Become A Master in Photoshop with These 4 Constructive Workflows

The constructive workflows shown in this article will strengthen your Photoshop skills. These constructive habits will allow you to speed up your visualisation process, and by default results in clean, organised layers with non-destructive image editing.  

anchor: image editing  

What is Constructive (Non-destructive) editing in Photoshop?

Constructive Photoshop editing allows you to; manipulate images without damaging the original information. The original information remains, in case you want to revert back. Nor does it degrade the quality of the image.  

You need to avoid common deconstructive editing on Photoshop (as such the Eraser tool). As you can prolong, hinder or lose all that lovely hard work. By not being able to revert back to the images original form.

I have included some additional workflows in this article to improve your constructive use of Photoshop even more so. Scroll to find out more!

In this article

1.Clipping Masks

2. Adjustment Layers

3. Layer Comps

4. Artboards

Clipping Masks

Clipping Masks allow you to ‘mask’ out unwanted parts of an image without losing its original information. Therefore, you are able to recover the masked information because it is hidden behind the ‘mask’ not permanently deleted as it would be using the Eraser tool. See the example image on how to use Masks.

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Adjustment Layers

These wonderful little things allow you to edit a selected layer in isolation. For example, you may have just pasted some people onto a new layer, then cut them out using Clipping Masks. However, the people are too bright and do not blend with the scene. To solve this, you simply apply a Brightness/saturation adjustment Layer to the people and adjust the brightness according.  

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 Layer Comps

You are able to save multiple layer combinations using Layer Comps. A good example of this is being able to flick through the phases of a build development and saving out the phases individually. Or having a day and night time version of a scene in the same file and not having to manually turn off and on individual layers. Layer Comps saves the hidden/shown combination for you.

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Artboards

Artboards are such a powerful feature you really should be taking advantage of! It allows you to have multiple pages open in a single file. Therefore, you can view portfolio pages side by side, edit them all at once and export them as individual pages.

 

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