Chapter 5. Nondestructive Layering

The secret to a good nondestructive workflow lies in a regular system of organizing layers and layering techniques. The objective of keeping the workflow layered is that individual layers can be modified without affecting other layers. One type of layers, Adjustment layers, are completely nondestructive. You can always readjust an adjustment layer's effect as long as it hasn't been blended with another layer by double-clicking on the icon that designates its adjustment type. When you do that, the standard dialog for that type of adjustment appears. Adjustment layers affect all visible portions of any underlying layers. You can also make them affect only a specific layer or group of layers by attaching them as a Clipping Mask to the target layer or group.

Adjustment Layers: The Key to the Nondestructive Workflow

This chapter is about how certain types of layers should be ordered and how you can use them to track exactly what you've done to your image. I'm not going to break down all the individual tricks that could be used on each of these layer types right here. This chapter covers the rationale for why the layers are placed in this order.

This seems to be the best place to objectively address a problem that many users have with using "too many" layers: use of disk space and RAM. Let's face it, some of your images will be approaching 300 or 400 MBs by the time they near the end of the nondestructive workflow recommended in this book. But there are several solutions to this problem, including:

• Add a cheap external hard drive to your setup. Buy the capacity of drive that will give you the lowest cost per megabyte. These days, it is about 30 cents per megabytethe cost of a single CD.

• Create a LZW compressed and flattened version of the final image and let that be the only one that is permanently kept on your hard drive. To do this, copy the layered file and move it to both CD/DVD and to an external hard drive. If you can't yet afford the hard drive, at least make the backup to a name brand CD/DVD and mark it with an acid-free marker. Don't use a standard marker or store your CDs in albums that haven't been certified as acid-free or archival.

NOTE

Although it's good discipline to arrange your Photoshop editing workflow in the suggested order on the layers as they appear in the book, you do have the option of performing the work for a layer out of necessity and then moving it to its "proper" position later. After all, there will be times when you need to do the work that creates the most obvious results first to turn an image around as quickly as possible.