Photoshop is a very solid piece of software, but as every other software, it tends to crash from time to time. For me it’s sometimes happens when I use a plug-in, or work with a very big image, and each time I of course forgot to save my work beforehand. But that’s normal, as the crashes are so rare, I never developed the habit to save regularly :)

Have auto recovery save on

One can’t really prevent a crash, but one can be prepared for one. You could either learn to save regularly, or even better, use the Photoshops auto save function. This is turned on by default, but it’s set to every 10 minutes. I think this is a little too much time. I suggest changing this, so it saves a copy every 5 minutes. If you are painting in a mask, 5 minutes is a long enought time, to do a lot of work.

You can find this setting under Edit/Preferences/File Handling/Automatic save recover information every. There you can also change how often it’s saved.

There is also a second setting here, that should stay on, that is Save in Background. This is so you are not interrupted in your work while Photoshop is saving.

Photoshop settings

Folder location

What to do after crash?

If you are lucky, and Photoshop saved a backup, once you open it again, your file will be loaded automatically. If it does not load, you still have a chance to get it.

What you need to do, is go directly into Photoshops Auto recovery folder, where it saves all the backups as PSB files (PSB is almost same as PSD, it just supports bigger files, it can be opened in Photoshop). You can find the folder under System drive (C:)/Users/ your user name here/AppData/Roaming/Adobe Photoshop (CS6 or CC)/AutoRecover. It’s possible you will not see the AppData folder, as it’s hidden. In that case you have to go under View/Options int the File explorer, and in the tab named View turn on Show hidden files. Be careful opening the files in the AutoReover folder directly in Photoshop, as when you do, Photoshop will delete the recovery immediately.  I suggest copying them to a separate folder first.

This is all under Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Under Windows 7 this will be very similar, but I can’t really tell where the folder is on a Mac, as I don’t own one, and can’t try it out :)

Btw. for a little more info on crashes, check out the very first comment under the post by Foster Brereton (fbrereto)

What is you favourite time of day to shoot photo? Mine is probably the Blue hour, followed closely by the sunset :) The best thing about the blue hour is, that even when the weather is bad, or just boring, you usually get a nice shot.

Like this photo, taken in Zurich. The sky is completely blue with almost no clouds, but with the water having another beautiful shade of blue, it still makes for quite an nice photo. This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

As every Monday, I have for you a new process post today. This time I chosen to show you this photo from Prague. This is taken from one of my favourite spots there (you can see my list of spots here).

So let’s first look at the finished and the original 0EV exposure.

Finished photo

Original photo

There was not to much there regarding the dynamic range, but still a lot of things to tweak. For some reason, I don’t remember, I took 7 exposures here. In retrospect, I would probably be OK with three, but since I already had all, I used them.

I started with tweaks in Lightroom, where I corrected the white balance and lens distortions.

All exposures

Lightroom edit

From there I loaded all the exposures into Oloneo Photoengine, and just by changing the strength and contrast. From there I continued into Photoshop (layers numbered from bottom up):

1. Oloneo Photoengine result
2. 0EV exposure, set to 20% opacity, to recover a little of the contrast lost in the merge
3. 0EV exposure once more, to remove ghosting
4. -2EV exposure to darken few bright areas
5. desaturated a little the strong yellow lights
6. Color Efex pro contrast to add more local contrast to the photo.
7. Retouched out the light streak I caught in the bottom left
8+9. Added glow to the photo
10. Little more contrast to the whole photo
11. Color efex detail extractor to add more details to the sky and the trees in the foreground
12. Color balance to make the photo a little warmer
13. A little more contrast
14. Brightened the photo a little
15. TK actions Vibrance mask to add more color to less saturated areas of the photo.

Oloneo merge

Photoshop editing

And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

To bad the sky was not blue when I took this photo. That would create such a better contrast between the Matterhorn and the background. But I still really liked this photo, so I decided to edit it anyway :) This was taken right before the sunset, as the sun coloured the clouds as they passed across Matterhorn.

This is a single image, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. It was taken from the middle of Zermatt with a long lens.

I was going through my photos from the Switzerland trip, and I noticed that I haven’t yet posted any photos form the day I spend in Lucerne. So for today I chosen one from there. The thing I really liked there, was this opening in the water power plant, which created really strong waves in the water. So I thought of using the ND filter, and get these nice soft waves in the shot. And it worked out really well :)

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine. I actually edited them twice, to get different brightness in them, and then blended them in Photoshop.