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?

Clients don’t always realize why the picture they took on their cellphone or old 3.2 MP digital camera can’t be blown up for use on a trade show booth. Even in the hands of a skilled photoshop artist the picture can only be blown up so much. But 600%? There’s a group of Photoshop actions called Re-Sizer that claims to have Photoshop actions that will allow you to resize a photo up 600%. I don’t know all the ins and outs but at $10, it’s worth a look.

What I love most about Photoshop on the iPhone is the functionality. Adobe has really thought of everything. Designers, prepare to throw your laptops and towers away. The iPhone is really all you need.