Chapter 6. Nondestructive Overall Adjustments

The workflow organization of this book is about maintaining nondestructive editing in as many ways as possible for as long as possible. So when it comes to making post-RAW or non-RAW overall adjustments, you want to start by doing them with adjustment layers. That's because an adjustment layer doesn't actually do anything at all to the image itself. The adjustment layer simply passes on a text description to Photoshop to display the image in certain ways. You can even go back to that layer and change those instructions at any time. But, you say, what about all the ImageAdjustments commands that are not available as adjustment layers?

Adjusting on Adjustment Layers

Once you've done your spot retouching and lightened or darkened (burned and dodged with the 50 percent gray layer), it's time to adjust your image. You'll probably want to make adjustments at this stage, whether you're working on top of adjustments you've already made in Camera Raw or starting from scratch, because your camera shot a JPEG or TIFF image. Also, if you made adjustments in Camera Raw, you'll be happy to know that there are even more overall adjustments that can be done only in Photoshop. This chapter only discusses the adjustments that can be done on adjustment layers because they are completely nondestructive. In Chapter 12, I'll show you how to make destructive adjustments on a separate layer.