Adobe Photoshop CS6 Saving Your Images

Hi everyone, Michael Brown again, welcome back to educator.com's Adobe Photoshop CS6 course.0000

In this lesson, we're going to discuss saving your images--quite important--and a couple of things that will: number one, save your life, number two, save you time...life is more important in this case, not losing your images, and a couple of new features in Photoshop CS6 and we'll discuss saving images for the web, so let's get started.0006

Here's an image--we'll check the image size...original image is 32 megabytes at 240 pixels per inch.0028

It's a layered file.0038

If we were to--now right at the end of the Title bar you see there's no asterisk, same thing with this other image--now this one has been altered, so we made a change and have not saved it.0041

Same thing with this image--the little asterisk indicates it has not been saved after you made a change, so if you go to the File menu you'll see that the Save command is highlighted as well as Save As.0055

If it is not worked on, such as this one, when you go to File, Save is grayed out but Save As is live.0069

OK, so now, if we make a change on this image--let's just make a couple of changes here...I'm going to drop the saturation, make the yellows down a little bit, make them a little red...there's a natural change.0076

Now let's just say...what happened there, that's OK, it went crazy, that's fine with me, I'll take it...so we make some wild change here, we flatten the image, we've seriously altered our original image--we go to image size, let's knock it down to 72 pixels per inch, we'll just do that.0095

Now we have a small file with no layers, and if we go to the File menu, Save is highlighted.0125

If I release right here, or if I was to use the shortcut Command or Control on the PC +S, it will save this image right over the original file because the name is still the same, it will not ask you, it will not prompt you, it will just plain do it, and what that means is that you will wipe out your full sized file that we have here--I can still go back because of the History panel--it will replace this full sized file with this tiny little off-color file and you've wiped out your original and you can't recover it.0133

So I recommend highly making a habit out of never using the Save command.0173

Instead, use Save As, because when you do, you will get a dialog box that gives you several prompts.0180

What do you want to save it as, where do you want to save it, and what format do you want to save it in, and it will remind you that...oh right, I changed this image so I do not want to save it as the same name, I want to change the name, so I'm just going to hit a slight name change...modified...and now I've changed the name, I'm going to save it in the same folder, save it as a Photoshop file, I'll click Save, and now we have Claudia Mod.0190

If we go back to Open Recent Files and open the psd file (it should open up...come on...there it is) we're back, and we have both files.0224

Let's go to Bridge, and I'll show you that there they reside, there's our original that we did not accidentally save over, there's the small off-color file, we changed the name.0239

This is why I highly recommend that never use Save.0249

In 20 years of doing this, I've been working and working and working along on an image, and inadvertently you go...let's say you make a change like you flatten it, let's do something here--there's one way you can save it (let me show you what we do here, I'll just go craze it...flatten the image) instead of saving I just go to close the window, I go Command+W, or Control+W on a PC, it will prompt you--and it says "do you want to save these changes?" so there's a safety valve on closing a window.0257

The other safety valve is you Save As all the time, Save will never prompt you, Save As always will, and if you try to close the window after making some change and instead of inadvertently--notice the button is highlighted, so your instincts are to click the Enter button and you go "oh no, I don't want to save that", I can cancel it and save it as something else or I could click Don't and it will go away.0297

Be very careful in saving that you don't save over images.0323

So now, we're going to go back to this and we've dealt with...the Save command, which I suggest personally that you never use.0328

That way it will save you from yourself, instead use the Save As command always.0344

That's my recommendation, your call, but my recommendation.0354

So that takes care of the saving.0358

The wonderful Save As command always saves you.0360

Let's look at saving background and autosave.0365

I have a large file I opened up here that's 840 megabytes.0368

Previous versions of Photoshop...if I was to save this file right now...I'm just going to make up...do a Save As, and I'm going to change the name just slightly, now when I click save, it will start to save it, and you're going to see a progress bar which is new at the bottom left of the File window, but in previous versions we could not continue to work until it saved it, but watch what happens now.0374

I'm going to go ahead and replace it--see, it was prompting me--I know that this exists and it's the same file so it's not a problem.0407

Watch what happens down here...it's saving.0414

Now, previous versions I couldn't do anything, but we're going to go ahead and work!0418

We're going to go into our Preferences, Photoshop Preferences--File Handling on a Mac, Edit, Preferences, File Handling on a PC and notice behind us in the background it's saving.0422

So here we have three check boxes in the File Save options: Save As to original folder, that always puts a modified version right in with the original so your organization is nice and clean, Save in the background which is what it's doing right now, checked we're continuing to work while it's saving--saves time too--and this one is a life saver; automatically save recovery information--every, and you have the option of between 5 minutes and an hour, I leave it at 10 minutes, it doesn't slow the computer down very much, that means if you get a power failure or a crash in Photoshop which it doesn't usually do, but you never know, sometimes things happen, instead of losing umpteen hours of work, if you've been working on a file for a long time, worst case scenario, you'll only lose whatever your setting is.0435

In this case, it will open the file back up when you reopen Photoshop, re-access only at 10 minutes maximum back from where you are--a very great addition to Photoshop.0485

Notice, this has been saved in the background, so we go here and there is Save in background, and autosave, so now let's talk about saving images for the web.0499

Now, obviously you're going to work with jpegs--we'll go back to Claudia, and we're going to bring her back to the beginning, we'll check the image size out--this is a 32 meg' file.0511

So if I take this file and Save As, and make this Claudia Original, and save it as a jpeg, and then save it on the Desktop.0523

I'm going to save, it's going to prompt me as to a quality and I'll pick a medium quality, let's just say 9, and click OK.0537

Now, that file size is going to be about two megabytes, which is transferable but it's an awfully large file to be trying to open on the web, so what Photoshop has, under the File menu, is a Save for Web dialog box, but before I jump there I want to explain something.0547

This file here is about 32 megabytes in size--it will open up in the File, Save for Web dialog box, but files that are 60, 70, 80 megabytes or higher than that, in that range, have a tendency--first they'll take forever, if they opened, to open in that Save for Web dialog box because it is very file intensive as to size, or it might actually come up with a dialog box telling you that the file is too large, so what I do as a habit, instead of trying to open up my files into Save for Web directly, I size them down--you can size your files down in the Save for Web dialog box, but I prefer to do it beforehand.0573

So we'll go to the Image menu--image size, and I'll knock it down right off the bat to 72 DPI--there's a lesson on image size so I'm just going to quickly go through this--change the resolution, resampling, 72 DPI, let's pick, say, 2000 pixels, and we've now knocked it to 7.8 megabytes.0620

Click, and it's smaller...just double check, it's now 7.8, so this is the file size that's going to be taken into the Save for Web dialog box, but we'll do it very easily--we're already sized for the web.0642

The Save for Web--here's your dialog bar, excuse me...you have an original, you have optimized, you have two-up, which shows you the original and the optimized jpeg side by side, or you have a four-up, which gives you three different quality levels--I prefer two-up and to adjust it and to compare them side by side.0656

Now, you'll see down here, there's your image size--you could have done the image sizing right in here, but it takes a lot of time if it will open a large image, so by doing it before we saved ourselves.0681

So, you have the option of saving as a jpeg, a gif, or two versions of PNG.0694

The PNG aid has 256 colors, PNG 24 has 16.7 million, the same as jpeg.0701

The advantage of a PNG, the only thing that's different between a PNG and a jpeg is it supports transparency.0709

If this was a logo against a transparent background and we save it as a jpeg, it will make the transparency white.0718

As a PNG, which is a slightly larger file--still has 16 million colors, it will save the image, optimize it down, but it will also preserve that transparency so you can bring files into a website or a web design with transparency and move the layers around--very, very cool.0727

Alright, but we're going to deal with just a simple jpeg here.0748

You have progressive or optimize--progressive is when it opens up and it scrolls its way down when it's opening, takes a lot of time.0752

Optimize is the way you want to leave it, embed the color profile is just fine...let's see, it's converting it to SRGB--you want to do this because monitors are SRGB.0762

Preview monitor color--that's what we're looking at in the preview box to see what it looks like, and we have the option to throw in some Metadata, a good idea for copyright and contact info.0778

We've already sized it, and the quality level--we don't need to deal with that one.0789

Now we come up here, and we can adjust our quality level of the optimized image--notice at 100% quality, the 7.7 megabytes goes down to 2 megabytes, if we go down to zero and we zoom it up, you'll see the quality is terrible, it's just blocky, and the file size of course is very small.0793

As we increase the quality--we'll go up to about 40--you can see it's improving, but look at the lips on the left, on the right, they're still a little bit blocky.0819

Once we get up close to 60 or so, those images look pretty close to the same--there's a little degradation here, but not much.0828

If we get up close to 70...it's very hard to tell any difference between the original and the optimized image, and the jpeg has gone down from 7, almost 8 megabytes, to 760KB, which is not necessarily exactly the way we'd want it for the web, but certainly to email someone a test image for good viewing, it works well, so we're happy with that, we'll click the Save button, and we're going to save this as a Claudia SFW--Save for Web--on the Desktop, and we'll click the Save button, and now let's go to the Desktop and look at those two images...there's the original, there's the full sized jpeg, and there is the Save for Web.0838

I think the FS image is 2 megabytes...the original one knocked down is two, they worked the same--that was the 100% full size--and here is the Save for Web image; 780KB, and let's open both of these in Photoshop, and I'll show you that, from a viewing point of view, they work quite well.0888

We'll select both of them and not touch them, just open them in Photoshop...there we go...and what we're going to do here is we're going to close out the car...we're going to close out the full size image...actually we won't.0919

We're going to go Window, Arrange, float all in windows, and we'll just put this one away for the moment, and put the three of these--that's the full size file, and this one here...coming up...is the Save for Web image viewed on the screen, and this one here is the full size jpeg.0938

If you'll notice all three of these images look--and there was the whacked out one that we don't need to deal with--all three of these images on a monitor look equally as good, but this one is 32 megabytes, this one is 2 megabytes, and this one is 700KB.0972

But all view perfectly when the Save for Web with the 700KB looks just as good for emailing and on the web as the other ones.0996

So let's go back to Photoshop, Arrange, Consolidate to tabs, and that takes care of the Save for Web.1006

So now you have learned not to use the Save, always use the Save As, leave the save in background and autosave on, and you can now see how you can knock an image down for viewing very well, and still have a small file size for your save an image for the web, and that wraps up this lesson on saving your images.1014