Seven Words You Can Never Say in Photoshop

With apolo­gies to George Car­lin, it seems there are seven words you can never say in Photoshop.

This idea started as most of my ideas begin — with me get­ting frus­trated. I’ve found the secret to elim­i­nat­ing 99% of my frus­tra­tion, though. Just stop talk­ing to other peo­ple. It’s amaz­ing what that can do to help your blood pressure.

Mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion is at the heart of frus­tra­tion. I was try­ing to get some help on a photo and asked a Pho­to­shop expert for some ideas. It was when I men­tioned that I wanted to “dodge” part of the photo that I got an imme­di­ate rebuke and lec­ture on why I should never use the Dodge tool because it’s destruc­tive. There were many other words in the lec­ture, but I decided to sum­ma­rize it for you. You’re welcome.

What this help­ful soul didn’t real­ize is that I had no inten­tion of using the Dodge tool. Had he let me fin­ish my state­ment, I would have explained in more detail and it would be clear that I was using the words “dodge” and “burn” to describe mak­ing an image lighter or darker in areas, but not refer­ring to a spe­cific way to do it.

Beware these Non-​Destructive Nazis. They descend from the heav­ens rid­ing winged Pega­sus and scream “I smite thee!” if you ever do any­thing to harm the pix­els under their pro­tec­tion. That’s when I real­ized that there are seven words you can never say in Photoshop.

Seven Words You Can Never Say in Photoshop

1: Erase

What’s wrong with the Erase tool? We grew up with erasers. They worked on chalk­boards and sit safely on the end of your pen­cil. When a mis­take hap­pens, we’re trained to erase it. Sim­ple erad­i­ca­tion, as if it never hap­pened. Besides, if Pho­to­shop has an Erase tool, shouldn’t we use it?

Look at a com­mon prob­lem that we’d like to erase — dust spots.

Unsightly things, aren’t they? Let’s erase them!

Mis­sion accom­plished! OK, maybe that didn’t work out quite the way we expected. Let’s move on to the next of the seven words you can never say in Photoshop.

2: Burn

Let’s take a look at this photo of Nemo. Over­all, it’s kind of under­ex­posed. That’s not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing, because I only want parts of it to stand out in the viewer’s mind.

Nemo just doesn’t pop out of this image, so let’s help him out a bit. First, I hit “B” for “Brighten…”

Where’s Nemo? Oh, wait. “B” isn’t for “Brighten”, it’s for “Burn.” Maybe I got Burn and Dodge con­fused. Why don’t they just label these tools Lighter and Darker? I don’t set Pho­to­shop to keep much His­tory, because that eats up your RAM. So I’ll have to find some other way to cor­rect my prob­lem now.

3: Dodge

Let’s try using the Lighten Dodge tool. If we made Nemo dark, then we can make him Light. Dodge, fishy. Dodge!

There you go, I found Nemo! Now he’s nice and bright and really pops out of that under­ex­posed scene. Hmm, what’s that on his forehead?

It looks like Dodg­ing him after Burn­ing him has crin­kled up his skin a bit. That’s OK. this is just going on the Web. No one will ever look close enough. Besides, I’ve heard that detail is a good thing to have in photos.

4: Flat­ten

For some rea­son, it’s con­sid­ered bad form to Flat­ten your image. That’s just mind-​boggling. After all, the result is going to be a flat image, so why not have a flat file? Just think of all the space you can save by get­ting rid of those super­flu­ous lay­ers. Take this image I posted last week as an example.

This is an HDR photo that came from five dif­fer­ent expo­sures. I blend them together to get the amount of expo­sure that I want in the over­all image, and then I Flat­ten the file once I’m done with all of my edits.

After I posted this image, I real­ized that I just wasn’t happy with that sky. You see, I made the mis­take of pro­cess­ing this in the evening to crank out a blog post and missed an impor­tant detail because I was con­cen­trat­ing on too many things at once.

No wor­ries, though! I learned my les­son from the Dodge & Burn débâ­cle above and I increased my his­tory depth. Now just let me open that file again and hit Undo.

OK, maybe I mis­judged how His­tory works. I guess you can’t Undo a Flat­ten after you’ve saved the file. Maybe that’s why you can’t use that word in Photoshop.

5: Ras­ter­ize

Ras­ter­i­za­tion hap­pens when you change Text or Shapes from vec­tors into pix­els. I’m not sure why this is a bad thing. Clearly, we aren’t destroy­ing any pix­els. We’re cre­at­ing them! In fact, some of the cool fil­ters require ras­ter­i­za­tion before they’ll work. Pho­to­shop wants you to rasterize.

Let’s start with an image and add some text to let peo­ple know what they’re sup­posed to feel when they see it. I do that because I’m here to help.

OK, the text is clear and I didn’t make any spelling mis­takes. How­ever, it looks a bit bor­ing. I’d like to add a fil­ter to the text. As soon as I try to add a fil­ter, I get this warn­ing notice.

It’s just like I told you. Pho­to­shop wants you to ras­ter­ize. Here we go, folks. We’re cre­at­ing pix­els. Those non-​destructive nazis can’t smite us for this, right?

Of course not. We’re play­ing by the non-​destructive rules that say you can’t harm any pix­els. There are no pix­els in type, so we’re good. Let’s just ras­ter­ize this puppy and get on with our filter.

Once that’s out of the way, we get an image like this one.

OK, we ras­ter­ized the text so we could apply an Embossed fil­ter. Nifty, huh? You know, the only thing is that I’d like the text to be a lit­tle big­ger and maybe change the font to some­thing spook­ier than Hel­vetica. I just need to get my Type tool and select the text and…

Oh, right. It’s not text any­more. Mov­ing right along.

6: Adjust­ments

Look under the Image menu for Adjust­ments. Lots of power in here. You can make some glo­ri­ous changes with Image Adjust­ments. Rather than do some­thing dras­tic, we’re just going to make a slight change. Take a look at the yel­low shirt on the model below.

Looks kind of dull, doesn’t it? Let’s make it pop with a Hue/​Saturation adjust­ment. It’s pretty easy, since that’s one of the pre­sets that ships with Photoshop.

This is a global adjust­ment. You can tell that the changes applied directly to the image layer.

Why does this mat­ter? If you don’t like it, you can just hit Undo and remove the adjust­ment, right? Let’s save the file and re-​open it.

Hmm, no his­tory after I re-​open the file. If I wanted to change or undo that Image Adjust­ment, I’d be out of luck. That must be why they invented Adjust­ment Lay­ers. Then you could change your mind later, as long as you didn’t Flat­ten the image.

7: Fil­ters

I love fil­ters. Who doesn’t? Fil­ters are just like Adjust­ments — they do cool stuff! You can dis­tort, you can blur. You can sharpen or swirl. All of those effects seem so cool. Just imag­ine what you can do with a por­trait when using filters.

We have a lovely young model here, but per­haps we want to add some skin soft­en­ing. I know, let’s blur it!

There we go. I just added a 5 pixel Gauss­ian Blur. It really smooths out her skin. It also smooths out her eyes, hair and every­thing else, too. Don’t worry, we can just use the Erase tool to clean that right up.

Oh, wait. It’s all on the same layer. Well, maybe nobody will notice.

Non-​Destructive Edit­ing is a Waste of Time

As you’ve clearly seen demon­strated here, pix­els were meant to die in the ser­vice of your con­ve­nience. Don’t believe all that stuff you hear about the impor­tance of non-​destructive edit­ing in Pho­to­shop. Nobody really looks that closely at your pho­tos, anyway.