Destructive or Not?
Photography is an incredibly creative field, because of its ability to go
anywhere your mind can imagine. Combining the power of a camera and a strong
photo-editing program makes anything possible. The only stop to this infinite creativity
is wrecking the source of your image. If you’ve done something wrong, on the
base file, how can you ever save it?
There are two types of black and
white photography; destructive and non-destructive. Destructive photography
refers to the lack of availability to switch back and forth between monochromatic
and polychromatic scales. When actively shooting with your camera, taking a
destructive photo means that you’ve set your camera to take a black and white
image either with the digital filter or a filter over the lens. In this
situation, all the pictures you take will not be capable of having colors other
than gray. If you take an image with a black and white setting, you will not be
able to post-process them back into color. However, shooting non-destructively
allows for switching between chromatic scales. This means that when taking
pictures, you will be able to later, in post-processing, convert the image to
grayscale or remain in the original polychromatic scale you shot in. This is
why photographers that are unsure of whether the picture will look better in a
mono or polychromatic scale should use the non-destructive method that will
allow for the original image to be in color; leaving two options for a final
product.
Now, in post-processing the same
concepts apply. Destructive and non-destructive image editing are all based
around leaving the backdoor open; the option to have the original image
unaltered, instead of playing with the only form of the image you have.
Advanced photo editing programs allow for layers and masks. I’m going to
describe how these can save you from sure horror. Destructive editing allows
for you to edit an image, in a program, but the technique is to play with the
image itself and nothing more. If it’s a quick adjustment and you know exactly
what you’re doing, editing destructively is perfectly suited. Alas, if you’re a
beginner or a professional editing to create an extensively imaginative work of
art, the image is not guaranteed absolute safety. Imagine, saving a beautiful
typography assignment and spelling something wrong, you only notice it shining
brightly on your photography blog. Rushing back to the JPEG image, you open it
in Photoshop and see to your dismay
that the image is flat and incapable of being altered because you edited
destructively. The style of editing is playing with the original image that’s
been captured with your camera. If you do too much, and do something
incorrectly, you can’t go back and may have even destroyed your beautiful shot
completely. This is why destructive editing is not generally recommended.
On the other hand,
non-destructive editing is the best. This technique employs the use of layers
and masks (among others), which allow you to play with the photo as if you were
affecting the base image, but you’re not! Masks equip you to cut parts of an
image out, without actually cutting them out. It visually shows the cuts but only
when you choose to apply the mask will the missing parts actually be missing.
Duplicating the image in a new layer enables free editing of any sort to that
copy layer, because the original image is still safe and sound.
Editing is an essential part of
photography, but you must acknowledge that messing with an uncopied image is
dangerous because you can really screw things up and not be able to retrace
your steps. Always remember to never alter your original image. Non-destructive
editing is the safest technique, I believe, when it comes to messing with an
image.
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