Was horrified when resuming my doodle in ArtStudio to find my newest mountain had vanished! Layers were missing, I thought, then realized the work itself hadn’t been saved. As I’d spent a lot of the previous night on it, it seems strange nothing was saved during those hours. I normally save a lot, but possibly I was lulled into a false sense of security by autosave…. and simply forgot?
According to the ArtStudio forum there’s an autosave.art file that you can only see in iTunes when you back up your iPad. If you get to that autosave file early enough, it might have what you lost.
Originally I misunderstood what autosave was doing. I thought it saved the file I was working on, not a hidden copy that might change according to which drawing I was in. I looked for it in iTunes and found it, but it was blank. Same dimensions; one white layer!
Maybe that was because I turned off autosave before I even knew that it saved to a separate file. I thought it had somehow caused a problem but wasn’t sure what. But IF disabling autosave reverts the autosave file to a blank white file, that’s something else… people might think they were protecting their autosave file by stopping ArtStudio saving new stuff to it in the meantime.
Well, my mountain’s gone, and I don’t know why… but I’ve re–enabled autosave now that I understand it better.
I managed to retrieve my work by using a jpeg I created last night on a whim. The white areas show blotchy JPEG artefacts; I don’t know how it manages to do that on what should have been a pure white background! I cleaned it up but the lines are jaggy (had to erase the white completely, which took away from the smoothness of the black lines).
For the rest of the night I just cleaned, tidied, merged layers and duplicated copies of the file. Sent a PNG to the camera roll and saved a PSD ready to export to iTunes. Closing the stable door after my mountain had bolted!
Doodling time has not been wasted… I found several useful tips in the ArtStudio forums. For instance, I kept wanting to remove white areas without having to spend ages with the eraser. I went to the affected layer, made sure the palette colour was set to white, then went to the menu and chose Adjust > Color to transparency. The white bit just disappeared.
It didn’t work on the JPEG mountain because it left shadowy artefacts behind, but it worked on other layers. Saved my bacon!
Aw Diddums 