As the industry standard, Photoshop is a powerful image editing tool for designers. There are lots of Photoshop resources around to help us keep on top of thing, including handy tutorials. But in the wrong hands it can affect quality and make things less productive.

That’s why Creative Market has shared a list of common Photoshop mistakes and provides tips on how to avoid them.

Organize your layers and files

When working on complex design jobs, it is easy to end up with a stack of layers in your PSD. This is one of the most common Photoshop mistakes. If users don’t name your layers, you might end up with a mess of similar, indistinguishable layers like “layer 7 copy copy 22”. Users should get into the habit of deleting, organizing and renaming layers as they go. It’ll make sense the next time you open your document, trust me.

Using Photoshop for the wrong job

Always use the right tool for the right job. You wouldn’t use a screwdriver to pound in a nail, would you? Photoshop works well with photographs and rasterized images. It can be used for typography to some extent, but if you are doing more scaling, re-sizing, typesetting or page layouts, you might want to switch to InDesign. For text and vectors, you are better off using Illustrator.

Filter overkill

Although Photoshop provides users with a whole suite of filters and effects, subtlety is truly the key to their good use. Brush strokes, ripples and lens flares have their place, but effects look best when the audience doesn’t even know they’re there.

No Alignment

Great design sticks to a grid. It may seem lame to stay confined within a grid structure, but it generally makes good aesthetic sense to align common elements. You can do this in Photoshop by turning the grid on when needed, or snapping elements in line automatically.

Destruction

USE A LAYER MASK PEOPLE! If you’re trying to trace an object to remove it’s background, add a layer mask to your object. That way users can add or remove parts of the object without having to start again if they remove too much. As well, when changing the colour, saturation, or making other adjustments to an image, get into the habit of using adjustment layers. That way, your original layer is kept intact and untouched, and ready to be revisited if your edit doesn’t work out.

Are you guilty of making these errors? Or do you disagree with any of these Photoshop mistakes?

Source: https://creativemarket.com/blog/2015/10/13/incredibly-common-photoshop-fails-to-avoid