Lots of things are permanent: marker, car-dents, broken glass, and words. Destructive editing? That’s definitely up there too. 

Destructive editing modifies your original image, saves it, and makes it impossible to return to its original state. It’s like spilling wine on a white table cloth, no matter how hard you try it’s never going to be the same, which is why you want to watch out for that. A word of advice, always make sure you’re working on a different layer. 

On the flip side, you know what’s not permanent? Non-destructive editing. That’s what we’re going to focus on, because I would have to be out of my mind if I were to teach you how to destroy perfectly good photos. 

Non-destructive editing allows you to always have the original image intact no matter the changes you make on the other layers, so you always have something to go back to if you make a mistake. There are a couple ways to do this type of operation, such as: duplicating the background layer and working with adjustment layers.

Duplicating the Background Layer

This one is pretty simple and if you don’t know how to do it by now, I suggest you lean into the screen. 
Open up your image in Photoshop, move your mouse controlling the arrow towards the right of your screen to the layers panel and right click on background, then move it down until you find the word duplicate and click one time. Or if you’re lazy like me, you can just click the background and then press Ctrl+J on your keyboard and it will duplicate your layer. It’s much quicker. 

Now, you can use the healing brush, patch tool, any of the marquee tools, whatever you want and you can always go back to your original image. 

Adjustment Layers

Adjustment layers don’t permanently change anything either. They’re also non-destructive. These layers tweak the color and tone of your image. This can be found in the task bar above in window>adjustments. Once the window pops up, you will be met with saturation, brightness, gradients, etc. After that point, all the tools you want are at your fingertips. You can edit without worry.

In the end there are many ways to non destructively edit on Photoshop and by using google and gaining plenty of experience you will find new ways to edit. But, as I explained above and hopefully as you know now, all nondestructive editing is about is working on new layers rather than the image itself. If you haven’t worked with layers it might seem messy, and organizing them into files may not even help but you’ll get used to it.

One day when you make a mistake you’ll be so glad to remove the layer you were working on and not have to worry about your beautiful high definition image getting ruined. You’re welcome!