Tools and Techniques

It should be clear after reading this chapter that knowing how a particular sharpening or smoothing tool works is only part of the answer. Learning to work with layers and masks provides you with much more control and flexibility than is attainable when you simply use the tools to burn changes into the pixels of a flattened image.

But as we all know, there's no such thing as a free lunch, and the downsides of doing everything on layers are that the files become very large, and also very complex. If you plan to leave the layers intact for maximum flexibility, name them in a way that you know will make sense to you several years hence. Otherwise you'll find yourself spending considerable amounts of time just figuring out what each layer does when you come to revisit the image.

In the next chapter, Putting the Tools to Work, I'll show you how to assemble the techniques covered in this chapter into a compete start-to-finish sharpening workflow.