This has many advantages, the most obvious being that having your original photograph available to you whilst you work means you are always able to duplicate the layer and play around with its clones until you are happy with the result, and never loosing what you began with being as it’ll sit quietly untouched whilst you work around it. This can be a huge relief if you’ve made mistakes and can’t undo what you have done (which I always found in my earlier retouching days an absolutely gutting nightmare if i’d been working for hours on a single image).  If you attempt to work in a complex way on the original image, then besides risking having to start over if you’re not happy you are also severely restricting the possibilities of manipulation with the photo.  Being an abstract digital artist, I myself can work with anything up to 15 layers for my work, although sometimes I am quite happy with 3 or 4… maybe more than 15 if I am in a particularly crazy mood!  Being able to offer such flexibility to myself enables me to further increase the number of ways and quality of how I can make my photographs look and “feel”.

In the examples I have posted of some very recent works, you will see from left to right the progression of changes plus the more significant manipulated layers that make up the final image on the end of the montage.  It’s not easy to show and explain step by step everything I have done in the images (I haven’t been able to include all of the layers as there are quite a few!) unless i do a video tutorial sometime, but in the jist of things you can see how layering various manipulations of the same image can create a work of art out of an ordinary photograph.  It really is simple, and only requires you to duplicate your original image a few times so you can make a start on having fun with the copied layers.  You will be able to check progress more easily than adjusting a single image alone as you can toggle the visibility of each layer to draw comparisons and make judgments on your changes,  you can label your layers so you know exactly what you have done in each of them which will make handy references if you want to go back and do more or undo things, you can be experimental with tools like layer masking which allows you to apply effects on parts of your image (my flower picture is a good example of using layer masking), and you can easily add text/watermark/cliparts etc as separate vector layers without ever having to embed them into your image whilst working.  I make the suggestion to any fellow photographers, or artists… even crafters that wish to have more control over the basic adjustments in their product photography to consider working with layers, as daunting as it may seem to begin with, you’ll find your images with have a much better quality and once you’re used to your photo programs functioning, and in the end it’ll make your corrections a whole lot easier (and less stressful if mistakes happen) to implement.

* Finding Your Spark – Easy Post Production – Contrast Adjustment – http://www.handmadespark.com/blog/finding-your-spark-product-photography-easy-post-production-contrast-adjustment/