From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Five essential things to know about saving - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Five essential things to know about saving

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- [Instructor] All right, we're going to start things off by looking at five essential things that you need to know about saving inside Photoshop, regardless of which file format you're going to use. And so for starters, I've got this kind of FYI. These next three items in yellow represent some of the best safeguards available to you inside any piece of computer software. And then this last item is a warning. All right, so let's start by looking at the meaning of the asterisks that appear inside and outside the parentheses up here in the title tab. And so notice my title starts off with a copyright. That's because I assigned a copyright by going into the File menu and choosing the File Info command. And we'll look at how that works in the future chapter. Next, we have the file name and then we have the zoom ratio. Inside the parentheses, things start off with the name of the active layer, which is this guy right here, coaster, followed by RGB. So that tells us that we have three channels of data, red, green, and blue. And then this number here tells us that we have eight bits of data per pixel per channel. So eight bits of data for red and green and blue. 3 times 8 is 24, which is why this is said to be a full color 24-bit image. Next, we've got an asterisk inside the parentheses. We do not have an asterisk outside the parentheses. All right, so let's say I just want to experiment with this image, make a few modifications, all of these modifications are going to be terrible because I want you to see what happens when things go terribly wrong. And so notice this doodle layer right here. I'm going to go ahead and click on it to select it. This happens to be a bunch of layers that have been combined into what's known as a smart object, which allows you, among other things, to apply a nondestructive transformation. And so in this case, what I've done is I've distorted the artwork in order to fit the perspective of the coaster. So let's say I want to extract the layers from that smart object. Then what I would do is make sure that the Rectangular Marquee tool is selected up here at the top of the toolbox. And then I would right-click inside the image and choose this guy right here, Convert to Layers. At which point, Photoshop is going to tell me that my transforms, that distortion I was telling you about, will not be retained. In which case, I'll just go ahead and click OK. And notice that I lose that perspective. All right, so now notice that we've got this group right here, this folder full of layers. If I twirl it open, you can see all the layers that make up the doodle. Well, let's say I don't want them to be in a group. Then I could go up to the File menu and choose the Ungroup Layers command down here. And that will not only ungroup the layers, but it makes them so that they're not inside the coaster anymore. And that's because we've lost a special advanced blending option that was applied to the group. All right, so now I want you to see this adjustment layer up here at the top of the stack, and we'll be talking about all these features in future chapters, by the way. But for now, you just need to know that it's the item that's responsible for the purple coloring. And so I'm going to select it and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac, at which point the coloring goes away. And then with the hashlines layer selected, I'm going to Shift-click on the circles layer and just press the Backspace key to get rid of all that stuff. And then I'll right-click in this white thumbnail, which represents the filter mask. And I'll go ahead and choose Delete Filter Mask. And now notice we have this smart filter, which is another non-destructive operation in the form of the Camera Raw Filter. And I can just turn that guy off to see what it does. Notice the image becomes much more drab than it was before. And so, you know what? I'm just going to grab the smart filters and throw 'em away by dragging it to the trashcan icon in the bottom right corner of the layers panel. And then finally, I'll flatten this image by clicking on the layers panel flyout menu and choosing Flatten Image, which means we no longer have an independent layer, we're just left with this flat background. So obviously, I've totally destroyed everything. At which point, you can see that we have an asterisk inside the parentheses and out. Now, the one inside is not a concern at all. That just tells you the image uses a different color space than Photoshop is using by default. That's something we'll discuss in the mastery course, but for now, you can just ignore it. This asterisk outside the parentheses is something you want to pay attention to. It tells you that you have unsaved changes, which brings us to our second item here, how do you undo a save or a PSDC auto-save that would occur if this were a cloud document? And we'll learn more about cloud documents in a future movie of this very chapter. But in the meantime, let's say I somehow accidentally go to the File menu and choose the Save command, which sounds like a really weird accident if you don't consider the keyboard shortcut of Control + S or Command + S on the Mac. And here's the thing about the S key. It's located between the A and the D keys on a US keyboard. And so notice if I switch over to the Select menu here and choose the All command, that's got a keyboard shortcut of Control + A or Command + A on the Mac right next door to the S key. And so I go ahead and choose it. I've now selected the entire image. I can't really see unless I press Control + Minus or Command + Minus on a Mac to zoom out. At which point, you can see this animated marquee surrounding the entire image. Now, I think to myself, "Really didn't mean to do that." So I'm going to deselect the image, which you can do by pressing Control + D or Command + D on the Mac. So in other words, the S key is sandwiched between these two very common operations. And so I want to do that. I want to press Control + D. And I figure I have until I notice, wait a sec, I still have my animated marquee surrounding the entire image and my asterisk has disappeared up here in the title tab. And it dawns on me, my finger slipped to the wrong key and I hit Control or Command + S instead. What do you do? Well, if this was another application like illustrator, for example, you would just have to sit there and press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac in order to take advantage of Illustrator's multiple undos, but you just have to sit there and do it over and over and over and over again until you got back everything you wanted to. Once you do in Photoshop, it's so much more elegant. You go up to the Window menu and you choose the History command. I'm going to make it taller so that we can see all of these states. And notice that Photoshop is sitting here tracking everything I've done. So if I click on Delete Layer, for example, the second time I deleted a layer, we're going to go ahead and bring back that highly saturated wood or I could click on this guy, Converts Smart Objects to Layers, in order to bring back the undistorted doodle. Now, if you want to go all the way back, then you have one of two options. You could click on a word Open right there, which is the state at which you first opened the image, which by the way, goes ahead and restores all that bad work I did, or if the open state is rolled off the list. And that's going to happen if it's more than 50 operations away. And that's because by default, the History panel goes ahead and tracks the last 50 operations. In that case, you want to click on the document title up here at the top of the History panel, which is the so-called snapshot that's saved by default when you open an image and it does not roll off the list. And so I want you to notice here that we still have access to all the history states. It's just that when you go backward, they become dimmed. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and click on this item up here at the top. And of course, what I would do is go to the File menu and choose the Save command in order to get back all the stuff I had lost. But that's not what I'm going to actually do. What I'm going to actually do is something much more reckless in the very next movie.

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