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Elimite
Participant
November 26, 2016
Answered

Help .psd got flattened

  • November 26, 2016
  • 3 replies
  • 3877 views

I was working on one of my larger projects (I put 6 hours into it today, which is small for some but I'm not a designer by trade). I finish the project, get it signed off by my superiors, save it as a .psd on my desktop to be cataloged later. I go to mail the finalized product and it's too big on our internal mail servers so I open the .psd (layers still there), flatten it, and save it as .pdf (I don't save the .psd at all at this point). I close PS and all is right in the world. My superior calls me back 2 hours later and asks me to tweek positioning on a couple things and I say sure. I open the .psd and it's flattened! History is empty and I so I can't undo.

What happened? I never resaved the .psd! ! Is there any way to fix this without another 6 hours of work? Either way is there a way to stop this from happening again (over writing the .psd when I save it as a .pdf)?

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer SasquatchPatch

    I wonder if it's possible that there was some sort of auto-save going on in Ps. I think there is an option for that. If you flattened and it auto-saved the flattened file as your were doing your save-as, that would explain your lack of layers. A much better way of working in the future is to Duplicate the psd file and flatten that and save it as whatever you want. And for getting approvals on iterations of work like this, there's no need to use anything other than jpegs, which will transmit with no issues. Finally, depending on the exact content of your composition, you may well be able to reconstitute many of your layers by careful selections and the Cmd-J (copy to new layer) command, then backfilling in behind what you just floated to a new layer.

    3 replies

    S
    SasquatchPatchCorrect answer
    Participating Frequently
    November 26, 2016

    I wonder if it's possible that there was some sort of auto-save going on in Ps. I think there is an option for that. If you flattened and it auto-saved the flattened file as your were doing your save-as, that would explain your lack of layers. A much better way of working in the future is to Duplicate the psd file and flatten that and save it as whatever you want. And for getting approvals on iterations of work like this, there's no need to use anything other than jpegs, which will transmit with no issues. Finally, depending on the exact content of your composition, you may well be able to reconstitute many of your layers by careful selections and the Cmd-J (copy to new layer) command, then backfilling in behind what you just floated to a new layer.

    gener7
    Community Expert
    gener7Community Expert
    Community Expert
    November 26, 2016

    Sounds like you have a Mac. Do you have Time Machine turned on in your system Preferences?

    Barring that, do you use Dropbox? It supports versioning (File History)

    Do you have a copy stored elsewhere? Try a Spotlight search.

    Gene

    E
    ElimiteAuthor
    Participant
    November 26, 2016

    PC. No Time Machine, no Dropbox, no back up version. Ugh. I guess I learned my lesson??

    JJMack
    Community Expert
    JJMackCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 26, 2016

    Elimite wrote:

    is there a way to stop this from happening again (over writing the .psd when I save it as a .pdf)?

    Saving a PDF does not overwrite your PSD.  If your PSD was overwritten and what was written was as single background layer you must has use menu File>Save at some point after you flattened you layered document to save the PDF. It is highly unlikely the you can get you layers back. Unless you had a backup. For you also closed down the document in Photoshop. So all the doaument's  history states are now history a thing of the past.  If the disk has had little use after the over write a disk scavenger may be able to recover the old files data that was returned to disk free space.

    JJMack
    mytaxsite
    mytaxsite
    Inspiring
    November 26, 2016

    Is the document still open?  If it is still open then try going to:

    Window >> History

    Then see if you can delete the action of "flattening" of layers.

    If the file is already close then I don't know how to resurrect the history.

    Good luck anyway.

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