Editing an Image

Raster editing as a working craft. What resolution can and cannot be recovered, why every edit belongs on its own layer, how masks separate people who can edit from people who cannot, selections down to hair, Levels and Curves instead of Brightness/Contrast, the difference between healing and cloning and generative fill, sharpening done last, and export settings that survive a slow connection. Photoshop is named; Photopea, GIMP and Krita are the paths that cost nothing.

1. 1The photo you were sent is too small, and nothing fixes that9 minEnlarging can only average pixels you already have; AI upscaling invents new ones, which is a different thing from recovering them.
2. 2Every edit should still be undoable next week9 minStack instructions on top of the pixels instead of changing them, and save the layered file before you save anything else.
3. 3The eraser is the tool that costs you the second revision10 minBlack conceals, white reveals — mask instead of erasing, and every revision becomes a brushstroke rather than a restart.
4. 4Selections are easy until you reach hair10 minEdge pixels are mixtures of subject and background, so a good cut-out is about partial transparency and colour decontamination, not about finding a line.
5. 5Brightness/Contrast is one knob for a problem with five10 minSet the black and white points first, shape the middle with Curves, and remember that contrast in the midtones is borrowed from the shadows and highlights.
6. 6Three tools that all remove a spot, and they are not interchangeable10 minHealing blends into its surroundings, cloning copies exactly, content-aware borrows from elsewhere in the frame, and generative fill invents — and only the last one changes what the picture claims.
7. 7Sharpening adds no detail, and it goes last9 minSharpening only exaggerates edges that already exist, so do it after resizing, at the output size, and after noise reduction rather than before.
8. 8Why your image looks washed out on somebody else's phone10 minDeliver sRGB by converting rather than assigning, choose the format by what is in the picture, and treat file size as part of the job.
9. 9One bottle, one window, twelve minutes12 minThe order is fixed — shoot, develop, straighten, mask, retouch, tone, then resize, sharpen, convert to sRGB and export — and the layered file is saved before any of it.