To Flatten or not to Flatten… Curious

DC
Posted By
Darren_Clark
Jul 6, 2008
Views
262
Replies
3
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Closed
Hi everyone,

Curious question…do you flatten your layers when finished? PSD files are huge and flattening seems to compress the size.

Also, if you do flatten, can you open them up again to make further adjustments? If so, how do you do this?

Cheers!
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C
Curvemeister
Jul 6, 2008
I always keep the original image.

If the image has less than about 30 minutes of work in it, I generally flatten when I’m finished.

If I have an hour or so invested, I keep the unflattened PSD. I have one or two images, group portraits with complex compositing and color matching, that I have so much time invested in that I would never flatten them.
JJ
John Joslin
Jul 6, 2008
And to answer your question, once a flattened version is saved over itself (which will happen if you don’t do a "Save As…" and give it a new name) the layers are gone for ever.

Drive space is cheap – your work is not.
S
Stan
Jul 7, 2008
What’s the difference ion Merge Down & Flatten?

Thanx

On Sun, 6 Jul 2008 00:29:13 -0700, wrote:

I always keep the original image.

If the image has less than about 30 minutes of work in it, I generally flatten when I’m finished.

If I have an hour or so invested, I keep the unflattened PSD. I have one or two images, group portraits with complex compositing and color matching, that I have so much time invested in that I would never flatten them.

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