Quote Originally Posted by davidedric View Post
Hesitate a bit to step in here, but maybe the reason for the non-destructive / destructive confusion is something like this:

If I use only a parametric editor such as LR then I can go back to any intermediate point in the edit, though of course if I change anything I lose the subsequent edits. (Incidentally, one enhancement I would like to see in LR would be the ability to make a virtual copy at any point in the edit that preserves all the edits up to that point.)

However, if I hand the image over to PSE, say, to do further editing which I end up saving as a TIFF or jpeg or whatever, I have two different image files with a break between them and the changes made in PSE baked into one of them.

So it's the way I use the software that makes the difference?

I suppose another point is that LR also edits jpegs parametrically?
Hi Dave,

In essence, the parametric editing that LR does is the same as what ACR (Adobe Camera RAW) does (they use the same processing engine). Although one can't "step back" through previous processing steps in ACR once a session has been exited (while it's active one can use ctrl+Z to step back as far as they like), one can use the snapshots tool to "freeze" the state of the edit at any point -- which is retained with the image (not sure if LR has this feature).

Once the image is passed through to Photoshop, the above situation changes - but - assuming that one is following best practice of "everything that CAN be done in ACR SHOULD be done in ACR (or LR)" then (a) what is about to be done in Photoshop couldn't have been done in LR / ACR anyway (so the LR non-destructive argument becomes moot because presumably at that point LR isn't up to the job required), and (b) it's easy to save intermediate states as a separate layer (simply merge selected layers to a new layer and rename it).

Hope this helps.