I was surfing this morning through my favorite design blogs, when I stumbled onto this wonderful tutorial at gimp-tutorials.net. It’s a great tutorial, as are the tens of tutorials that I read every day, but this particular tutorial spurred me to write about one of the biggest boons to my design carreer – the concept of non-destructive editing.

Non-destructive editing, as the name implies, means editing that does not alter the original work. The payoff to us is that it is work that can be undone or change, and redone. The most basic delivery of non-destructive editing may be the simple addition of layers. Instead of drawing a black line directly on the digital image, forever obliterating those sacred pixels which once there resided, one might create a new layer and draw the black line on that which can now be removed, changed, or made invisible, all the while leaving the original image unaltered.

Here’s the rub though. Non-destructive editing takes more time, more finesse, and more creativity, than does its ruthless counterpart. Most of the time it’s not as reflexive as adding a new layer, nor as obvious. Take for example a simple size change. Objective: Remove red-eye from a digital portrait and downsize it to be sent quickly in an email. Once you have removed the red eye and you approach the home stretch it might be easy to simple go for the image size adjustment, save it the size you need and leave. However you would have perpetrated an enormous blunder. The proper procedure would be to edit the red-eye (hopefully with layers), save that project (layers and all), shrink, save as a copy, and then decline to save changes to the original. In this way, you have retained maximum raster data at minimal cost, in fact only the tiny bits of time, mental focus, and hard-drive space (for which prices are currently free-falling nearly through the floor). Now I would hope that the benefits are self-evident, but maybe are not convinced… What if you decide after all that you left a distracting and now illegible billboard blob in the background? What if you decide you made it too small to be printed at 5×7 size? Now these minimal costs seem like a bargain when your data is lost. Hopefully you saved the original, so you can repeat all your editing to get it just right. And this was an incredibly mundane example. Imagine your examples, your logo, your website, your business cards. Non-destructive editing should be a constant pursuit for anyone who works with pictures.

Fortunately for us, non-destructive editing is the way of the future. Things like layers, adjustment layers, layer masks, layer properties, blending options, layer styles, smart objects, and paths all make it easier to change your mind. So next image you are working on try to do one extra thing in a non-destructive way, and then make it two… It will change your editing world.