My day started today by finding out that I had accidentally saved a crop of a website design yesterday. In the perfect storm of backup redundancies not working (including the most important one – my brain) I was left with one of two options: a) Spend a day rebuilding the file in an already tight timeline or b) finishing production from memory.
Turns out there’s an option 3.
Step 1) Open the affected PSD
Step 2) Increase Canvas Size
Turns out, this recovers around 90% of the data. While I’m unsure of why some of it was saved, and some of it was lost, I’m just thankful to have my file back. To best of my examination layers that I had drawn pixels in with the pencil tool, or “fill with background colour” were lost while smart objects and objects build with the rectangle / circle tool(s) were maintained. The biggest issue is that a lot of the masks were messed up, but nothing that an hour can’t fix. Maybe some adobe junkie and shed some light on this?
Posted by Steve Mynett
Tags: backup, Design, Learning, photoshop, redundancy, Software, tricks, tutorial
Todd Smith (October 21st, 2008)
Steve, this goes back to 2005 when Adobe switched from standalone products to the Creative Suite. They required tighter integration across the full lineup and introduced non-destructive editing in Photoshop, one of the most helpful uses of this comes in After Effects. When working with larger layers, they extend outside the visible boundaries of your canvas and when you put that comp into motion… you don’t run out of pixels if it drifts to the left or right. They’re caching that information, because they know you’ll need it.
It has other applications, but what it means is you don’t lose any information on layers that are larger than your comp. That is… with the exception of masks, fills, filters, and strokes painted IN Photoshop, because they correspond directly to the canvas size.