QUESTION: When I open a photo in Photoshop to print, and don't do anything to it except print, it often asks when I close, "do you want to save?". Since I have not made any changes, what is it saving? If I elect to save, and it is a JPG file, will it alter the file?
Tim's Answer: If you've opened an image and then printed it, there's no need to save the image upon closing. In fact, my personal preference when I've opened an image for the sole purpose of printing is to not save changes, just in case I applied some minor changes to the image that were focused on the print, and that I don't want to save as part of the master image.
Photoshop obviously needs some way of determining whether the image you are working on has had any changes applied to it, and thus whether you will lose any changes if the image is closed without updating the information contained in the file. In some cases the method of determining whether or not any changes have been applied seems to be a little flawed, and printing is one example of that.
If you're sure there haven't been any changes applied to the image that you need to save (and especially if you've made changes that you don't want saved to the original image) you can most certainly close the image without saving after printing. If you do save the image and it is a JPEG, you don't need to worry about causing a loss of quality in the image, because you're saving back the same original data, and it will be re-encoded in the same way.
I actually use a workflow that helps me avoid this situation altogether when printing from a "master" image file that contains a variety of layers. I start by choosing Image > Duplicate from the menu to create a copy of the entire image, but I turn on the Duplicate Merged Layers Only checkbox in the Duplicate Image dialog so that the resulting duplicate image will be flattened. Then I resize the image to the final output size using the Image > Image Size command, and apply sharpening as needed (generally using the Smart Sharpen filter). I then print the image, and close it without saving it (unless I think I'll be making more prints at the same size, in which case I might choose to save this derivative image).
The bottom line is to make sure your print workflow isn't compromising the information contained in your master image file. But if all you're doing is opening an image and printing it, that really isn't a concern.
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