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Rich, I really don't have a good answer for your question. Most images opened in Ps are locked as a BG. The BG is not technically a layer. A lot of the formats we use do not support things like effects and transparency like a jpeg for instance, so it needs to be altered into a working layer or just have working layers above it. This is a way of protecting the original image data in a sense. I personally just duplicate the BG and turn the original off, all of my work will build on the duplicate. There may come a day when all formats support editing and we will no longer need the BG in Ps.