Photoshop Auto Saving

[ooklah]

AKA a Birthday Present for Amber

A while back, Amber posted on twitter that she had just lost about three hours of work. I realized I could solve part of that problem - the lack of Photoshops ability to auto save things. So I wrote a small program in C#/Python. It's finished now. And now I'm releasing it to the wild.

Since Amber instigated this whole thing with her twitter, This is the first group of people I'm announcing this to. I hope that it helps out some of you other Photoshop users.

You can find the program here:

http://www.windmill3d.com/programs/ps-autosaver/

Please Note the Note: if you don't have the .net 4.0 framework installed its probably not even going to run or even get to the point to tell you something is wrong. Make sure that's installed first before complaining it doesn't work.

Enjoy!

[Turnsky]

no offense, but it's largely redundant if you have a good work ethic with photoshop. (read: ctrl+s) however i tend to work with multiple files and many other things that i wouldn't want to be 'automatically saved' in that interim, good idea however, not exactly original but it's free.

i'm more inclined to save along the lines of the 'philbert' method (turn the page, wash your hands~) that is, finish a layer, save the file, finish a layer, save the file.

[ooklah]

Not everyone is a diligent as you though, so no offense taken.

While I realize people may have more then one file open, it won't save a file if no changes have been made to it, if it's not already saved, and for right now, only the active image. On my To Do list is to address the issue of handling several files at once and control over what gets saved or not. Another item is when Photoshop crashes, it will offer you the option to reopen all the currently open files.

[RobbieThe1st]

If I used Photoshop, I'd definitely want it. Diskspace is *cheap*. Time is not - If it can save a few minutes of work at the cost of a few GB or less... It's well worth it.

[Tapewolf]

If I used photoshop it would be on the Mac where I'm fairly sure it won't work.  There is another issue - it would probably destroy the high res versions of the comic, since from what I've heard, Amber's workflow involves reducing as the final step.  Sometimes, I have heard, she has accidentally saved afterwards and thereby left it in low-res.  Something which does that automatically might not be a good thing.

In short, it's a nice idea but it sounds like it's going to require more presence of mind to avoid it causing new problems.
(That's assuming it works like the Gimp autosave mod - which I don't use for this very reason despite the windows port crashing so much - if it autosaves to a different filename or something, it would be fine)

[Turnsky]

i don't actually shrink down in the high res itself, i go to save for web which has an entirely different interface.

[Tapewolf]

i don't actually shrink down in the high res itself, i go to save for web which has an entirely different interface.

Personally, I export them as flat and work from that.  But what I do fairly often is open older files up and merge some of the layers, typically if I need to steal some wings or something else that I can't draw very well myself or when I want to reuse a backdrop.  That would be a big problem if it autosaved them to the original file.
Usually I duplicate them into another window these days after a couple of near-misses, but not always.

As for Amber's technique, I can only go by what I've been told.

[ooklah]

Thanks for both your feed back so far. It's very helpful. I'll work on improving it's usefulness with what you suggested.

As for use on a mac, you are right, it probably won't work. That's something I would like to look into much later in time, but not now unfortunately. (I don't know anything about programming on a mac, currently)

[Darkmoon]

As far as saving backups of my comics (which is still necessary even if I do all my sprite work in "low-res" to begin with) I keep everything as PSD files, and then use an action I made that does "flatten", "save for web", and "close" all in one swell foop. Makes life very convenient, and then I never have to worry about accidentally killing a comic.

Actions are also how I make sure all the font glows I use are consistent, all the lighting effect on the backgrounds are consistent, etc, etc.

As for autosaving... yeah, I wouldn't want that either. Any time I'm doing sprite work, a lot of my work is "gut-instinct, zoom out, zoom in, go back to edit some more," and if it's not turning out right, the good old "close to revert."

[RobbieThe1st]

The autosave should be to a *new* file, preferably in some sort of "temporary" directory. That way, a user-defined number of backups can be kept, and it doesn't mess with the original file.
Because, yea, if it saved to the master PSD, no way I'd be using it.