Need help STAT re: RAW in PS

[Breanna]

Oh geeze..... First of all, sorry if this is in the wrong forum. I need an answer quickly and thought to come here first. I did an engagement session yesterday....I just spent about an hour and a half editing in the RAW in CS3....(pardon my lack of technical knowledge here) using the RAW menu that pops up automatically when I open the images in CS3. I've done it dozens of times before, and I never have to "save" the changes I make. I mess with the exposure, warmth, contrast, etc, and it stays with the image. Well.....not this time. I went to move all of the images into their own file on my desktop so that I could easily convert the ones I wanted into JPGs, and when I opened them, they were back to their "original" form. I'm dying here. Any ideas? What happened? Are my edits "saved" anywhere else? I told the couple that I would have them ready tomorrow since I knew I would have a couple of hours to get the editing done today, but now I don't know if I will have time to re-do my work if it is lost.

 

[Big Mike]

I think the problem might have occurred when you moved the files.

If my thinking is correct, Adobe Camera RAW (the pop up program) saves the changes either in a single database file or in separate little files...but part of that is that is the location of the original RAW files. So when you moved the files, this association was lost. Try moving them back and see if that helps. There is probably a way to 're-associate' the files with the saved changes...but I don't use it enough to know it.

When I'm using Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop, I will typically save/export the image before moving on. That would take a little more time in your workflow but it would save you from this problem.

 

[Sw1tchFX]

Download a trial of Lightroom, edit with that, export them into a subfolder, be done with it.

You'll have your editing done in a fraction of the time it took you earlier as well.

 

[Mike_E]

If you haven't deleted the original folder, try moving a file back to it and see if the data is restored.

If so you can just use bridge to save as to another folder.

I would suggest you try Lightroom, just not in the middle of a paid shoot.

 

[KmH]

One of the options in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) is to put the edit information in a 'sidecar' file that has the file name extention .xmp and that is the default setting for ACR.

If you move the image but not the sidecar file your edit info doesn't move to the new location. If this is what happened in your case, the sidecar files are still in the original image folder and you can just move them to the new folder with the images.

 

[davebmck]

I agree with the above suggestions that you have separated the CR2 files from their xmp files. It won't help you this time, but an alternative to working with files like this is to convert the CR2 files to DNG format. The DNG format does not use the sidecar files. All the changes are stored in the dng file.

 

[Garbz]

Adobe CameraRAW stores any edits you make as separate files as per default. These are small xml files and should be moved around with the image for any changes to be recognised.

Download a trial of Lightroom, edit with that, export them into a subfolder, be done with it.

You'll have your editing done in a fraction of the time it took you earlier as well.

Not all that helpful to the current problem, also it would suffer from the same issue That said Lightroom does not cut it for many of the effects used in Weddings. Depending on photography style Lightroom may bring nothing to the workflow over using Bridge / Photoshop.

 

[KmH]

I agree with the above suggestions that you have separated the CR2 files from their xmp files. It won't help you this time, but an alternative to working with files like this is to convert the CR2 files to DNG format. The DNG format does not use the sidecar files. All the changes are stored in the dng file.

ACR can be configured to embed the edit info in the file rather than putting it in a sidecar file. The user has to go into the ACR preferences and turn the option on.

I'm not yet convinced converting to the DNG format is the way to go. I think when a couple of the major camera makers like Canon and Nikon make DNG their format of choice I'll start using it. Till then I'm sticking with NEF.

 

[davebmck]

Dng is an open specification. The manufacturers formats are proprietary. That benefits the manufacturers, not us. It's just like the pdf format that's universally available now. You don't have to own MS Word or other manufacturer specific specific software just to read a basic text file. Open specifications are always a better option for the general public.

 

[Garbz]

I don't care either way unless I am archiving. I wouldn't ever archive in RAWs. Who is to say that Lightroom will support the Nikon D200 RAW in 10 years, who is to say Lightroom 2.0 which does read them will run on Windows 8 or 9. I am sure it will read the JPEGs or TIFFs just fine, and since DNG is an open spec I am sure someone has a converter to convert the DNG to whatever you want.