Real World Digital Photography, 2nd edition

Master Images

You can spend hours and hours finessing, tweaking, perfecting, and slaving over every pixel in a file to create the perfect image. This final image file contains both the original image capture and the interpretive layers dedicated to clean-up, dodging, burning, and creative additions. It's very important that you save this file as a layered file—what we refer to as the master file. It's the file you'll return to the next time you decide to make a change, create a print, or send someone a copy (Figure 14.1). You should save the master image file in PSD or TIFF format, with all layers, channels, and paths intact. This is the image file that you'll need to archive, catalog, and back up for safekeeping. You can take advantage of special ...