Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Saving Files

After you’ve put a ton of work into whipping up a lovely creation, don’t forget to save it or you’ll never see it again. As in any program, be sure to save early and often so your efforts don’t go to waste if your computer crashes or the power goes out.

Tip

Photoshop sports a life-saving Auto Recovery feature that automatically saves your document every 10 minutes (though you can change the time interval; see the box on Photoshop’s Magical Auto Recovery). You can also keep working while Photoshop saves your file in the background, meaning you don’t have to wait until it’s finished to do something else. And new in Photoshop CC is the ability to trigger yet another document save before the first one finishes!

The simplest method is to choose File→Save or press ⌘-S (Ctrl+S). If you haven’t previously saved the file, Photoshop summons the Save As dialog box so you can pick where to save the file, give it a name, and choose a file format (your options are explained in the next section). If you have already saved the file, Photoshop replaces the previously saved version with the current version without asking if that’s what you want to do. In some situations, that’s fine, but it can be disastrous if you wanted to keep more than one version of the image.

You can play it safe by using the Save As dialog box every time you save. It always prompts you for a new file name (see Figure 3-4), which is handy when you want to save another version of the document or save it in a different ...