Choose your photo editor carefully. Better yet, understand what your editor does, when saving an image. Some editors are destructive, meaning when you make changes to an image and save the changes, the original image is overwritten. Unless you were working on a copy, the original file is now lost.
The Picasa editor, which I have mentioned in previous tips, makes a copy of the original file and stores it in a folder within the directory holding your images. That is fine and good until you choose to clean-up your files and delete the directory containing the original files. All is not lost, if you made a copy of your images in a another location.
Some image editors are non-destructive, meaning you can recover the original file. Capture NX2 is non-destructive. It actually saves the changes in the original file, if you are editing NEF (raw) files -- changes are not saved to jpeg or tiff files. Of course, I always have back-ups of my important images, just in case things go badly and files become corrupted.
Photoshop makes destructive edits, unless you do the smart thing and duplicate the original image layer with a new layer. Your edits should also be made with adjustment layers. Otherwise, you may lose details in the original image. See more on the topic at Photoshop Essentials.
If you find that your editor is completely destructive in nature, be sure to copy an image and save it with a new name, before you begin your edits. I recommend that you edit the copy, so that the original remains unchanged.
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