That way, retroactive correction is a lot easier. Don't put every brush stroke on a single layer, but collect clusters in their own layers, and group those layers to form objects. What you can do, is have one of Photoshop's strengths work for you: work in layers. It's what offline painters do and have done for centuries. Advertisement Step 1 Image Credit: Image courtesy of Adobe. From there, create a new layer and then apply the stroke to the selection. Hold Ctrl and click the thumbnail for the layer you want to stroke in the Layers panel, which creates a selection matching the layer's contents. My advice would be to live with your mistakes. If you want to stroke a layer, there is a trick you can use. Object-oriented drawing is not really fit for what painting requires. It is possible, but you will need a very heavy rig to be able to compute every of your (tens of?) thousands of brush strokes independently. Painting in Illustrator is disrecommended, though. Illustrator is an object-oriented application, and there you can edit and re-edit every object you create at a later time. This is, theoretically, possible in Adobe Illustrator. The functionality you are looking for is object-based painting, where every brush stroke is its own object. Hence, as soon as you painted over one stroke with another, the only ways you have to remove the first stroke is your undo states (if present and they go that far back) or a meticulous and time-consuming pixel-based retouching operation. Photoshop doesn't see a brush stroke as a single object, it's just an operation that changed the colour of some pixels. That means that every brush stroke you make directly affects pixels, and is stored in Photoshop only as pixels. It stores images by storing the respective colour of each of the image's pixels, and no (or very little) other data.

Photoshop strokes