Storing PSD files on small devices (USB stick, CD-Rom, floppy disks, whoops, sorry!) or transmitting them by email has always been a problem: it’s sometimes huge, and you wonder why.

Here’s the tip of the day:

If you want to save some space (my tests showed a loss of 20%, but I didn’t try it on bigger files, which could lead to an even better result), put a white filled layer on the top of your PSD file, save it, and see the slim-fast effect.

Of course you lose the preview, but you don’t always need it, do you?

Here’s the result:

3.4M 2006-05-04 22:11 idle.psd
2.7M 2007-07-23 00:36 idle_white_layer.psd

The weight loss is already about 20%.

How is this possible ?

The preview is gone, so the composite information is empty, and the “cache” used by photoshop to know which pixel belongs to which layer as well.

Want more space? Zip’em all!

Why couldn’t we zip these PSD files? You’ll see they have plenty of holes!

3.4M 2006-05-04 22:11 idle.psd
834K 2007-07-23 00:41 idle.zip
2.7M 2007-07-23 00:36 idle_white_layer.psd
553K 2007-07-23 00:41 idle_white_layer.zip

I zipped the “normal” and “white layer” versions to show you the zipped file is even smaller after this treatment.

Conclusion

Before : 3.4M
After : 553Kb!

Combining the white layer tip and zipping leads us to a whooping 85% size loss!
Happy shrinking!

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