Do you keep .psd files?
 

now that I am using PSE4 more, am interested what others do about files-
obviously keep a copy of the original, but after a bit of PS work with half a dozen layers and saving .psd (or .tif which now seems to be much the same thing) the original 6MP=2MB .jpg has grown to 40-60MB

my inclination is to compromise and merge most layers but save with one live for anything likely to be printed (say 15MB) as I find printing (usually for a greetings card) needs something a bit more saturated and contrasted than for on screen - and much easier to achieve this by adjusting the transparency of an 'overcooked' layer than messing with the printer colour management settings

(epson 1290)

I keep my workings, but not on my main computer, I archive them off to another machine.

In more detail. I try to avoid using Photoshop and Paintshop because they are such great slow, clumsy programs, especially Photoshop. Mostly, I post process using only PMView and Neat Image, using Painshop or PSE2 (Woops - I meant to write "Paintshop", not "Painshop", but on reflection maybe I ought to let it stand) only when I have to. I can crop, rotate, adjust saturation, sharpen, reduce noise, and resize much faster with PMView (and Neat Image for noise and a litle sharpening), and also see exactly what I'm doing with a full screen devoted to the picture I'm working on, none of it taken up by surplus tools. Only when I need to clone out dust or tweak the lighting or otherwise get fancy do I fire up one of the heavier-duty image editors.

But in either case, I keep my workings in TIFF format. Every few months, the scratch folder gets too big for my very limited storage space on the laptop and I archive it off to a desktop system. The laptop has twin drives, 80 and 120GB, but the desktop (like all decent desktop systems) has effectively unlimited storage. Presently it has a 250, two 300s and two 400GB drives internally, plus a couple of external 300s. I just upgraded it a couple of weeks ago, so that's plenty for the time being. Being a desktop system, it will be cheap and easy to add more storage to it when the time comes.

The long and the short of it, Chris, is that unless you are limited to a laptop system, simply add more storage as and when required. Full-size 3.5 inch desktop hard drives are really cheap these days, and getting cheaper every month, so simply add a second or third hard drive (around 300GB is the best price per MB right now) any time you run short of space. Compared to what you pay for a camera, a lens, or even a decent tripod, it's chicken feed.

While you are at it, buy an external enclosure (Firewire or USB) and a drive to put in that too. Fill it up with the really important stuff you can't afford to lose, then disconnect it and leave it somewhere apart from your home so that if you have a disaster (a fire, a burglary, a virus attack, whatever) your pictures are safe. Slip it into your bottom drawer at the office, leave it at your brother's house, whatever. Then you can rest easy.

Thanks Tony. I likewise prefer to use my less cumbersome mac progs, but the fact is that no one prog is supreme in all situations.

I also do as you suggest and have a loose firewire drive that goes in the shed in disguise when I am away, but capacity not an immediate problem at either end.

Just thought it worth seeing what other folks do.

Contrary to most folk on here who ferret away their images on huge backup disk storage I’ve kept only a small percentage of my shots over the past 3 yrs. My working drive is 15Gb. I have a 40Gb drive kicking around but have never got around to swapping it over. Once in a while I backup some of the originals I want to keep to CDROM. I suppose I have 4 or 5 CDROM of images which I rarely look at again. The majority are kept as jpeg. I never keep the PSD files.

So what do you folk do with all these tens of thousands of images you have stored? Do I under estimate the value of my images or is the trash can the best place for them

I reckon there's a variation of 'Parkinson's Law' at work - the bigger hard-drive you've got, the more you're likely to store all sorts of shots, 'just in case' and the more likely you are to work on them and store the psd and tiffs as well as jpegs.

Sooner or later you then have to back-up, either onto a seperate drive or writable disc and with a huge number this means DVD-Rs rather than CD-Rs and, bearing in mind all of those old negatives stored away in drawers around the house, most of them will never see the light of day again!

I wonder how much time has been wasted on doing all of the work and then waiting whilst they're being written to discs, in the forlorn hope that some day some publisher will recognise our 'genius' and ask for some older shots as well as recent photos for their up-market publication that pays a fortune for each shot used...

I think you misunderstand my drift, or it has already drifted elsewhere.

I take pictures to capture my experience of, mostly nature, which leads to 2 sequences

1 getting the image to coincide as nearly as practical with my experience, the camera does not 'see' as the eye does, our brains are more complex (tho it often captures 1/500 sec lasting things and very small things the eye misses). So one works on it in PSE or whatever to 'freeze' the best of what the camera and the eye saw.

This can take say 1/2 hour. So do you keep that in .psd/.tif for when you want to print rather than view or you have learnt a new trick. I just wondered if others have similar ideas on this?

2 filing and storage only becomes an issue if you haven't enough. My image folder = last 3 years kept digital and as much as I have had time to scan of my historic and all extant family pics is 15GB and could be weeded to 10. I will risk the chance of both La Cie drive and internal dying simultaneously, especially as the system (mac OS 10.2.8) locked me out the second it found 1 suspect sector out of squillions on the internal HD so it could all be transferred before any serious damage could occur.

I think the major difference is that I print so few of my images the need to go back to reprocess files hardly exists.

As with Rob, I print very, very few of my files, so rarely, if ever need to reprocess. I shoot about 98% in JPEG format and after loading onto the PC from the card, do a ruthless cull of duff images. Of the few that remain, with some I'll twiddle with a few adjustments and save the result as a JPEG. I never bother saving in psd format, I don't usually do anything complicated enough in photoshop to warrant it.

Sometimes I have a clearout and, with the passage of time I can see that stuff I thought was a keeper at the time is really bin fodder. I'm forever thinning out my archives. Don't care what format it is, if it's bin fodder, it goes.

Duncan

Why do I keep a vast archive of 2nd and 9th rate shots?

Rest assured, it's not in the vain hope that anyone except me will ever want to look at them! They are archived away on a spare machine, and only my ruthlessly-pruned collection of "keepers" stays on my laptop and goes everywhere with me.

There are two main reasons. First, as a record. Rarely, but more often than you'd think, I need to know something about a sequence that I can't tell from the shots I keep. Example: I show someone a nice picture of a Red-capped Robin. "Wait", they say, "that's Jackie Winter". Fair enough, from some angles, it can be very difficult to tell them apart. If need be, I can go back to the reject shots and find a different angle that will confirm (or refute!) my ID. Another example: Someone said that there hadn't been any Rainbow Bee-eaters is a certain district this year, where they are usually recorded every summer. Biologically, this is significant. I *thought* I could remember seeing them there. Again, I can go back through the archived files and even a terrible shot can tell me what I need to know. Third example: if I go to somewhere and want to make a note of the spot, I take a quick picture of a signpost, or the readout of a GPS. Obviously, I don't want that ugly shot messing up my nice collection of birds and wildflowers, but one day I'll want to go back there or tell someone about this great spot in Western Australia I discovered in '04, so I call up the files on the spare machine and remind myself of the details. I guess I refer back to the archives for one reason or another once every month or two, on average. I don't take field notes as a rule so it really is useful to me.

Second, much more important, reason. Time. As I'm sure we all know, pruning out the worst shots and sorting out the keepers takes forever. I constantly battle with my collection, ever so gradually improving it by discarding the worst shots. I guess we all do. It's stressful.

One thing that helps me make faster, more efficient decisions is the peace of mind that comes from knowing that nothing I do is irreversable. I never delete a shot, only move it to an archive. I can, if I need to, change my mind - and I can be 98% certain about a shot in less than a second, where to be absolutely 100% certain that I will never, ever regret deleting that particular picture takes 5 or 10 times longer than that. So I can flick, flick, flick through a shoot discarding the 2nd best shots as I go, happy that when I do make a mistake I can always recover from it.

Sure, I could go through the archives later, deleting anything that is absolutely, for certain useless. But why? Storage is so cheap, and time is money. I can earn enough to pay for a couple of dozen 400GB hard drives in the time it would take me to sort through every last picture in the archives on a single drive, making certain that there is nothing I will ever want on there before I delete it all.

But if I fall under a bus next week and someone elects you to save my pictures for posterity (maybe Arthur Morris was busy that week and you were the next best choice), here's a tip for you: don't even bother looking on the desktop machine, just take the files off my laptop: all the good ones are on there. (And backed up in about five different places, of course.)

Anyway, that's my method. I'm not for one moment suggesting that it would suit everyone, just throwing it in for discussion.

First off, I delete the 'crap' shots from the camera! I keep all my raw and the therefrom generated tiff & psd files. I print only from psd files. When I save a psd I DO NOT save the tiff which forces me next time round to re-evaluate my work in an attempt to improve the result.