Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [36]
When you choose File Close All, if any of the photos have been modified, a warning dialog alerts you and allows you to close all open images with or without saving them first. For example, if you make a series of adjustments to a bunch of images and then change your mind, with this option you can quickly close all open images if you don't really need them to be saved.
The ‘save everything’ file formats
There are four main file formats that can be used to save everything you might add to an image, such as image layers, type layers, and channels, and also support 16-bits per channel. These are: TIFF, Photoshop PDF, (the large document format), PSB and, lastly, the native Photoshop file format, PSD. I mostly favor using the PSD format when saving master RGB images.
Using Save As… to save images
If the image you are about to save has started out as, say, a flattened JPEG but now has layers, this will force the Save As dialog shown in Figure 1.92 to appear as you save. However, you can also choose ‘File Save As…’ any time you wish to save an image using a different file format, or if you want, you can save a layered image as a flattened duplicate. In the Save As dialog you have access to various save options and in the Figure 1.92 example I was able to select the JPEG format when saving a layered, edited image. As you can see, a warning triangle appears to alert you if Layers (or other non-compatible items) can't be stored when choosing JPEG. In these circumstances, incompatible features like this are automatically highlighted and grayed out in the Save As dialog, and the image is necessarily saved as a flattened version of the master.
Quick saving
As with all other programs, the keyboard shortcut for saving a file is: . If you are editing an image that has never been saved before or the image state has changed (so that what started out as a flattened JPEG, now has layers added), this action will pop the Save As… dialog. Subsequent saves may not show the Save dialog. But if you do wish to force the Save dialog to appear to save a copy version, then use: .
File formats
Photoshop supports nearly all the current, well-known image file formats. And for those that are not supported, you will find that certain specialized file format plug-ins are supplied as extras on the Photoshop application DVD. When these plug-ins are installed in the Plug-ins folder they allow you to extend the range of file formats that can be chosen when saving. Your choice of file format when saving images should be mainly determined by what you want to do with a particular file and how important it is to preserve all the features (such as layers and channels) that may have been added while editing the image in Photoshop. Some formats such as PSD and PSB are best suited for archiving master image files, while others, such as TIFF, are ideally suited for prepress work. Here is a brief summary of the main file formats in common use today.
Maximum compatibility
Only the Photoshop, PDF, PSB and TIFF formats are capable of supporting all the Photoshop features such as vector masks and image adjustment layers. However, for Photoshop (PSD) format documents to be completely compatible with other programs (especially Lightroom) you must ensure you have the ‘Maximize PSD and PSB Compatibility’ checked in the Photoshop File Handling preferences. The reason for this is because Lightroom is unable to read layered PSD files that don't include a saved composite within the file. If PSD images fail to be imported into Lightroom, it is most likely because they were saved with this preference switched off.
Photoshop native file format
The Photoshop file format is a universal format and therefore a logical choice when saving and archiving your master files, since the Photoshop (PSD) format