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For some of the latest versions I have been annoyed by this behaviour:
When I work on a PSD and then decide to create a fork, I do a 'save as' copy of the project.
The old behaviour was that PS automatically switched over to the new file, the 'saved as' file.
The new behaviour is that a new copy is saved, but the old file is still active, and the new file is not opened..
So I have many times accidentally kept on working in the old PSD, and couple of times even not noticed it until I closed PS. This meant I no longer had any v1 of the project.
Is this something only I have noticed? Is it some error on my system? If any of you have seen this kind of thing happen, do you know of a solution? Legacy 'save as' option does not seem to affect this.
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You can change this in Photoshop preferences.
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As I said in my post, enabling the legacy option didn't help.
What does help is that I have to untick 'save as a copy' in the save location popup dialog as well.
Racking up that nonsense extra clicks count.
Does the new 'save as' behaviour really help anyone? For me it means I have lost some work and have to do extra clicks.
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So, it is like I always knew it was,
I am alone. This is fine.
But now it seems that enabling legacy 'save as' also enabled legacy free transform, although that option is not ticked.
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I do a 'save as' copy of the project.
The old behaviour was that PS automatically switched over to the new file, the 'saved as' file.
By @Henry Griin
If you "Save As", the new version becomes the current file in Photoshop.
But "Save A Copy" can't work that way and never has. The whole point of "Save A Copy" is that the target format doesn't support all properties of the file, so some data have to be discarded to save to the new format. In such a situation, the original file is always the one that remains open. It has always been like this, even before save a copy became its own menu item.
I understand that "Save A Copy" can be used like you do, to create multiple instances of the same file. But that's not why Save A Copy was implemented. It was implemented as a workaround to a change in MacOS, which no longer allowed direct saving to an unsupported file format.
To switch the working file to your copy, you need to use "Save As".
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You say that "If you "Save As", the new version becomes the current file in Photoshop." - but I created this discussion exactly because for me, this is no longer so. It used to be, and I was used to that behaviour. But with newer PS versions, this is no longer so and I am confused and I have to do extra clicks to achieve the old behaviour, and I have lost some work, and I have no option in the settings to make the software more quickly do what I want.
As far as I can tell, 'save as' and 'save a copy' are currently doing the same thing in a sense that they save a version of the file I have open, and they don't switch to or open that new version.
I am trying to discuss the usefulness of that redundancy.
And I am trying to find out whether the 'save as' behaviour change is an update that was implemented due to majority of users actually wanting this, or, is there a chance I am not the only person troubled by it, and have a more substantial right to issue a feature request ticket.
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"Save As" and "Save A Copy" should not behave identically, and they don't here. What I wrote above was based on my own testing.
If they do behave the same way, I'd suspect a corrupt preferences file, and I would try to reset.
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TLDR - PS version update re-routed my key bindings.
The beautiful fairy tale about this heap of rancid nonsense, AKA how I reset the preferences, and it resolved the issue, but hold your horses, this is what I found out.
Before resetting, I made a full backup of the ‘Photoshop 2023 Settings’ and the ‘Presets’ folder folder in appdata, thus creating copies of my presumably corrupt prefs.
After resetting prefs, the ‘save as’ issue was gone, so I copied back my custom keys set and my workspaces. And of course, the 'save as' problem was back again too.
So, after some fumbling around, whilst in PS, I switched from my workspace to one of the PS default ones. And, the 'save as' problem disappeared. Then I switched on my custom keys set. And, the 'save as' problem was back again too. As long as I wasn't using my custom keys set or my workspace - no problem.
Then I copied back all the backups I had made before resetting, all except the keys and the workspaces, and the 'save as' behaviour was normal.
Therefore, I could conclude the problem was limited to just these two files: my kys-file and my psw-file.
So I put two kys files into a text compare tool - one of them was my custom kys and the other one was the PS default. The binding for ‘save as’ was missing in my custom kys. Instead, it had been re-routed to - drummroll please - ‘save a copy’. That’s why ‘save as’ was, for me, doing what ‘save a copy’ does.
I am 10000% sure I never changed the binding myself. And I never thought that version updates could re-route bindings like that, so I never looked into my kys-file. And for the same reason - I never thought this was a key binding issue - I never tried executing the ‘save as’ command through menu clicks, I only did it using the shortcut keys. Now isn't that neat.
After manually switching my custom binding back to what I liked it to be, peace has been restored to the universe. Hopefully I am the only one to meet this malice, but in case life proves otherwise, let this story be helpful to those unlucky to trod into my circumstances.
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@Henry Griin wrote:
The binding for ‘save as’ was missing in my custom kys. Instead, it had been re-routed to - drummroll please - ‘save a copy’. That’s why ‘save as’ was, for me, doing what ‘save a copy’ does.
It makes sense that if your keyboard shortcut for Save As was rerouted to Save a Copy that Photoshop would do exactly that. Thanks for sharing.
Jane
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So I assume the part where, in the midst of troubleshooting, when I applied the setting 'legacy save as', and it made free transform turn legacy instead, was all just the same old corrupt preferences file foolery.
Unfortunately I could not dig deeper into this. There was a long due hardware upgrade on my PC, and now that I have all new MB, CPU, SSD, OS and Adobe installs, things seem to be working okay.
So, my advice. Computer problems? Buy a new computer!
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" I do a 'save as' copy of the project"
Which format you save?
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It applied to all formats.
However - I have found the source of the issue by now. The problem was that a version update had re-routed my keyboard shortcuts. See detils in my reply to D Fosse.
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@Henry Griin wrote:
For some of the latest versions I have been annoyed by this behaviour:
How many versions have been affected?
Jane
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Hard to say at this point. It was some iteration of v23. Probably mid-year, but that's just a guesstimation.