Photoshop Tragedy

[Photo-John]

Photography horror stories are always fun. I've got a fresh one to share with you. It happened this morning.

I had a product photo job to deliver to a client this morning. I shot the photos on Monday and the final, processed image was to be delivered at 9 AM, this morning. Of course, I waited until the last minute to do the processing. I enjoy the photography part. But even though I'm pretty good with Photoshop, I dread spending more time sitting in front of the computer.

So I started the processing last night at about midnight. Smart, huh?

First, I convert the RAW image to a TIFF. Then I need to place a screen on the ipod nano that's in the photo. I take the screen from an old product photo, tweak it to fit, and make it a little transparent so that it fits the tone of the image. Next, I have to remove an old logo from the product and replace it with a new one. The client doesn't have the correct logo so I have to sort of hack one from another one. That's a pain in the ass and takes a while. Once it's done I place it on the product and tweak it so that the perspective is correct. That's about an hour in - 1 AM. I'm not so young so I'm tired. I set the alarm for the ungodly hour of 7:30 AM and go to bed.

In the morning, after feeding the worthless, greedy, little felines, I get back to work. I'm back in front of the computer at about 7:50. The last task is the worst. I have to drop out the background. If you've ever had to make a big selection in Photoshop to remove a background, you know how much this sucks. It's tedious and takes a lot of concentration. But it has to be done. I have it done and the background replaced with pure white at about 8:30. Last step - add fake drop shadows. And save. Of course, I've been saving at regular intervals since I started with this file. I have a 40 meg layered TIFF file. It's no problem. So I save it for the last time. The next step will be to flatten it and save a JPEG for the client.

That's when it happens. My antivirus software was updating in the background. No big deal. Except, as I close a couple of programs, a antivirus window pops up asking whether I want to restart now. Of course not. But for some reason - either I clicked something I shouldn't have, or there was a timer that I didn't notice, the damn machine shuts itself down. No big deal. I saved the file at regular intervals. Probably, I'll just have to redo the drop shadow.

I wait as the computer restarts. I wait.

When the Windows is back up and running I open Photoshop. But where's my file? Maybe I accidentally saved it in the wrong directory. Damn!!!!!

All I can find is a .tmp file where my 40 meg TIFF should be. It's gone. Insert loud - LOUD - cursing. Sorry, kitty cats.

I call the client. He answers and says, "Are we still on for 9 o'clock?"

Nope.

to be continued

[Asylum Steve]

John, sorry to hear what happened. I'm curious: do you save by shortcutting (Ctr-S)? The reason I ask is I've noticed that I too have created .tmp files while working in ps a few times. And I think it was caused by a mistyped short cut.

I work quickly and save very often, and I've gotten to the point where it's little more than a flick of the left hand. Luckily, I've never deleted or replaced an important file by doing this.

BTW, the temp file was always in the same folder as the file I was working on...

[almo]

Just damn.

[drg]

I can provide suitable curses and obscenities in several languages if that would help.

All I can say is ARRRGGHHHHH!!!!!

[opus]

I don't exactly have a photoshop story but mine is similar. I worked in the electronic prepress department of a trade shop for awhile in the 90s. Our shop was extremely progressive technologically. We always kept up with the latest and greatest technology. Anyway, at one point we decided we needed to expand our server space, so we bought a huge (at the time) 90-gigabyte RAID server. Space like that was unheard of. Anyway, shutting the thing down was a major project and took about five minutes from the time you initiated the shutdown procedure.

So one week we got a HUGE project updating several versions of a science textbook. We needed to make extensive type changes and add new photos to several different language versions of the same book. The job put us all on overtime for a couple weeks straight. Each of us would get one chapter to work on, and often several shifts would end up working on the same files because we had to wait for the color correcting to be done before we could place and process the photos. In the meantime each photo we placed had the risk of altering the clipping path and/or runaround, shifting the text undesirably onto the next page and even possibly dropping text altogether. Basically what I'm saying was it was tedious, careful work on a tight deadline, and delays were costly.

So one day I was working the Saturday shift alone. I think I put in 8 hours and got a lot done. At the end of the day, just before I left, I started the shutdown procedure on the RAID. All of a sudden, I realized I wasn't sure if I had forgotten to do a final save of the file I was working on. I didn't know what to do. The work I had done at the very end of the day might be lost. (Maybe about 15 minutes worth, if that.) So then I thought about how the server took a long time to shut down, and I thought just maybe if I quick saved the file, I could "sneak" in the save before the shutdown got to the RAID volume the file was on (as I imagined the process worked in my head). So I ran over and hit save. But it took a long time to save the file, as it was a huge document. And then the screen went black.

So anyway, it was very difficult to live with myself until Monday when I'd find out what really happened to the file. And it was the worst-case scenario: End-of-file error. I had completely corrupted the file. So alllllllllll the work that had been done on it was up in smoke. Well, not exactly. Since we always did daily backups of everything to Retrospect, we were able to go back to the file as it was on the Friday before I had worked on it. So my whole day's work was lost, but all else was saved.

I never got in any trouble for the incident, the worst I got was a disappointed look from the shop manager. Man, I loved that job.

[Photo-John]

Back to my story. Sorry about the pause.

When we left off, I'd just told the client I had lost the file. He was very understanding. I told him I'd make small copies of the plain photos and send them and redo the lost work the next night. So he'd see what I'd done and get his photo one day late. That made my life a little easier. But I'd still lost two hours of work I didn't want to redo. And I was very upset about losing work through what appeared to be no fault of mine.

So I'm staring at the computer, at the Photoshop .tmp file. I try to open it and it isn't recognized. I try copying it and renaming it and changing the extension back to .tif. It opens. It Opens!!!!!!

IT OPENS!!!!!!!!

Do you understand? I have my file back. And all the layers are intact. This is awesome. I haven't felt so elated in a long time.

The moral? Try renaming your .tmp file

Don't give up hope?

I don't know if there's really a message in this. But it's a good story - especially since it has happy ending.

[almo]

YAY!!!!!!

WTG Johhny Boy. I was feeling quite bad for ya' there. I am glad you got it all back and intact. Beautiful! Can we see the image in question?

[Liz]

Congratulations! Wow! That is really some story...you should put it in the next newsletter - seriously. I'm very happy for you, John.

BTW, how are the kitties?

Liz

[Photo-John]

Can we see the image in question?

Good idea! You would never know how much work goes into an image like this from just looking at it.

[Photo-John]

So you read what I suggested to do then John, in the other thread about this.

Nope

Tried it myself immediately after hanging up with the client. I just didn't finish posting the story last night. But great minds think alike - right?

[Peter_AUS]

So you read what I suggested to do then John, in the other thread about this.

[mjs1973]

PJ , you must be a mind reader. You tried Peter's suggestion, BEFORE he posted it, and you answered his question BEFORE he even asked it!!

Glad to hear everything worked out for ya Captain!

[Photo-John]

and you answered his question BEFORE he even asked it!!

Oh yeah. That's weird. The timestamp feature in the forums has been acting up periodically. An upgrade is in the works,

[megan]

Ow. That's painful. Ow.
Here's a logo hint, though - google "best brands of the world," they've got a good selection of vector logos of many many companies worldwide to download for free.

I also have a few tricks for extracting them out of pdf's....
Feel free to email for more info, though it's pretty easy and you probably already know how!

Megan

[Peter_AUS]

I posed in the other thread you started about this, and reposted back in this thread. Was confusing to me that it happened that way as well, but it is bound to happen with two threads about the same thing.

[Asylum Steve]

John, I know what happened to you is very rare, and also that it worked out in the end. Still, it caused quite an amount of stress...

What I do that helps avoid that whole situation is to save (copy) the folder of whatever important image I'm working on in ps to both my second internal HD as well as an external HD at regular intervals. The internal HD every half hour or so, and the external HD at the end of the work session.

[Photo-John]

Steve-
Thanks. To answer an earlier question of yours, I also use Ctrl+S. I probably do it every couple minutes. That's part of the reason I wasn't that concerned when my computer started to shut down. But now that I've had this happen, I'm definitely interested in a system to protect myself from a similar event. Your idea is perfect. I was working right off my external drive when it happened. But I'll start working on the computer's hard drive and then copying my work to the external. That's a very good idea.

Thanks!