Photoshop® Elements 7: Top 100 Simplified® Tips & Tricks

Chapter 5. Create Adjustment Layers for Nondestructive Changes

Photoshop Elements is pixel-editing software, designed to work with the pixels of a digital image. This is what you have been doing in the book so far except for your work with the Smart Brush in task #42. One problem with working directly on the pixels of an image is that every time they are changed, there is the potential for the loss of image quality as the pixel data changes. The pixels cannot gain more information, but they can lose it.

You can work on your image without changing any pixels through the use of adjustment layers and layer masks. A lot of photographers who have not used layers panic and do not want anything to do with them. That is a big mistake. Adjustment layers ...