Shrinking Massive Clip Studio Paint Pages into One Layer

In my project to move my Clip Studio Paint files to iCloud so that I can import them into CSP on my iPad, I ran into a big problem. When I tried to upload a file from my desktop computer, I received an error message that said I could not save the rile to a remote device (iCloud) because the file was being used by another service. iCloud was updating the file after a CSP autosave. I would have to wait until iCloud had transferred the autosave version.

On the iPad, I ran into a problem when I tried to download a file: CSP locked up while the file was downloading, sometimes for many minutes. Uploading files from the iPad caused the same lockup.

When I examined the file sizes for my CSP files, the cause of the delays was obvious: the files were enormous. By “enormous”, I mean 458MB. The smaller files ranged from 180MB to 300MB. It would be unreasonable to expect that these files would move quickly from my desktop CSP to iCould to my iPad. It was painful.

To make the process snappier I simply flattened the files. The 458MB file became a 65K file. In fact, all of the flattened files ended up being about 65k. They uploaded quickly, opened quickly, saved quickly, and were available on my iPad in seconds.

The problem with flattening files is that I no longer have the layers necessary for making major changes to the images. To preserve that information, my strategy is to save that information before flattening the files. I copied the entire project to a drive on my computer. If I need to redo the inking or color, I have a the complete page, with all of its layers, available.

Keeping two versions of the file is extra complexity, but it’s workable.