Master a few tools well instead of many tools poorly

One of the marvellous things with Photoshop is that you can achieve the same thing in so many ways. That is also one of the sad things. You may rush around, trying to learn as many of the different tools as possible, and you end up being able to do the same thing over and over again, without acquiring the skills to do anything really well. Two things spring to mind in particular.

Blend modes. Some people claim that a great way of lightening a picture is to add the picture to itself as a new layer and applying, for example, screen blend mode. Likewise, it is alleged that multiplying a picture with itself is an excellent way of darkening it. Well, those methods definitely work, but they are not very flexible. You can equally well achieve the same thing using curves or levels on an adjustment layer. Using an adjustment layer takes much less disk space, and it is much more flexible, as you can choose in which way you want to darken or lighten the picture. There are admittedly quite a lot of flexibility with a duplicated layer as well, if you use Blending options, but no matter which way you use, you need to do some work to get it exactly as you like it.

Another thing that may be overrated is LAB colour space. It can be used for several things, one of them being to get more colour into a picture as described here. However, you can also get more colour into a picture using the adjustment layer Vibrance or Hue/Saturation. You may not get exactly the effect you get using LAB, but the effects you can get with LAB are not necessarily better. And LAB is very destructive. You have to change colour space for the full image, and once you have gone back to RGB, there is no way to go back to LAB to undo or modify the changes you made.

LAB has other uses of course, and so do Blend modes. The point is simply that it sometimes is more efficient to look at how best to use the tools you have and to master them well, instead of trying to find a solution in other tools.

Using new tools is often fun. Using old tools is often efficient.