September 2009 Entry: Passage of Time - Woadsbury

[töff]

Once more I beg humbly on my knees on my knees for the challenge not to be closed before I submit my final on Sunday evening (Pacific time)! I thought we had through the end of September, for the September challenge. Ugh, time -- esp. the lack of it -- is a horrible HORRIBLE thing.

Boss is absent today so I'm putting in some time on the WIP ... according to notes from my writers group discussion last Tues eve, I've got the first iteration of the village set in the nook of the river. There's a low stone wall, some houses, and some paths. That's all they had. This is after the Romans withdrew, and the Dark Ages have begun: c.500 A.D.

[Coyotemax]

if you need support from other entrants to extend the closing date, count me in. I'd love to see this complete.

[töff]

Thnx Coyo.

The project just took one of those nice unexpected great leaps forward as I realized that I do NOT have to have six evenly-shaped & -sized thumbnail windows. Each thumbnail will be a slightly larger zoom-out, and/or a pan (like concentrating first on the village, then on the hilltop fortifications) ... so I can try to serve up the time slices in some more artful manner than just a row of cloned cubbyholes.

But, ugh, the worktime. I might have an hour or two tomorrow, then I have Sunday, and that's it.

[Steel General]

*begins cheesy, terrible latino accent*

You can doo eet!

*ends cheesy, terrible latino accent*

[töff]

LOST WORK in Photoshop

So I did a fancy forest, and added a series of roads and trails ... and lost all my work UGH. Not sure how it happened. Somehow, I closed a SmartObject without saving the changes, I think, who knows ...

It happened again, and I think I know why. I was working in a Smart Object, and I hit SAVE, and it said (something like) "Can't update SmartObject."

If you don't use Photoshop, you probably don't care ... but, backstory, a (non-linked) SmartObject is essentially a file within a file. It's not a separate document on your hard-drive; it's embedded in your main .PSD. You can open it in another tab/window in Photoshop, edit it, save it ... but instead of saving as a file on your hard drive, it saves as an internal segment of its parent .PSD.

Well, what I thought "Can't update SmartObject" meant was, it could not update the display of the SmartObject in the parent .PSD, which (of course) was open in another tab. But I thought I was OK, because I don't care about the display, really ... it'll refresh the view eventually, when I zoom or whatever ... and, in general (I told myself), in Photoshop and 99% of all software, you can't close an edited-but-unsaved document without the system telling you, "Yo, save changes before closing?" So I thought that when I hit SAVE, it had saved the SmartObject. When I hit CLOSE, it said nothing; it just closed the tab.

Well, I was wrong. When I closed the Smart Object, I saw in the parent .PSD that all my changes since my last save were gone. That was a few days ago, and the work was gone.

Yesterday it happened again: "Can't update SmartObject." Well, instead of closing the SmartObject tab, I looked in the tab for the parent .PSD, and sure enough, it only reflected changes since the last successful save. In this particular case, I avoided utter panic and fury and despair, and I was able to find a gigantic .PSB object in the Photoshop temp folder, which had been modified when I hit SAVE. Okay, so, it DID save my changes! Hah! but it did NOT write the updated SmartObject data into the parent .PSD.

I copied that .PSB file *out* of the temp folder, because when Photoshop closes, it clears the temp folder, which had my technically-saved-but-kinda-not work in it! Thus I was able to preserve my work.

I think I am going to experiment with a new workflow for a while, of relying more on linked SmartObjects than embedded ones. This is how I have operated in my day job (prepress graphics) for 20 years or so. Photoshop SmartObjects are somewhat new, and I am not really versed in their quirks (I think they came out in CS2, and only by CS4 did Adobe repair the alphamask lock for them) ... but if I have everything saved as files on my hard drive, I can more easily ensure that I don't lose hours upon hours of work.

So, I hope this info is of some use to someone here. Grain of salt, as always. Cheers!

[Coyotemax]

Nice save. I'll keep that in mind should that requester pop up for me (luckily it hasn't but I haven't worked that much with smart objects yet).

So once you have the psb on it's own, it opens like a regular psd if you open it with photoshop?

[töff]

Yeh, .PSB is Photoshop Large Document Format.

Photoshop opens it like any other file. I resaved to .PSD format just because that's what I'm used to.

[töff]

So here I've pretty much moved beyond all my Google Earth satelllite imagery and replaced everything with Photoshop-originated terrain: elevations, woods, trails, etc.

This is the 500 A.D. era. I started here because as each era progresses I will delete forest (for cropland and timber) and add buildings, roads ... various extensions of the Woadsbury Castle ... etc.

[töff]

Off to a slow start today ... including (but not limited to) a nice overflowing toilet ... ah the joys of losing worktime to the mundane!

I'm doing the first of the fortifications, which is a wooden keep, a stone wall, and a wooden palisade. I haven'ty put the earthworks in yet.

[töff]

Earthworks.