How to use Photoshop History States

Try clicking Window and choosing History to bring up the history window, here instead of tracking back and forth one at a time, you can see exactly what state changes Photoshop has recorded in a simple table that you will be familiar with if you’ve ever used the Actions menu to record steps, with a little image and a name describing what action was taken. You can use this history window to go directly to any recorded state of the image you are working on, where every time you change the image in any way, the history window records the action as a new state.

You can even select an image state from several steps back and just delete that, it does have limitations though, for instance if you make a change to the Photoshop parameters, like colour settings, the actions window or preferences like changing the number of history states, this is not recorded as an image state because you are altering Photoshop itself, not the image directly.

It’s a bit like time travel, if you select a previous history point, then change the image, it deletes any changes you made after that point in history, but don’t worry if you do this you can still use undo to restore not only the last change you made, but all the deleted history points as well.

Armed with the history window, you can have so much more control over your previous actions and save a lot of valuable time. So fire up your Photoshop flux capacitor and start changing history!

[Image via Russ Payne]