Techniques - Destructive vs Non-Destructive

In photoshop there are lots of ways to carry out certain tasks, the ones I will mostly be using will be layer masks to blend my images together, I will also be using curves and levels to match the colours and lighting of each image.

The first technique I will be looking at is blending my images together, the two methods I know of is using the eraser tool (destructive) and using layer masks (non-destructive).

Layer Masking:

Layer masking is where a layer mask is placed over the layer then when you paint black the image it masks it out, so when I want to blend my images together I will paint black on the edge of one of the images so that it blends in. Using a layer mask over using the eraser has it benefits, with layer masks you can also paint the image back in if you still have the layer mask separate from the image. As you always have the whole image it makes bringing back any part of the images later a whole lot easier than restarting or bringing back individual pictures.

Erasing:

Using the eraser will literally erase pixels which you cannot get back later so for blending images the layer masking technique works best.




(Destructive) Curves vs (non-destructive) Curves

There are two ways of applying curves, one destructive, one not. The destructive way once applied you cannot go back and change the settings, you have to reapply the adjustment setting again and again and each time you do this you are losing data.

The non-destructive way of doing it is to apply it in the similar way a to a layer mask, doing this however does effect every layer below it, this can easily be changed so it effects only the layer you intend it to.
Using this method means that at any time you can change the settings and every time you back to the curve mask all the original settings will still be there.


There are some times where it is better to use destructive methods instead of non-destructive methods.
When taking the pictures at different positions some points of the image may not match up, I would then have to warp the image to match.

The method i will be using to match my images will be warping which is destructive, each time i warp an image I will lose data so i need to use it in one stroke so that I do not lose to much quality.