this and I go it's not bad but I want to alter its slightly all I have to do is go back to this properties and there's feather right where I left and I think they're feathered even mohr or much less so that part is completely editable because I didn't click okay to make it permanent also I could go back to the original curve and say maybe I went a little too dark and as I move this back up you see it's lightning it so I can make it a lot more of a subtle effective I want and just toe throw it all into the mix this mask thing that we're going to talk about in more detail later on is just another object so I can use a command like free transform and decide I want to make it even smaller and have the vineyard effect that way so nothing about this is in any way permanent I could edit how dark it is through curves like an edit how soft the edges through that feather slider and I can even change the size of the shape completely and the recurring theme here is as long as I say this is a psd file so let's assume I say this is a psd now then that means that going forward I'm able to use this another document so let's open some other document I deliberately pick one that's not even the same kind of size and all I need to do is take my move tool again all of these things will become clearer as we go this is sort of our overview I'm going to drag this effect onto the other tab and it comes in and right now it looks pretty good except my vignette thing isn't avery good shape so I would go back to this free transform command and now I could alter this in any way that I want decide I wanted say this big hit enter and then go back to our properties and play around with the feather amount and go back to curse and make it darker or lighter or whatever I want so even though this particular effects start on a different document that was a very different size it was tall vs wide it doesn't really matter because thie effect is completely editable everything about it is done in such a way that I can change it and that's kind of the idea to begin with about working non destructively so that's kind of step number one all right and I keep repeating myself here but it's important to remember that a lot of things I want to show you are things that we'll see in more detail as we go so one of things will be talking about a whole lot is camera raw and this is again not intended to be a full introduction to camera but to talk about how useful it is from a non destructive nature now in photo shop cc it's been taken up even a notch further but even in photo shop cia six and previous versions there's a way we can incorporate camera raw very easily and let me show you what I mean by that so I'm going to just open a raw file and first of all let me put this back the way it normally looks in photo shop so let's get this to a good size all right so I'm going to make an adjustment and for the purpose of demonstration I'm going to over adjust it so I'm going to go one way the other too much to the point where I'm getting bad stuff happening deliberately trying to go over the top so you can see normally when you work with a raw file at this point I would click open image once I do that it opens in photoshopped with all those settings on it and I always like to say at this point the end meaning at this point you can if you want to edit any of those camera settings really your only choice would be to close this document and start over again and that's the way it worked for the longest time was kind of like a one way street from camera aw two photo shop and if you want to change it oh well the good news is now there is a way to change it so you open your raw file an in camera at the very bottom in what I really feel is not perhaps the best interface design ever made there's this little almost was like a hyperlink at the bottom and if I click on that I don't know why this is not called workflow options by the way because that's what it is when you click on it it opens this dialog box with some very important settings including things like what color space is it bit depth and you can even resize it here it's saying this was a ten megapixel file but I could re size it to a particular size I can even do some sharpening but what we really want talk about right now is this very important check box has opened and photoshopped as smart objects now I gotta be honest when first time I saw this I thought that's weird how could they make a typo because how can I open this one document as smart objects plural but then I realized this is workflow options which is like you're saying from now on always open every camera raw file into photo shop as this thing called a smart object and frankly I would do that I would keep that on ninety nine point nine percent of the time there's very few times I wouldn't use this but I want to at least show you the benefit of doing this why we do this so I'm gonna click that little check box and click okay the good news is on from now on and there's a subtle change but down here it now says open object instead of open image so let's click that it still applies those settings and still opens in photo shop but if we look at our layers panel there's a very subtle change that's happened if you look more closely you can see there's a little symbol on the bottom right hand corner of my layer thumbnail no longer says background it has this little smart object indicator and really what that means is I can still do things to this like I normally wouldn't photoshopped example I start to transform and rotate it and maybe add some effects in photo shop and then I suddenly look at it go I think I went a little too much it's a little too the exposure's old too high back to camera so it's created a two way street back and forth so now I khun adjust whatever I want in terms of getting this look the way I really want and open up the shadows and put the exposure will hire in the contrast whatever you want there's a hole a bunch of options of course this is just the very basic tab that I'm starting with but including things like vibrance and saturation and clarity and all that good stuff and again I'm deliberately kind of go a little too much you can see soon as I click okay it jumps back to photoshopped and it updates whatever I did before is still there but now it's updated the raw file now this has some very very interesting possibilities because first of all here's a simple example when we talk about making adjustments later on throughout this course I'll talk about things like adjustment layers and how they work and things like that but honestly cameras easier a lot of the time for example if you just want to brighten up a photograph many times caesar and camera to move that exposure slider versus trying to figure out the multiple different ways you can do it in photoshopped uh clarity is a good example where right now there's no really easy way to change clarity and photo shop but because we have this link to camera we can change it there and any time you're making changes and again not clicking ok to me this opens up some possibilities for example maybe I want to work on a part of this image I'm trying to identify it so I double click and go back to camera raw and I deliberately change the exposure dramatically because really maybe I wanna work on the sky so right now I'm making crazy changes that you normally wouldn't if I was clicking okay but in this case I'm clicking ok to say for now bring it back to photoshopped this is not a permanent okay this is update more than it is okay so you saying apply changes so when I click okay it goes back to photo shop now I could do whatever I want to win photoshopped like used my selection tool to select the sky let's just do that really quickly see I've got a nice little selection of the sky and we'll just pretend it looks great and now I double click to go back to cameron's okay let me put this back to the default settings and then once again kind of play with it the way I want it and when I click okay it's gonna update but preserved the work I done in for osha so this is one of the reasons for working non destructively is it's easier to do certain work I noticed people all the time that our working in photo shop and they're trying to make a really subtle change to something so for example they make an adjustment that's very subtle and then try to paint it in somewhere using this thing called a mask and they're struggling because really hard to see what they're doing so my suggestion is make it easier overdo it deliberately like we just did here in camera raw temporarily and that's key is I've got it set up in such a way it's a temporary change not a permanent one so this way I could make the change do the work I need to make a selection to whatever it is and then when I'm ready jump back to camera on this case to edit the changes let's look at another example of doing the same kind of thing let's just go back to this one and let's say for the sake of argument that I want to attempt to change the color of this flag a little bit well again there's various ways to do that but I would tend to start with something like on adjustment layer like hugh saturation the problem is when you do that initially it's going to change the hue of the entire thing so if that's gonna happen maybe I want to make a subtle shift in this flag but to make sure I'm doing it right I'm going to make a really over the top change initially now of course we're gonna talk about adjustment layers and mass in more detail later on but in a nutshell here's how layer mask works when the layer mask is white that means everything is revealed so in this case the adjustment I made is affecting the entire photograph anywhere right paint with black I'm gonna say don't affect that area so let's look at this document it actually there's only a few areas I really want to effect so what actually make better sense if are to take this image or this mask and inverted so it's filled with black now initially that means I've made an adjustment but you can't see it because the adjustment lairs filled with black and we'll look at this and more details away that a lot of people work now I switch to my paintbrush and wherever I paint with white I'm revealing the effects of this adjustment so if I zoom in closer and I will do this fairly quickly just for the sake of argument this is by the white way we're having a tabal like a walk him is so much easier for a detail work as I'm just sort of changing varying the pressure of how hard I press to get this filled in and we'll just do this part really quickly just to show you but this is what I was referring to before when I said the problem is many people spend way too much time trying to make a subtle change and they can't really tell where they got the whole thing because I'm temporarily in this horrible fluorescent green ish kind of thing going on I can clearly see are there areas that I need to effect again I'm just burying the pressure slightly to get these areas I went a little too far there solicitous that now imagine trying to do this if all I was doing was making us such a subtle change that I couldn't see the effect here I can very easily see where I need to make change so eventually what I end up with is this layer mask is filled with white where I want the effect to be shown and black everywhere else because all you're alone effect is thie flag but don't really want it to be fluorescent green so at this point I go back to the adjustment layer and say all right let's put it it wass lets go back to zero that's where it was I want to change it like maybe that much so a very subtle change but much easier to do because I allowed myself to say let me temporarily make it look ridiculously over the top so it's easier to see what I'm doing and that's another example of this hole why we worked non destructively is one of my favorite phrases and you'll hear me say this probably again multiple times you haven't guessed already I tend to repeat myself to make sure you're getting the point one of my favorite phrases in photo shop is end up with I want to end up with the flag looking the color that I want but it's such a subtle shift that instead of me deciding well I guess I'll better zoom in really close and spend two hours hoping it's looks good I'm going to deliberately go over the top pick some horribly fluorescent color that stands out like a sore thumb makes my life so much easier to see what I'm doing when I'm painting on the mask in this particular case and then once I finished I put it back the other way and this applies in lots of different things I could do the same thing where let's pick a different photograph actually let's uh use this one I'm just gonna open this directly in tow photoshopped unless I want to darkened parts of this photograph so same kind of ideas we did before with that been yet effect but a slight variation I'm going to go to curves and I'm going to darken the whole photograph really dramatically then once I've done that I can say okay but there are parts of this that I don't want to be so dark like the couple here ashleigh and nick so I'm gonna make my brush just a little bit bigger perhaps and I've got a softer edge going on and then and I'm doing this is gonna look really awkward at first because all I'm trying to do is just say rough in say these areas here I don't want to be so dark again all my only goal here is to kind of be saying this is the idea of what I want and you have to get used to the fact that initially it's gonna look bad it's gonna look really weird I mean that just looks like really bad photo shop job at this point but that's okay because remember when I moved that curve down to that part I did not at any point click okay to make it permanent so at this point say well I think that's looking pretty good but there's probably some gaps in here and I can fix those later on but the main point is now I can go back to the curves and have it like this so it still looks a little obvious so probably go back and maybe make it quite so dark and the other option I could do at this point is to take that mask that I created and feather to soften the edges even more so once we've done all that now let's look at the difference so once again that's an example where in my mind I'm thinking I want to end up with the background looking darker but I don't wantto have tto make a decision right away about how much darker so I deliberately kind of go way overboard so I can see what I'm doing and then pull it back by either making further adjustment to the curves in this case and or softening the edge of the mask all those kind of things however you do this it really just means that I'm setting myself myself up to be easy to make things easier so here again I would say this is a psd now here's a little side tip that I would suggest you if you're working on making a fairly significant change like this like darkening up part of a photograph won the challenge is is if you stare at an image for too long honestly you just get to the point of going I'm I can't make a decision anymore because I my eyes are tired of looking at the same thing so my suggestion would be say this is a psd close it work on something else for a while then open it back up and look at it with kind of fresh eyes and off when you do that you'll realise that even noticed that over here and I do just this but least you are set up to do that because of this nondestructive way of working so again non destructive means saving as psd and preserving as many layers as you might want I tend to keep all my layers for the most part so let's just add some text here that's another part of non destructiveness is the text is a separate layer so let's talk about a couple things that you might be tempted to do but are what I would call the enemies of working not destructively so at a certain point for example you may say okay well I I like the way this is looking actually let me do it this way maybe so it'll be easier to see I'm gonna cut this out of here and make a separate type player just so you can see what I've got going on here and I have two separate type players and at a certain point the temptation might be to say well now that I like the way those look I don't want those to be two separate layers anymore I want to put them into one when you have type players you want to keep them as type players assumes you convert them into something else you lose the ability to edit the type so for example if I decided to choose these two layers here and then use a command called merge the good news is now it's one layer the horrible news is I can edit it anymore because it's no longer type so to me that would be a really bad decision and honestly is there any reason to make those two type players into one I can't think of one because I can still edit them even okay they're two separate layers there are also things you could do to make life simpler for example may be the reason you think you want to merge these two layers together so you can treat them as if it's one layer will a simple way to do that is now at the bottom here we can click on the link symbol and now that means whichever type player I click on they'll both move together so that eliminates the need to merge them and preserves the ability for me to edit the contents of the type so merging is something that I would say there are few times we want to do it but not that many often the comment I hear people say as well I felt like I ain't emerged my layers because the document was getting so big you know there are so many layers and really the on ly downside of having lots of layers as your file size might get a little bigger and to me I can live with that I'd much rather have a bigger file size and all this edit ability then suddenly decide six months from now oops I wish I hadn't merge those layers and lost the ability edit the type so now having said that if you run into some situation where you have so many layers in such a big file that you run into problems where photo shop can't operate okay that's different but on a day to day basis don't let the file size be the reason why you your emerging layers so even further up the scale of bad things to do in photo shop is a command called flatten image and I only semi jokingly refer to this as photo shops f word it's bad don't use it because here's what it does it takes all those layers and flattens them all and they're all gone and why would we do this well the reason some people tell me they do it is because in their mind they're thinking wanting to make a jpeg file so it needs to be flat almost true but a very important difference I'm gonna undo that very quickly and I already kind of alluded this before I would have already saved this is a psd file so now I need to maybe make a j peg to give to them well rather than using the flattened command here which has the danger of me saving it by mistake I'm going to go to save as I showed you before it assumes photo shop but if I want to make it a j peg and automatically removes the layers so going save as and then picking j peg automatically means a couple things were happening you're flattening it and you're saving the file format so this way you have your psd master file which is the one we work on all the time you're saving as the j pick and the j peg is your and I always like to do a quote final version because it's not really fine but the j peg is the one you give to your clients then if they come back and say wow we love that but can you make the type white you say certainly and you go back to your psd master file edited and then save another j pick so when I look at a folder on my hard drive when I see psd files that makes me happy because that usually suggests I have a master file with multiple layers and kind all kinds of things that I can edit my whole non destructive file if you will so the way I work and I would suggest you consider this is very often I take photos I shoot in raw format because I love working in camera so if I were to look inside a folder I'd see a whole bunch of raw originals I'd see psd versions and they're called whatever the name of the file dot psd that I know just at a glance is my layered photoshopped master file and then often I have a folder called finals I don't put the quotes on them but I know they're in quotes because those finals I know could be edited anytime so that way I have j pays to give to my client or for me to use for whatever purpose on my web page whatever it is I have the psd file with all the layers and I even have the original raw file of I need to go back to that level to add it so that's a huge ability for me to do things in a way that I know I'm never going to be stuck now the question that usually comes up at this point is could you save a tiff file and still preserve all the layers and technically the answer is yes you can however and it's just perhaps it's only my mind that works this way here's my fear if I looked in a folder and I see a file it's called dot psd I know it has layers because that's just the way I save my layered files if I see a file says dot t I f it might have layers but it might not and that worries me because I'd hate to send a tiff file to someone thinking I was saying them a flat document like a tiff and all of sudden they couldn't open it because it had layers so although technically it's easy to argue that tiff is justus good or in some ways better than a psd file I tend to use psd files because for that very simple reason I know psd files have layers tiff mayor may not now if I'm working with on organization says please send us a finished tiff file then that's what I would send my final version is as a tiff out but I know I still have that layered version now a couple of other little important things here speaking in other terms of the enemies of working non destructively I'm going too add a new layer and on here I'll just make a box and I'm just gonna fill it with something let's just use white okay all right so we'll put it here now I decide at some point that there are parts of this that I don't want now I could on this layer take the eraser tool and their race or tool as the name suggests lets me let's go into our little checklist thing that was my bad cause family always check first I could a race part of this layer to get this effect right here going on this edge and all of sudden I've taken this little box and made into some cool little shape however when you use the eraser those pixels air now gone they're deleted so if I were to say this even though I have a layer which is a good start I've deleted some of that information now I guess you could say if you're really certain you don't want something you can erase it and honestly occasionally that many times I erase it because I just know I won't need it but you know what even when I raise something a little voice in my head is going you sure you want to raise that so I'm going to step backwards enough times to not do that and this is where once again I would use a layer mask because a layer mask allows me to do the equivalent of a racing at least visually it looks like I've erased all that information but if I make a really bad mistake all it really is is this black and white mask that I can always reverse even three weeks from now history wouldn't help me through it so now but a layer mask would so please don't worry if layer masks are still kind of this mysterious thing if you haven't played with him too much or don't get them yet because again we will be talking about that believe me it's ok it's little call come together and we'll make perfect sense but for now when we're deciding how should I do things this is the decision you have to make can I race you could but just keep in mind are racing means you're in in that potential area of painting yourself into a corner where many steps later go oops I wish I hadn't done that and it's too late you can't undo twenty seven times or maybe you saved enclosed it yesterday and all that history is gone so here's something that I put together has kind of actually open it in photo shops you can see it probably better made a whole series of little postcards and this is one of them when I called the five forbidden few fruits of photoshopped merge a race flatten delete and rast arise now we talked about merging and flattening both of those or bad we just talked about a racing the leading is kind of the same thing so if I when here on let's pretend that back at this step I just decided I was going to take for example my lasso tool and just select an area of that layer and hit delete that's effectively the same thing as a racing so I just basically removed those pixels so deleting in that sense is also not such a good thing because it's fairly permanent and the other one is rast arised when I merge the layers before it had to rest arise but what is this thing called rast arise now if I unlinked this layer and let's say for the sake of argument that I decide I want to add a filter to this to add some of fact maybe add some I don't know let's just add some noise it's going to tell me this type player must be rast arised before proceeding I believe this part should be flashing in red it's text will no longer be editable and it's actually prompting me to click okay look that little button is glowing going go ahead click me well here's what happens when you do is yeah now I can add the noise but once again I have lost the ability to edit the type so if we undo that a better option which will again talk about later is called convert for smart filters and what that does it allows me to do the rough equivalent of rast arising but with an ability to come back and edit the type which is very important so anywhere where you see it you might right click on something and choose rast arise or see it under the type menu resist the temptation don't do it sues you rass arise the type you've lost a ble to edit and I can tell you right now many people have said oh I know that's the right type of do you really is it possible that it might change particularly work with clients it's it's very important but if you're experimenting on your own I hate toe limit myself by saying yep that looks perfect I'm gonna rast arise it because honestly you don't need to anymore when we talk about smart objects and smart filters you'll see it's really the way to go because everything about it is editable so you can take type and you can stretch it and pull it and add effects to it but underlying it is still the original type so the difference between editing our rations say different rast arising which is very permanent and smart smart filters which is very flexible that's another example of our whole nondestructive way of working so as you're working away in photo shop if at any point you're tempted to do any of these merge a race flatten delete grassed arise think twice they're usually lots of occasions where almost every situation you could figure out some other way to do it other than these now let's talk about this for one more second because I tend to say things like never flatten and always and be very dramatic and hold that kind thing but it's really to get you thinking that at least you make considerations before you're too quick to flatten things so do I ever emerge layers occasionally do I ever flattened things actually probably not but I do save a flattened version all the time so that whole savings psd and save a copy that's flatten yes definitely but we'll be times where you'll just say it's quicker to a race will be times where it's quicker to say work on the background layer sure no question about it but I want to plant the senior head to atleast think very carefully before you two quickly jump into the eraser and deleting and rast arising because there will be times where you'll go gosh darn it all I wish I hadn't done that so that's why I'm kind of planting the seed in your head now as I said that it reminded me of one other thing and I kind of mentioned it in passing but let's close a couple of these documents I'm just closing and not savings I don't need a save version of all these things let's just get one other while open here sees this one now when you open a normal file that's not like starting in camera rethink it has background and that has this padlock symbol well that's a misleading symbol because that implies this layer called background is locked but it really isn't it's really just locked from a moving standpoint in other words if I take my move tool and I try to move it is going to say can't do it because the layer is locked but as we saw the beginning if I take my paintbrush there's certainly nothing to stop me from painting on it so it's not locked from that perspective it's just saying locked from a moving standpoint so what many people do is when they first opened a document one of the first things they do is duplicated press commander control j or use one of the other methods to duplicate and that's fine I'm going to show you a method shortly and one of our other classes on smart objects that I would frankly use instead but at least this is giving me a back up plan so now if I do some work directly on this layer and then realized later on I wish I hadn't done that at least I have the original background to go back to and that's the way I used to always work was duplicate the background layer now instead I tend to use another method more often not which is called convert to a smart object so we'll touch on that very soon in a couple of classes from now but again that what I'm really trying to point I'm really trying to make here if it's already not obvious hopefully is set yourself up for doing things in a nondestructive way for a couple of those important reasons one is to be able to change your mind but the other is to be able to make your life easier so that example of trying to mass something it's really hard to see overdo it mask it and then pulled back or the other example where you create some really nice effect and you want to use it on other documents it's much easier to do that if you can drag something over and just tweak it instead of starting from scratch every time all right so in this case I don't really have any specific assignment for you other than start looking at the way tools work and as every time you're working on some project from here on in even if I don't specifically say it although I probably will start thinking about ways that you khun always be thinking non destructively so for example if you start to adjust in image and this is just a plant one will see it in your head of things we'll talk about all of these menus under the image adjustment menu are quite permanent because for example levels I make an adjustment and I am forced to click okay which means I have just altered the pixels on this image if I undo that and use an adjustment layer called levels it looks exactly the same but first falls over the side making my life easier but the other thing is there's no ok button so all that happens is I just leave it there and my original is untouched and I can change it as long as I save it as what right a psd file because we have to always be saving psd files to preserve it so again moving forward from today every time you're starting some project in photo shop including the ones that I give you our stuff you're doing on your own think about can I do this in such a way to make my life simpler by building something in this whole nondestructive way we'll see you tomorrow