RICH SKIPWORTH’S TIPS, TRICKS, AND NERDY TECHNO-BABBLE
One of the joys of working digitally is the facility to easily change your artwork. Change colours,
change positions of layers, change opacity, it’s all easy. Trouble is, it can be too easy.You can be working
on a job, altering things as you go and refining your design only to find that you preferred the look of
the damn thing about twenty steps back.You can use the undo command to go back a certain number
of steps, but that’s often not enough. You can save your files under different names as you progress
through the job, making a save whenever you get a version you like, but you then wind up with loads
of files that are difficult to look through and take up a load of space.
What’s the answer? Well, Photoshop has a couple...
Apart from hitting the undo command, possibly the
easiest way to retrace your steps in Photoshop is
via the History palette. Start drawing, use various
brushes, alter a few layers, then from the Window
menu, choose History. The History palette will
appear:
This palette shows a list of all your recent actions
as you have worked on your design.You can click on
any one of those actions in the list and your
artwork will return to the point at which that
action was applied. The number of actions or
‘states’ that the History palette can hold is
determined by its setting in the Performance
section of Photoshop’s Preferences pane. (From the
Photoshop menu at the top of your screen choose
Preferences, then Performance... )
There is a section there marked ‘History States’
Enter the number you require.
More states require more RAM, but about 20 states
is fairly useful.
At the bottom of the History palette there is a
small camera icon.
Clicking this icon will take a snapshot of the current
state of your artwork and store that snapshot in
the palette. You can take as many snapshots as you
like and clicking on any snapshot in the list will
reveal your artwork as it was when the snapshot
was taken.
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Double clicking on the Snapshot name will allow
you to rename the Snapshot to make things easier
to recognise later.
You can also delete Snapshots (or History States)
via the little trash icon next to the Snapshot camera
icon.
One more nifty thing about the History palette...
At the very top of the palette there is an entry that
represents the state of your artwork when it was
first opened in this Photoshop session. Click it, and
you have your artwork back as it was before you
worked on it this time around. If it’s a brand new
artwork then all you get is your original blank page,
but if it’s a piece of artwork you have created
previously you can restore it to its original pristine
state it was in before you started this session,
even if you have saved over it. Cool eh?
Now the History palette is pretty useful, but it does
have one big limitation. All the history states, all the
snapshots are deleted when you quit Photoshop.
When you return to this artwork, you’re starting
with no safety net, no undos.
Fortunately, the mighty Photoshop has a solution to
this limitation. It’s called Layer Comps.
When you have your design in a state you’re more
or less happy with, rather than taking a Snapshot in
the History palette, open up the mysterious and
rarely heard of Layer Comps palette from the
Window menu at the top of your screen.
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