Creating a Copy to Work on in Photoshop

Sometimes I like to save an image and continue to work on it. There’s a lot of ways Photoshop allows you to do that but we’ll have a look at just a couple of them here. What we’re after is to be able to work on a new version of our image without having to save and reopen an image.

Opening a New Copy of the Image With Options

Choosing duplicate from the Image menu brings up this dialogue box;

This allows us to give a name to our new document. By default Photoshop puts the current image name, in this case ‘Light_House’ and adds ‘Copy’.

We have the option here of selection the Duplicate Merged Layers Only check box. If we do then Photoshop will merge all the layers in the new document. It does this behind the scenes so doesn’t affect our original image.

Opening a New Copy of the Image Without Options

I like having my History palette nice and handy, grouped with Layers, Channels and Paths, so this button is always easy to find too.

This button again creates a new document but flattens and renames the new image behind the scenes. Interestingly, the new document name is taken from the current History state. So, in our example above the new document is called ‘Layer Via Copy’. (Sadly there’s no way to interrupt the process with the my beloved Alt key)

Is this The Best Way To Work?

There;s some pitfalls. Neither your original image nor its copy are saved during the process and it’s very easy to forget to save the first image. Should there be a problem with your computer you could loose both images.

If you’re after having different versions of an image then Snapshots are the way to go really, creating various versions of an image within the document. For experimenting, or having a version outside the document, that maybe you don’t want going to the client, either of the above can really help.