Sat Jul 03, 2010 9:01 pm Reply with quote
I spent a couple of hours working on my next photoshop entry. I recently rediscovered the benefits of using smart objects, and immediately created a smart object and worked on it. While working on the smart object, I continually hit the save button. At some point Photoshop froze up, and I had to reboot the computer. When I opened my PSD file, I was in shock to find that nothing had been saved, my smart object was not included in the file, and the work I'd done seemed to be lost. Damn it!
So what the hell was going on when I hit the save button? My smart object layer had to be somewhere on my computer. I checked the temp folder on my PC (Vista) under C:\Users\user name\App Data\Local\Temp and saw a tempory file that was over 3GB! Holy cow, the date modified looked promising. I changed the extension of the file to ".psd" and tried to open it, but Photoshop said that it wasn't a file it could recognize. Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! The internet was little help. Basically that file is full of history information and data used by Photoshop, and getting Photoshop to open it is impossible. IMPOSSIBLE! I've got CS3, I hope newer version of Adobe programs will someday figure out how to use a temp file to recreate a lost project.
3 GB is just too big anyway for a file I had been saving. There had to be another kind of file somewhere that was smaller that contained the specific data I kept saving in the smart object. In the same temp folder, listed just above that temp file, was a file called "Layer 1 copy.psb". I didn't know what a PSB file was, but it had the Photoshop icon next to it. I opened it, and HOORAY! My lost smart object layer opened up as it's own photoshop file. I quickly saved it to my PSC folder.
Come to find out, PSB is a large format photoshop file that can be opened by CS or later. I don't know too much about it, but it makes me wonder why I'm saving my photoshop files as PSD files and not PSB files. Can anybody shed some light on the differences, and the benefits of PSB?
