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Why I Stopped Duplicating Layers for Every Edit (And What I Do Now)

Last week I was halfway through a skin retouching job for a cosmetics client, staring at a layer stack that looked like a accordion file folder someone had dropped down a staircase. Seventeen duplicate layers. Each one named something only slightly more useful than “Layer 3 copy copy.” I had to flatten and start over, which cost me about an hour I did not have. That moment made me go looking for a better system, and I landed on this tutorial from Matt Kloskowski that genuinely changed how I think about building a retouching file.

By Maya Chen ·
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