Photoshop Tips & Tricks: Image Editing

I remember taking my VCR (yeah, it was that long ago) into my local repair shop and seeing a funny sign on the wall that listed the shop’s hourly rates. It read, “Basic rate: $25/hour. If you watch: $50/hour. If you’ve already tried to fix it yourself: $100/hour.”

In my line of work, sometimes clients will give me a CD or thumb drive with photos that they want to use in their project. I open up an image, and see that they’ve already done some editing to it that makes the photo difficult to use, if it’s usable at all. Then I ask them the million-dollar question: “Do you have the original?”

You’d be amazed at how many times I see that deer-in-headlights look when they tell me that this was the original. I want to look back at them and tell them, “Well, you’re ruined the picture. I can’t do anything with it now. Thanks for playing.” Of course, I don’t tell them that, because, well, I have a little more tact than that (usually), and because I still want their money and telling them what an idiot they are isn’t generally a good way to retain business. So, I find a way to work around the mess they made.

I say this now as a relatively seasoned Photoshop veteran; I’ve been working with Photoshop since about 2002. I taught myself the program from the ground up (actually, I’m still learning—Photoshop is a deep program), and I’ve made a metric boatload of noob mistakes along the way. All this brings me to the point of this post: Never edit the original photo. Never. Ever. For any reason.

The earliest iterations of Photoshop (prior to 3.0) didn’t have layering capabilities, so nondestructive editing was only possible by making a copy of the original file and editing the copy. It’s still not a bad idea; just a couple of weeks ago, I accidentally flattened an image I was working on and saved it that way. Fortunately, it wasn’t the original.

Anyway, now that Photoshop has layering capability (as well as adjustment layers as of version 4), there is no longer any reason to edit the original. Here are a few tips you can use to make your life a little easier and avoid pulling some hair out.

Adjustment layers are your friend.

When making color corrections or other adjustments to your image, you might want to do it by means of the Image > Adjustments menu. Be warned, however, that those commands will destructively edit your image. If you get out beyond the reach of your history steps, you may find yourself stranded. Instead, consider using an adjustment layer. These do the same jobs as the menu commands, but they do it non-destructively. The added benefit of using adjustment layers is that you can dial in their intensity by using layer opacity, and you can also use the layer they’re affecting as a layer mask.

Don’t erase it, mask it.

If you need to remove part of an image (such as taking out the background), folks who are new to Photoshop are often tempted to reach for the Erase tool. Here again, it’s a destructive editing tool; you can’t put back what you remove if you run out of undos. A better option is to use a layer mask. Once the mask is in place, your foreground and background colors will switch to black and white. At that point, any black you paint on the mask will hide that portion of the image, and any white will bring it back. The advantage of this method is that if you accidentally get rid of something you wanted to keep, you can just paint it back in by switching your foreground color to white.

Ultimately, as creative as you might be, you’re still human. Sometimes you make mistakes. In other cases, you might be following a creative urge that turns out to be a dead end, and if you’ve been destructively editing, you may very well find yourself stuck. In addition, you have no way of knowing whether the image you’re editing today might be needed for another application tomorrow. If you commit your edits and make them permanent, it might be useless for anything else.

Well, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and happy Photoshopping!