Saving As A Master Image

[rpcrowe]

A "Master Image" is an image that has been edited with initial RAW input sharpening, color adjustment, brightness control, elimination of any extraneous objects (such a lead in my dog portraits), straightening, plus dodging and burning. In fact, all editing EXCEPT final cropping and output sharpening. I prefer to save this image as a Photoshop PSD file but, any lossless file such as PNG or even TIFF could work...

The advantage of this workflow is that I can go back to the image at any time and crop it the way I need it and then apply output sharpening for the final product.

The simple extra step of saving the image as a Master Image can save time and work later if the image is needed in a different cropping.

As an example, I had just completed the Maltese Rescue California 2018 Calendar. As usual, I had included images of the various breeds of small dogs that we had rescued. However, the president, the vice president (my wife) and the board of directors told me that they preferred the 2018 calendar to include only Maltese.

I was able to go back over previous my Maltese Dog portraits and select 13 images (cover and 12-months). The images already had virtually all of the editing done except for the final cropping and the final output sharpening. It was just an hour's worth of work instead of many hours of editing to "reinvent the wheel" Since these files had not been cropped, I was able to crop them in the way I needed...

The Master Image system has saved my bacon many times

[Saorsa]

I do this whenever I begin working seriously on an image. I do the best I can and add an 'a' suffix to the filename. DSC_1234 will be unchanged when I create DSC_1234a.

[NorthernFocus]

Just get it perfect SOOC and it's a moot point. ..

[DanK]

Oops. I posted a reply, but it got lost in the ether.

I do something similar in Lightroom, where I generally do a fairly large proportion of my editing. I just create snapshots at stages I want to keep. One could use virtual copies for this, but I like seeing where the snapshots fall in the editing history, which makes it clear what the editing differences are among them. And this takes no storage space to speak of: just the original raw file and the tiny XML sidecar file.

[Manfred M]

I save all my files as Photoshop document files (psd or psb) with all layers intact. I give them logical names that describe the image with a version number / letter to save the edits I have done.