Saving Your Work

You’ve heard the advice before: save files early and often. Happily, saving your work is easy in Elements. You don’t need to do anything special to save information like tags or collections in the Organizer; that happens automatically. You just need to save images you’ve created or changed in the Editor. When you’re ready to save a file, go to File→Save As or press Ctrl+Shift+S/⌘-Shift-S to bring up the Save As dialog box, shown in Figure 2-17.

Figure 2-17. Elements’ Save As dialog box changes a little depending on what you’re saving, but this example is pretty typical. When you click the Format drop-down menu (where the cursor is here), you’ll see a long list of file formats to choose from.

The top part of the Save As dialog box is pretty much the same as it is for any program: You choose where you want to save the file, what to name it, and the file format you want. (More about file formats in a moment.) You also get some important choices that are unique to Elements:

• Include in the Organizer. This checkbox is turned on the first time you use Elements. Leave it on and your photo gets saved in the Organizer. Turn it off if you don’t want the new file to go to the Organizer. If you turn it off, Elements should remember to leave it off, at least for this editing session or until you save a photo that came from the Organizer.

• Save in Version Set with Original. This option tells the Organizer to save your image (including any edits you’ve made) as a new version, separate from the original. The image gets the same name as the original plus a suffix to indicate it’s an edited version.

  Elements lets you create as many versions as you want. That way, you can go directly to any state of your image that you’ve saved as a version, which is really handy. When you turn on this checkbox to start a version set, from then on, you’ll be presented with the Save As dialog box every time you save. Elements does that to give you the chance to create a new version each time.

• Layers. If your image has layers (see Chapter 6), turn on this checkbox to keep them. If you turn this setting off, Elements usually forces you to save as a copy. To avoid having to do that, flatten your image (Flattening an image) before saving it. But bear in mind that, once you close a flattened image, you can’t get your layers back again—flattening is a permanent change.

• As a Copy. When you save an image as a copy, Elements makes the copy, names it “<Original filename> copy”, and puts the copy away, but the original version remains open. If you want to work on the copy, you have to specifically open it. Sometimes Elements forces you to save it as a copy—for instance, when you want to save a layered image and you turn off the layers option in the Save As dialog box, as explained in the previous bullet point.

• ICC Profile. Turn on this checkbox to make Elements embed a color profile (Choosing a Color Space) in your file.

• Use Lower Case Extension (Windows only). This setting makes Elements save your file as yourfile.jpg rather than yourfile.JPG. Leave this setting on unless you have a reason to turn it off. (You don’t see this checkbox on a Mac because OS X always uses lowercase extensions.)

File Formats Elements Understands

Elements gives you loads of file format options in the Save As dialog box. Your best choice depends on how you plan to use the image:

• Photoshop (.psd, .pdd). It’s a good idea to save your photos as .psd files—the native file format for Elements and Photoshop—before you work on them. A .psd file can hold lots of information, and you don’t lose any data by saving in this format. It also lets you keep layers, which is important even if you haven’t used them for much yet.

• BMP (.bmp). This format is an old Windows standby. It’s the file format that the Windows operating system uses for many graphics tasks.

  GEM IN THE ROUGH: Saving Options

  Elements gives you several ways to save files. Before choosing one, you need to consider whether you want to create version sets (File Formats Elements Understands) of your photos.

  To tell Elements how to react to the Save command, in the Editor, go to Edit→Preferences→Saving Files/Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor→Preferences→Saving Files. In the Preferences dialog box that appears, you see the On First Save drop-down menu. By making a selection here, you can control (to some extent) when you’ll see a dialog box offering you options for saving your file, and when Elements will behave like any other program and just save your changes without asking you for any input.

  For most people, it’s fine to leave this menu set to “Ask if Original” (explained below). But if you want more control over how Elements saves your photos (if you always want the option to create a new version set without having to remember to choose Save As, for instance), you can configure Elements to suit you.

  Here’s what the three On First Save options do:

  • Always Ask. Choose this setting and, when you press Ctrl+S/⌘-S to save, Elements brings up the Save As dialog box the first time you save—if this is the first time you’ve opened the file in this session of Elements. Close the file and reopen it while Elements is still running, and you won’t see the Save As dialog box the next time you save. But once you exit Elements and launch it again, you get the Save As dialog box again the first time you press Ctrl+S/⌘-S. You can think of this option as short for “Always ask the first time I save a file in an editing session and then don’t bug me anymore.”

  • Ask If Original. If you’re editing your original file (as opposed to a version) and don’t have any version sets, Elements opens the Save As dialog box the first time you save the file. On subsequent saves, or if you already have a version set, Elements just saves right over the existing version (unless you specifically do a Save As to create a new version). This option is meant to help you avoid inadvertently creating dozens of versions of each file as you edit.

  • Save Over Current File. When you select this option, Elements overwrites your existing file when you press Ctrl+S/⌘-S, without offering you the Save As dialog box at all. This is the way most other programs behave when saving—if you save an existing file in Word, for instance, you don’t get a dialog box; Word just saves your changes, writing over the previous version of the file. If you use Elements as the external editor for another photo-management program like iPhoto or Lightroom, this is the option you should use in order to create proper versions in the other program. If you choose this menu option and then, while you’re working, decide you want to Save As instead of Save, press Ctrl+Shift+S/⌘-Shift-S (or just choose Save As from the Editor’s File menu).

  There are certain situations where Elements presents you with the Save As dialog box no matter what you choose here. For instance, say you add layers (explained in Chapter 6) to a JPEG file. You can’t save a JPEG with layers, so Elements brings up the Save As dialog box to let you choose a different file format for saving your work.

  The File Saving Options section of the Saving Files Preferences dialog box has two other menus—Image Previews and File Extensions—but you probably won’t ever need to change those settings.

  You can also use the Saving Files Preferences dialog box to control how well your image file works with other programs. If you leave the Maximize PSD File Compatibility drop-down menu set to Always, Elements embeds a flattened image file for the benefit of programs that don’t understand layers. That makes for a substantially larger file, but with disk space so cheap these days, it’s usually best to let Elements maximize compatibility. If you choose Ask from this menu instead, you’ll see the dialog box in Figure 2-18 when you save a layered PSD file.

  

  Figure 2-18. Choose Always in the Maximize PSD File Compatibility menu if you want people who don’t have Elements to be able to open your image. The downside: slightly larger files.

• CompuServe GIF (.gif). Everywhere except this menu, this format is known simply as GIF; Adobe adds “CompuServe” here because CompuServe invented and owns the code for this format. This format is used primarily for web graphics, especially files without a lot of subtle shadings of color. For more on when to choose GIFs, see Chapter 17. Creating Animated GIFs explains how to animate GIFs.

• Photo Project Format (.pse). This special format is only for multipage Elements files (see Figure 2-19 and Photo Books).

  

  Figure 2-19. If you add pages to a file (page 515), you see this warning. Elements is telling you it needs to save your multipage project as a PSE file, a format that almost no other programs can open. To learn more about working with PSE files and how to get your project out of Elements for online printing or use by other programs, see the box on page 517.

• Photoshop EPS (.eps). EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) format is used to share documents among different programs. You generally get the best results when the documents in this format are printed on a PostScript printer (some laser printers are PostScript printers; inkjets usually aren’t).

• TIFF (.tif, .tiff). This is another format that, like PSD, preserves virtually all your photo’s info and lets you save layers. Also like PSD files, TIFFs can be really big. This format is used extensively in print production, and some cameras let you to choose it as a shooting option.

• JPEG (.jpg, jpeg, .jpe). Almost everyone who uses a computer has run into JPEGs, and most digital cameras offer this format as an option. Generally, when you bring a JPEG into Elements, you want to use another format when you save it to avoid losing data. Keep reading for more about why.

  Note

  If you’re wondering why JPEG 2000 isn’t on this list, see the box on Bye-Bye, JPEG 2000.

• Photoshop PDF (.pdf, .pdp). Adobe invented PDF (Portable Document Format), which lets you send files to people with Adobe Reader (a free program formerly called Acrobat Reader) so they can easily open and view the files. Elements uses PDF files to create presentations like slideshows. (People with Macs can also use OS X’s Preview to view PDFs.)

• PICT (.pct). PICT is an older Mac format that’s still used by some applications. AppleWorks, for example, handles PICTs better than any other graphics files. Also, sometimes larger file formats like Mac-created TIFFs generate their thumbnail previews as PICT Resource files (the type of PICT used within the TIFF file).

• PNG. Here’s another web-graphic format, created to overcome some of the disadvantages of JPEGs and GIFs. It has its own disadvantages, though; see Previewing Images and Adjusting Color for details.

• Digital Negative (.dng). This format doesn’t appear as a choice in the Save As dialog box’s Format menu; it’s only available in the Raw Converter. This format was developed by Adobe in an attempt to create a more universal way to store all the different Raw file formats (The Raw Converter). You can download a special DNG Converter from Adobe’s website (www.adobe.com/downloads) that lets you convert your camera’s Raw formatted photos into DNG files. DNG files aren’t ready to use the way JPEG or TIFF files are—you have to run them through the Raw Converter before you can use them in projects. Converting to DNG has more about DNG files.

UP TO SPEED: File Formats

After you’ve spent hours creating a perfect image, you’ll want to share it with others. If everyone who wanted to view your images needed a copy of Elements, you probably wouldn’t have a very large audience for your creations. So, Elements lets you save in lots of different file formats.

What does that mean? It’s pretty simple, really. A file format is a way in which your computer saves information so that another program or another computer can read and use the file.

Because there are many different kinds of programs and several different computing platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac, for example), the kind of file that’s best for one use may be a poor choice for doing something else. That’s why many programs, like Elements, can save your work in a variety of different formats. There are many formats, like TIFF and JPEG, that lots of different programs can read. Other formats—like the PUB files that Microsoft Publisher creates or the .pages files from Apple’s Pages program—are easily read only by the program that created them.

Not-so-common file formats

Besides the garden-variety formats in the previous list, Elements lets you save in some formats you’ve probably never heard of. Here’s a list of them—and then you can forget all about them:

• IFF (Interchange File Format). This format has no file extension, because it’s a kind of wrapper for other data. It’s best known for its use for 2-D images in Maya, the popular 3-D modeling program. This is a Mac-only format.

• Alias PIX (.pix). Another format originally used for creating 3-D images, .pix files were originally used by programs like Power Animater. It’s also only available in the Mac Save As menu.

• Filmstrip. This format is designed for use with Premiere Elements, Adobe’s video-editing program, so you won’t see this option unless Premiere is installed on your computer.

• PIXAR. Yup, that Pixar. This is the special format for the movie studio’s high-end workstations, although if you’re working on one of those, it’s extremely unlikely that you’re reading this book.

• Scitex CT. This format is used for prepress work in the printing industry.

• Photoshop Raw. This isn’t the same as your camera Raw file; rather, it’s an older Photoshop format that consists of uncompressed data.

• Photoshop 2.0. This is a very old, Mac-only format used in the early days of Photoshop (1992 or thereabouts). Unless you need to create sample files for exhibits in the Museum of Digital Antiquities, ignore this format.

• Targa TGA or Targa. Developed for systems using the Truevision video board, this format has become a popular graphics format, especially for games.

• PCX. This format was popular for graphics back in the days of DOS (remember PC Paintbrush?). Nowadays it’s mostly used by some kinds of fax systems and a few document-management programs.

COMPATIBILITY CORNER: Opening Obscure File Formats

You may occasionally run into a file format that Elements doesn’t understand. Sometimes you can fake Elements out and con it into opening the document by manually changing the file extension (the letters after the period near the end of the file’s name, like “psd”) to a more common one.

For the few file formats that make Elements throw up its hands in despair, in Windows try IrfanView (www.irfanview.com), a wonderful free program that can open almost any Windows-compatible format. You can sometimes even use IrfanView to salvage damaged files, especially if you get an “invalid JPEG marker” error. If Elements balks at one of your files, first try opening and resaving the photo in IrfanView. If you’re lucky, that may be all you need to do to make Elements recognize the file.

On a Mac, try Graphic Converter (www.lemkesoft.com), a great little program that can open darn near anything. It does great batch conversions, too, and even offers some basic image-editing features. Graphic Converter is shareware (it currently costs $40) with a generous demo period, and it’s worth every penny.

Very rarely, you’ll run across a file that makes even IrfanView or Graphic Converter give up. If that happens, try a Google search. (Use the file’s three- or four-letter extension as your search term.) It’s unlikely to help you open it, but if you can figure out what kind of file it is, you can probably figure out where it came from and ask whoever sent it to you to try again with a more standard format.

About JPEGs

In the next chapter, you’ll read about how throwing away pixels can lead to shoddy-looking pictures. It’s also important to know that certain file formats are designed to make your files as small as possible—and they do that by throwing out information by the bucketful. These formats are known as lossy because they discard, or lose, some of the file’s data every time you save it, to help shrink the file. Sometimes you want that to happen, like when you need a small (and hence, fast-loading) file for a website. Because of that, many of the file formats that were developed for the Web, most notably JPEG, favor smallness above all.

Note

Formats that preserve all your data are called lossless. (You may also run across the term non-lossy, which means the same thing.) The most popular file formats for people who are looking to preserve all their photos’ data are PSD and TIFF.

If you save a file in JPEG format, every time you click the Save button and close the file, your computer squishes some of the data out of the photo. What kind of data? The info your computer needs to display and print the fine details. So you don’t want to keep saving your file as a JPEG over and over again, because every time you do, you lose a little more detail from your image. You can usually get away with saving as a JPEG once or twice, but if you keep it up, sooner or later you’ll start to wonder what happened to your beautiful picture.

It’s OK that your camera takes photos and saves them as JPEGs—those are typically pretty enormous JPEGs. Just importing a JPEG won’t hurt your picture, and neither will opening it to look at it, as long as you don’t make any changes. But once you get your files into Elements, save your pictures as PSD or TIFF files while you work on them. If you want the final product to be a JPEG, change the format back to JPEG after you’re done editing it.

MOMENT OF SILENCE: Bye-Bye, JPEG 2000

If you’ve been saving files in the useful lossless JPEG 2000 format (.jpf, .jpx, .jp2), you may be perplexed to find that in Elements you can’t open those files in the Editor or import them to the Organizer (you can still see any existing JPEG 2000 files in a Windows Organizer catalog originally created in a previous version of Elements; you just can’t do anything with them). That’s right—Elements can no longer read these files. Fortunately, there are ways around this:

• Windows: Download the free ImageMagick program (www.imagemagick.org) and use it to convert your JPEG 2000 images to another lossless format.

• Mac: Use Preview (it’s part of OS X) to open your JPEG 2000 files and save them in the format of your choice.

Keep this in mind, because many books that include practice images on discs and a lot of downloadable artwork use the JPEG 2000 format.

Tip

Your camera may give you several different JPEG compression options to help fit more pictures on your memory card. Always choose the least compression possible. This makes the files slightly larger, but the quality is much, much better, so it’s worth sacrificing the space.

Changing the File Format

It’s super easy to change a file’s format in Elements: Just press Ctrl+Shift+S/⌘-Shift-S or go to File→Save As and, from the Format drop-down menu, select the format you want. Elements makes a copy of your file in the new format and asks you to name it.