Possible to preserve work in Photoshop after restart???

[thatsright]

Hi All. I have Adobe Photoshop CS4 and I am wondering is there a way I can turn off the PC without losing all the adjustments/changes etc I applied to images? So hopefully the next time I open the photo it will apply all the changes I did prior to closing out of PSP? Retain the ‘History States.’ Of course I can save the file but when I do this i loose the 'history states.' Sometimes I need to restart my PC in the middle of a bunch of work but don’t want to lose hours of possible work. I need to restart the pc soon as I have made some system changes.

This is an odd comparison, but some time ago I would use Lotus Notes and you could ‘Save Window State’ so it would open up all e-mails you had open when you closed the program down the last time.

Anyone know if this is possible?

 

[gsaldivar]

The reason that Photoshop doesn't save the edit history of each file, is because the changes that are shown in the History palette are contained in the scratch files that are deleted when you exit Photoshop. These files are *massive* compared to the size of the actual saved file you are working on. Not only would they take up an extraordinary amount of space if saved, but it would drastically increase the amount of time required to save each file.

I would suggest saving incremental changes to separate files more often. When I'm working in Photoshop, I often end up with dozens of intermediate files before i finish a project (i.e. project.psd, project1.psd, project 1a-noshadow.psd... etc). This allows me to easily go back and recover old versions of layers, etc.

Another option, might be leaving Photoshop (and your file) open, and use either Sleep or Hibernate to preserve the state of the computer when you step away. This might allow the scratch files to persist from one session to the next. It probably isn't something that Adobe would recommend, but it might allow you to more easily pickup your work where you left it.

Good luck!

 

[13Gigatons]

Click Save and then choose the .psd format.

Do it often cause if it crashes after a hour of working on an image you lose all your work.

 

[akugami]

Would this be a case where virtualization helps? I believe you could save the state of the OS and Photoshop when restarting your computer. I have no experience with virtualization, just throwing an idea out there. If you are possibly losing hours of work with each restart, it might be worth your while to learn how to set up and configure a virtual machine for the express use of Photoshop.

 

[gsaldivar]

Would this be a case where virtualization helps? I believe you could save the state of the OS and Photoshop when restarting your computer. I have no experience with virtualization, just throwing an idea out there. If you are possibly losing hours of work with each restart, it might be worth your while to learn how to set up and configure a virtual machine for the express use of Photoshop.

I haven't tried this either, but it's an interesting thought. The user would take a certain amount of performance hit from the virtualization. Also it would be idea to use a shared volume as scratch to avoid having to rewrite all the scratch files into a saved state file, but it certainly sounds like this is a good option as well.