Recovering a corrupted PSD file

Jake Mongey

Jake Mongey

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I have just had my personal project corrupt on me which i have been timing the total work on totaling 43 hours. Its a PSD file with multiple layers however its 1.3GB. Does anyone know any ways of recovering this.:bang::bang::bang:
The image is just grey noise with a black line across and all metadata has gone entirely.
 
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you're probably pooched. Unless you make copies or have time machine on a mac then there isnt much I would know of other than photoshop's auto recovery feature.

Best case you get your file back from a time machine backup or an auto recovery with a few hours lost. Otherwise you have just learned a hard lesson in file management.
 
I have had a large PSD go corrupt once before and I was not able to recover it, I think its a file size issue, there is a PSB format for larger PSD files.
 
Jake Mongey said:
I have just had my personal project corrupt on me which i have been timing the total work on totaling 43 hours. Its a PSD file with multiple layers however its 1.3GB. Does anyone know any ways of recovering this.:bang::bang::bang:
The image is just grey noise with a black line across and all metadata has gone entirely.
Click to expand...

I have seen a couple of dedicated PSD file recovery programs available on the 'net. Note that this is NOT a recommendation, since I haven't used any of them. However, they might be worth a careful look (with all the usual caveats about downloading).

Good luck.
 
Which version of Photoshop are you using? 5 and 6 had issues with smart objects and filters - that were corrected in some newer versions. I've also seen this happen with a bad ram segment.

Recovery of the file itself is usually not possible (though rarely can be done). Usually you have to back to an earlier version. I try to make workfile versions periodically for just this reason, though I've been lucky and not had a corruption with the new CC versions. (knock on wood).

If you'd like to throw the file on dropbox, I'd be happy to look at it.
 
With a psd that large you need at least 6 GB of RAM for its working space to open. What are the specs of your computer? Apparently the PSD is not corrupted, but your computer might be not capable of handling it.
 
Ouch, that's painful. It reminds me of my days when I was learning computers and would work all morning at my job and then turn it off for lunch. Of course everything disappeared because I didn't save it. But 43 hours would be the equivalent of a whole week at most people's jobs! Or, maybe that would only come to maybe 4 hours work time, and the other 39 hours spent looking at "art" websites, emailing people, and sipping coffee while looking out the window. You know, work. Maybe that's why I find retirement exactly like work?

I guess the messages for you if you can't recover it are to always use a tiff file, save as you go along so that you have multiple versions going, or just pitch the whole thing and get a film camera. My recommendation is for the latter, but there is no guarantee you won't shot a whole day before realizing there is no film in the camera either, or that a light leak won't ruin all the best shots . It's important to remember that all things are impermanent too, and some things are more quickly impermanent than others.
 
Sorry to read about the issue you're having Jake.

Thought I'd ask, what were you doing that took so long?

What program, computer and os were you using?

Can you open the file and use the back arrow key and see what happens. Maybe some of your stuff might still be in memory.

During your process did you save it as a psd? I'm guessing you did if you spent 43 hours on your project. After I saved my psd, I would flatten the work and save as a jpeg. I did that mainly so as I could email to the client for approval as well as the lab I used to make prints.

I use CS-4 on an iMac that I bought in 2006.

Hope it works out for you.
 
Steve M. said:
Ouch, that's painful. It reminds me of my days when I was learning computers and would work all morning at my job and then turn it off for lunch. Of course everything disappeared because I didn't save it. But 43 hours would be the equivalent of a whole week at most people's jobs! Or, maybe that would only come to maybe 4 hours work time, and the other 39 hours spent looking at "art" websites, emailing people, and sipping coffee while looking out the window. You know, work. Maybe that's why I find retirement exactly like work?

I guess the messages for you if you can't recover it are to always use a tiff file, save as you go along so that you have multiple versions going, or just pitch the whole thing and get a film camera. My recommendation is for the latter, but there is no guarantee you won't shot a whole day before realizing there is no film in the camera either, or that a light leak won't ruin all the best shots . It's important to remember that all things are impermanent too, and some things are more quickly impermanent than others.
Click to expand...

Funny thing is it was a scan from a negative and i was trying to make the best possible digital file from it
 
Bill Clark said:
Sorry to read about the issue you're having Jake.

Thought I'd ask, what were you doing that took so long?

What program, computer and os were you using?

Can you open the file and use the back arrow key and see what happens. Maybe some of your stuff might still be in memory.

During your process did you save it as a psd? I'm guessing you did if you spent 43 hours on your project. After I saved my psd, I would flatten the work and save as a jpeg. I did that mainly so as I could email to the client for approval as well as the lab I used to make prints.

I use CS-4 on an iMac that I bought in 2006.

Hope it works out for you.
Click to expand...

Im using photoshop CC on my custom built PC on windows 10.

When i press the back arrow key nothing happens, I can open the original file by pressing CTR + ALT when opening it in photoshop but there is no layer data and all the edits were onto layers.

Yeah i worked onto a PSD File
 
Jake Mongey said:
Funny thing is it was a scan from a negative and i was trying to make the best possible digital file from it
Click to expand...

48 hours on one negative is excessive.

If it helps, you may upload the file anyhwere (Wetransfer ?) and I could try opening it on a Mac with lots of RAM.
 
Bille said:
48 hours on one negative is excessive.

If it helps, you may upload the file anyhwere (Wetransfer ?) and I could try opening it on a Mac with lots of RAM.
Click to expand...

Its a personal project where the goal is to excessively edit it to be perfect.

Thanks for the offer but I know RAM isnt a problem as my PC has 16GB of DDR4 Ram
 
Its a long shot, but try "GIMP" its a free photoshop alternative and it can open PSD files. I had one that had an error that prevented photoshop from opening the file, but GIMP was able to open it and I was able to delete the layer that was causing the issue and re-save it and it was fixed. Not sure what level of corrupt your file is but it might be worth a shot.
 
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