ABSTRACT
You can open an image file in Photoshop in a number of ways. You can open an image via Bridge, or you can simply doubleclick a file to open it. As long as the file you are about to open is in a file format that Photoshop recognizes, it will open in Photoshop and if the program is not running at the time this action should also launch Photoshop. Every document file contains a header section, which among other things tells the computer which application should be used to open it. For example, Microsoft Word documents will, naturally enough, default to opening in Microsoft Word. Photoshop can recognize nearly all types of image documents regardless of the application they may have originated from, but sometimes you will see an image file with an icon for another specific program, like Macintosh Preview, or Internet Explorer. If you double-click these particular files, they will open in their respective programs. To get around this, you can follow the instructions described in Figure 1.94. Alternatively, you can use the File ➯ Open command from within Photoshop, or you can drag a selected file (or files) to the Photoshop program icon, or a shortcut/alias of the program icon (Figure 1.95). In each of these cases this allows you to override the computer operating system which normally reads the file header to determine which program the file should be opened in. If you use Bridge as the main interface for opening image files in Photoshop, then you might also want to open the File Type Association preferences (see Bridge chapter PDF on website) to check that the file format for the files you are opening are all set to open in Photoshop by default. Yet, there are times when even these methods may fail and this points to one of two things. Either you have a corrupt file, in which case the damage is most likely permanent. Or, the file extension has been wrongly changed. It says .psd, but is it really a PSD? Is it possible that someone has accidentally renamed the file with an incorrect extension? In these situations, the only way to open it will be to rename the file using the correct file extension, or use the Photoshop File ➯ Open command and navigate to locate the mis-saved image (which once successfully opened should then be resaved to register it in the correct file format).
