Big Assignment and Major screw up!

[Dave Gurtcheff]

Hi all: I received what is for me a rather big commission to shoot 4 homes owned by a client that has purchased some of my fine art seascape prints. I spent 4 different days shooting, waiting for optimal sky and sun position, etc. I narrowed down what I would email to my client, and did EXTENSIVE retouching and optimization on each, so as to showcase these homes. I down sized to 72dpi, 12" wide JPGs to email. Today I started to print the project, and to my absolute horror, most of the "masters" full res, full size, all layers intact, and labeled and saved as such, were in fact 72dpi 12" JPGs. I didn't know whetheer to bang my head against the wall, or throw up. My work flow for making emailable JPGs is to change the master to 8 bit, then immediately do a "save as" and rename it, and THEN down size, etc. Seems I somehow really screwd up and my masters AND the down sized images both became small JPGs. The several images that I did not screw up were burned to 2 DVDs as soon as I finished working on them and down sized later. The "masters" on my hard drive were also down sized, but the DVD back ups were not.
I post this to warn everyone to be smarter than I was. I am in process of re-doing a lot of work, and there is a dead line I promised to meet. Several of my efforts on one home are attached.
Regards
Dave G.

[roskav]

hmm hard luck .. I find that using photoshop actions for that type of thing eliminates the potential for cock-up!... If you used Aperture or Lightroom you might save yourself a bit of bother in that way too.  

Ros

[marimagen]

I'm sorry to hear this but I guess it happens to all of us at some point. I do most of my work in RAW, so basically when I get home from shooting, I download the contents of my cards to my PC and immediately burn the corresponding CDs/DVDs. That way, I always have backups in case something goes wrong. May be you should try this even though it's a bit time consuming. Good luck.

[feppe]

I don't get it. How can you overwrite RAWs/TIFFs/PSDs with JPEGs? Or did you downsize and save the downsized version as both PSD and JPEG? If you save downsized versions in any other than JPEG format, why? Just curious as your workflow and how this could've happened sounds a bit strange to me.

[haefnerphoto]

Perhaps this is what happened.  When saving a file that has layers or extra channels as a jpeg it is saved as a copy in the chosen folder.  When you close the small file (which is actually your original downsized tif or psd) a dialog box opens asking if you want to save the changes (which is the downsized image size) and you must say NO!  If not, your original is now a 72ppi tif.   Jim

[Dave Gurtcheff]

Perhaps this is what happened.  When saving a file that has layers or extra channels as a jpeg it is saved as a copy in the chosen folder.  When you close the small file (which is actually your original downsized tif or psd) a dialog box opens asking if you want to save the changes (which is the downsized image size) and you must say NO!  If not, your original is now a 72ppi tif.   Jim
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=138770\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

That's probably what I did. By habit, when prompted to save before closing a file, I always say "yes". I think you just solved my screw up.
I'm going to go back and look at my work flow and see If I can find if I did what you suggested....I think you nailed it, Thanks all
Dave

[pfigen]

The safest way to do this, and I do it twenty or thirty times a day, is to use the Image>Duplicate command. Never, ever, do something to your master file that you'll regret if you save it anywhere along the way. One of the other advantages of using the Duplicate command is that when you save that file to its own folder, all the subsequent duplicates you make at that time will default to the same save location.

[feppe]

The safest way to do this, and I do it twenty or thirty times a day, is to use the Image>Duplicate command. Never, ever, do something to your master file that you'll regret if you save it anywhere along the way. One of the other advantages of using the Duplicate command is that when you save that file to its own folder, all the subsequent duplicates you make at that time will default to the same save location.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=138788\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Good advice and I might adopt that. I believe that messes up Lightroom integration, though, which is quite inadequate.

[espressogeek]

I have been dumping everything right into aperture, also known on the street as appleturd, and then bouncing out files to either photoshop or as raw to a folder for processing. Then I copy the appleturd, I mean aperture, library to an external drive for backup. I could probably script that last part and make it a cron job but I have not got around to it.

[mmurph]

Sorry to hear about this!  Wow!

I download my files to my internal "RAW" (name) drive on my computer.  Then I copy those files to an external USB drive of the same size that stays *offline* almost all of the time.

I never work on files on either RAW drive.  After selecting files, I copy the ones I need to my internal WORKING drive.  That drive is also backed up to an external USB drive of the same size, that also is usually offline.  

I have used that process for a few years, it works quite well for me.  No help to you of course, but thought I would post it as a suggestion.

Any chance you still have images on your CF cards? I suppose you overwrote them.  A laptop you used in the field?

Good luck!

Best,
Michael

[dct123]

I recommend Photoshop CS3 Bridge to download your pix.  I've set the parameters of Bridge to download from the camera card automatically when it's inserted into the reader. Bridge creates a new sub-folder for each download and I've set it up to name each new folder with the current yyyy/mm/dd. You can add a prefix to the filename at this point. (Like "Beach" or Hotel" if I you have several cards/scene changes for a single day's shoot.) I've also set up Bridge to save copies to the network backup drive at the same time as the original transfer from the camera card. It's all automatic. If you don't have CS3 it's a good reason to get it.

[plugsnpixels]

Is it possible to go back to your CF cards (or similar) and recover the original images? I've had good luck with FileSalvage in this regard, even after formatting the cards.

A habit I have before doing anything with my original images is to archive them onto an external FireWire drive, after which I write them to CDs when enough accumulate. I do this manually; I don't trust any imaging app to do it for me.