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Non-Destructive Editing

Lesson 13 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

13. Non-Destructive Editing

Mark explains the difference between destructive and non-destructive editing. You will learn why it’s best to edit non-destructively as much as possible.
Next Lesson: Working with Layers

Lesson Info

Non-Destructive Editing

So, what we're gonna do here is we have this image of Karen and I wanna convert this to black and white. So I can go to image, well I need to click on that. Image adjustments and there's all these adjustments that I can make here. Now, just so you know, these adjustments are destructive. These are destructive things. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna change this image to a black and white image by saying image adjustments, black and white. And then it's gonna ask me for a black and white mix. So how am I gonna adjust that? I'll say, okay, now this image is black and white but if I saved it and I wanted to go back to the color image, I can't. I have destroyed all of the color information. It's not there. The history palette is gonna be wiped out. So I can't undo it there. It's forever black and white. I don't wanna do that, that's destructive editing. So what I'm gonna do is use the history palette to go back to the beginning of this edit. And instead of using the image adjustments ...

I'm gonna use something that we're gonna learn about a little bit later called an adjustment layer. So I can go down here to the lower right hand corner. There's this little half circle here, half moon and I can click on this and say black and white. Again, I get the same exact dialogue box. I can make the same exact adjustments, and then it's done. Now, if I want to save this, it will save just like it is. And you'll see over here, we have two different layers. And then if I in the future, think, you know I'd really like to have that to be color. Well, I can, I can undo that change that I made. It's non-destructive. So there are all kinds of techniques that allow us to change our images and then anytime in the future into infinity if we wanna undo those, we can. And so as much as possible, if there's a choice to do something destructively or non-destructively we always want to choose the non-destructive edit. So in the future, we can change things any way we want. And speaking of changing things any way we want, one of the most powerful features for non-destructive editing and other types of editing in Photoshop are layers.

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