Traditional photo editing is ‘destructive’. That means every adjustment you make permanently changes the pixels in the photo and there’s no way back unless you’ve saved a copy of the original and you’re willing to start again. ‘Non-destructive’ editing is fully reversible. You can go back and undo or redo all of your editing work at any point in the future. Naturally, there’s a catch
Variants (Capture One Pro)
Used in Capture One Pro to create different versions of a photo without physically duplicating the image file on your hard disk. Capture One Pro’s adjustment are non-destructive, which means they consist of processing instructions rather than direct adjustments to image files. Lightroom has a similar feature called ‘Virtual Copies’.