Ever edit a photo, save, and then decide you don’t like the edits you made? To avoid starting over, create an empty layer in Photoshop and make your edits on top of that.
Even the beginner Photoshop user has likely endured making an editing mistake the undo button won’t fix. Use empty layers with tools like cloning, healing, patching and content-aware moving to avoid these mistakes.
Just create an empty layer and enable the tool to edit multiple layers. Here’s how:
- Select the tool you want to use.
- In the options bar, check the “Sample All Layers” checkbox, or — depending on the tool — set the Sample menu to “Current & Below” or “All Layers”.
Now when you make a mistake, you can delete the empty layer and start fresh with a new one. Use several empty layers instead of one to make your edits. Think of it as saving a new word document so you don’t save over your current one: when you make an edit you want to keep, protect it by making another new layer for your next edits.
9 mistakes you’re making in Photoshop [Macworld]
Comments
One response to “Make Photoshop Edits In Empty Layers Instead Of Existing Ones”
The most important thing Photoshop users need to learn if they are serious, and also want to create non-destructive edits (ie with less undo problems like mentioned) – learn to use masking.
This is pretty basic stuff, and for the record, the history menu is a much better way to go than the undo button..!