First, do no harm

Much like doctors are supposed to adhere to the Hippocratic Oath, photographers should follow a similar creed when post-processing their digital images. Shooting in raw format gives us the equivalent of a digital negative and we should strive to keep the original on an untampered-with layer whenever post-processing. What I do is make use of adjustment layers in Photoshop then save the resulting layer stack as a .PSD file to ensure I’m not compressing or digitally mussing the hair of my original image. Actually this approach provides for the most flexibility during every step of post processing. Sure, the resulting image can be very large — but it’s worth the extra space. Give it a try and keep every change on a separate layer while working from a copy of the original to make sure you can revert to your original, just in case. 

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