I'll be honest, the original no longer exists. Once I've finished an image and I'm happy with it then I flatten the layers and that's it - gone. This prevents me from tinkering with it again months down the line - a bad habit of mine.
Did you have a particular query?
Gracious! :-O Well, if deleting files is what you have to do ... and if tinkering really is "bad" (I can imagine it as sometimes "good") - but I keep pretty well:
- every JPEG I ever took;
- every raw file I ever worked up;
- every raw file from a client-sponsored shoot;
- every PSD I ever worked on.
And then at least every year I do an optical disk-archive (portable Blu-ray writer, most recently, inexpensive and works like a charm), two copies of which one goes off-site. I do that also for each sponsored-shoot, as it occurs.
That's all on top of an hourly back-up and a nightly back-up, to separate external hard drives. The back-up protocol follows a near-miss I had with data loss.
I do no cloud-based backing-up or archiving, for reasons of expense and bandwidth - it may be the way of the future, although I'm not convinced that it's foolproof either.
So, our approaches are very different, and no one can say that there is one right approach ... but I like mine.
No back-up/archiving method is foolproof, but I learned from my professional archivist friends about LOCKSS - "lot of copies keeps stuff safe".
====
Specific question about your elderly market-woman portrait background: yes, I have several questions, but it would help me to see the original :-(. The question centres around the artistic decision to remove her from her context - pros and cons, and I do not pretend to know what was best in this case, but would like to know i) what you thought about it and how you made that decision, and ii) whether anything else could have been done with the background than eliminating it.
Again, simply gorgeous, as is.
