That moment when I spent 90 minutes fixing a file I could have rebuilt in 20

I was working on this digital painting for a client, a fantasy landscape with a bunch of layered clouds and glowing elements. I had the whole thing in one massive PSD file with like 40 layers and a ton of adjustment layers stacked on top. Then I noticed a weird color banding issue in the sky that I couldn't seem to fix no matter what I tried with curves or gradient maps. I spent a good hour and a half messing with layer masks, blending modes, even tried exporting to 16-bit. Finally I realized the problem started because I had accidentally left a low-res texture layer right at the bottom of the stack that was scaling wrong. If I had just opened a fresh file and dropped in the sky from scratch, I would have been done in 20 minutes. Has anyone else spent way too long trying to fix a bloated file instead of just starting clean?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_taylor4d ago

Wait, text layers in Photoshop can't have drop shadows hidden.

faithrodriguez4d ago

Oh man I feel this so hard. Spent like two hours once trying to figure out why some text looked weird in a design I was doing, only to realize I had a hidden drop shadow layer from a week ago just messing everything up. Would have been way faster to just remake the whole text block. Why do we do this to ourselves?