Non Destructive Vs Destructive.

I will now will be looking at Destructive and Non Destructive methods and how they both work and the positives and negatives of these methods. 


Layer Masks:

First of all i want to look at the non destructive method called Layer Masking because this is the best way of going at any project because with this method you can easily go back to the original when ever you want if you decide what you've done isn't what you really want or if you make mistakes at any point. 

This above is the window that is shown when you want to use the layer mask tool, this is easy because it lets you see clearly the other layer (which is the layer mask) and you can swap between the original and the edited layer very easily. They are also linked together so that it effects it well but you can hide it and see the original underneath. The way that the layer mask works is that you paint black and white on the image and this blends the two together, so if you paint white you paint transparency and if you paint black you bring the image back to it's original state.


The opposite and the destructive method to this is the simple eraser tool which once you have passed the undo stages you can't bring back what you erased so this method is only good for simple things in which you want to completely get rid of and don't want it back, if you was to use the eraser all the time you would need to regularly save your work so you could bring it back to it's original state. 




Curves (non-destructive and destructive):


The first one i will look into is the Non-Destructive method because this is again the best way of going about adding it because you can go back and change the effect at any time of your project which is good because as you add more images there exposure and there content can change meaning there might need to brighter sky ect. 

The above is the curves window which is where you add the curves to the image that you are wanting to do, when you bend the line up it makes the image darker and as you bend it down it makes it lighter but you can add points and make the tones higher and lower. But when you just add the curves to the layers but if you hold Alt + Click you then only add it to the layer which is directly below the curves effect. 

The destructive method for this is really simple, you just go into the adjustments panel and choose curves or just use the short cut Cmd + M to make it appear. 

Above is the steps that you take to find the Curves adjustment, but with this method once you've added the effect to the layer you can't go back and change it meaning you would have to re-add the effect again but the more you do it the more you loose the image quality. 

Stitching my images together is made up of these effects and now when creating them i will make something that will be neat and tidy, and if i can keep it to the non - destructive methods because i can always change it.