Hi Christine, OK, let me see if I can guide you onto a couple of workflow issues (some of which fall into good workflow practices): 1) never ever open a JPG image, make adjustments and corrections and then save that JPG image as a JPG image. Here's the reasons: The original image is your original image. If you make changes on that and sometime later PS has an ever better solution to fix your image you can't go back to your original image. That's gone because you saved over your original image. The reason why PS saved your images as PSD (Photoshop Document) is to help prevent you from saving over your original images. That's a good thing. In addition, JPG is called a lossy format. That means that to save storage space it tosses data from the original image. What it does is every 8 pixels the JPG makes a decision as to whether to keep and toss a pixel. Once that pixel is removed, it's gone and you cannot get it back. When you save a JPG, you are confronted with a compression options (0-10). The greater the compression, the more of the image is tossed. The more of the image that's tossed the more "JPG degradation is done." To see this compare the two images below. One is the original image, the 2nd was after one highly compressed JPG saving. The catch here is that if you take a JPG image, make some corrections, save it, open it up, make some more corrections, save it, and do that some more times, than you get cumulative damage even if you didn't save it with a lot of compression each time. BTW, for this reason never ever set your camera to save MORE images on your card. To do this your camera is either making lower resolution images (fewer pixels for each image) and/or higher compression. What you really really really want to do is to have highest resolution your camera can do and the lowest compression. Better yet, if you can save your images in the camera's raw format, that's best yet. Next, keep your PSD images as PSD images and ALSO save your original JPGs if you still have them for the reasons mentioned above. Next, you say you found your images lose in the Finder. You're lucky, if lost they could end up in less obvious places. When saving documents it is important to monitor where they are being saved. One of the quirks of computers is to open a folder, open a document and then save that document and expect it to go back to the original folder. It often does that but not all the time. Here is where I recommend that you purchase the small application called "Default Folder." [Default Folder X - St. Clair Software] I've been using this application for about 20 years and I absolutely cannot imagine having a Mac without that application. When using DF, every time you get the Open or Save dialog, it provides options to easily get to or back to the folder that you want the images to end up. You do not NEED DF, it just makes things so much easier. Now that you've got your PSD images, place them all in a folder for your convenience. You really do not want them lose on your desktop, besides being a mess, it makes it harder to find other things on your desktop. Give the folder a good name (e.g., Party at Jerry's, whatever). Now, to get your images back into JPG format so that you can send them all to your friends who where at Jerry's party, go to this page: Bridge Part 2: Working in Bridge This is a thing I wrote on how to use Bridge. There are bits of it outdated, but for the most part, it's very applicable to your needs. Scroll down toward the bottom to item #3, Image Processor. It should say enough there to let you know what to do. So to complete this all, when taking photos, always keep the original images and do not alter them in any way. They are the originals and should never be altered. When making alterations on them, save them as PSD or TIFF images. Either is fine. You can edit and save and edit and save these two formats till kingdom come and never do any damage to the image. So now you have two images for each image. Finally, because TIF and PSD format images are not supported on Facebook, etc. you will need to re-save them again back into a JPG format. When you do this, keep in mind that "generally" places like Facebook will not display images at larger than (say) 1500 pixels wide, you can both resize them down to 1500 pixels wide and when you save them as JPG, you can also set the compression down to about 7 (or 70, either is the same). That's generally a safe amount to set for that. And now you have three different copies of the same image. If that's too much, than toss the final JPG one, you can re-create that at any time. While this seems profoundly tedious, it's not and will pay you back with dividends as you go back to these images in years to come. I sure hope this helps you, let me know.
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