Overview: The Power Of Image Editing

Here's what nobody tells you about digital art: an image isn't a solid painting, it's just millions of tiny glowing squares lying to your eyes. Your instinct is to think of a photo as one continuous, flat surface. In reality, it's built out of pixels—the absolute smallest illuminated dots on your screen, like a single colored tile in a massive mosaic.

And when we edit, we don't just permanently paint over those tiles. Instead, we use layers. Think of a layer like stacking a sheet of perfectly clear glass on top of your photo. You can paint a funny mustache on the glass without ever ruining the original photo underneath! If you wanted to swap out the sky in a picture without erasing the mountains in front of it, how do you think stacking these invisible sheets might help you do that?