The Photoshop Productivity Series: The Productive Workflow

Creativity

People often tell me that they’re reluctant to experiment because they might mistake they can’t recover from. My response is, “If you use nondestructive methods, you won’t paint yourself in a corner.” If you use methods such as Smart Filters and lots of layers, you can head down that path of experimentation, knowing that you can get back to square one without any worries.

Yes, there’s the History panel for going back in time. However, the History panel and the associated Step Backwards commands are very linear. This means it’s not very easy to jump back five or six steps to change something without affecting every other subsequent step. Instead, experiment using methods that can be edited.

For example, let’s say you want to see what ...