recovering layers

[wendyhope]

Beginner here.....having merged layers and saved painting, can I then recover the layers to do more work on some?

[markw]

Hello wendyhope and welcome to the ArtRage forums:)
The answers to this is ‘Yes & No’.
The desktop version of AR stores all your actions from when you open a painting to closing it. And not from each Save point.
So even if you have hit Save while working on a painting and then you continued doing more work, so long as you don’t close the painting you can still step back through all your actions.
But once a painting is closed that’s it.

Which leads us nicely to ‘Backups’! (Everyone working digitaly should habitually keep system wide backups, but that’s a whole other topic!)
But within ArtRage’s Preferences you can set AR to keep it’s own incremental backups of any given painting each time you hit Save.
To do this open Preferences > Advanced Preferences > Store Backup Files.
Use the slider or enter the number directly, for the number of backups you want AR to keep. 26 is currently the maximum.
That’s it, you only need to set this once and that setting will be used with every painting you make.
One thing I would recommend is that every time you start a new painting is to keep it in it’s own separate folder. This is because AR will store the automatic backups in the same location as the file generating them. It just helps with keeping things tidy and organised!
For more info about AR’s Automatic Backups see the entry for ‘Store Backup Files’ here:https://www.artrage.com/manuals/getting-started-artrage/artrage-manuals/artrage-4/preferences/

[wendyhope]

Thank you for your prompt reply. So maybe I should save the painting before merging the layers, until I'm sure it is right?

[markw]

Yes, that would work nicely :)
Another idea that occurs to me is that you could, before merging the layers, export the relevant layers on their own.
Right Click on the layer and choose Export Layer… from the pop-up menu (it’s down near the bottom of the menu).
And in the export window that opens make sure you use PNG as the file format.
The only down side to this is that such exported layers only contain visual info i.e. how that layer looked at the time of export.
If you then re-import it, it will not have any paint wetness or depth info typically found in Oil Paint for example, which may or may not be important.