Photoshop Tip of the Week: Recording Steps of Your Edit

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If you ever wished you could remember how you edited a particular photo, now you can. You can actually save a list of steps you did in your metadata. (File – File Info)

Here is what you need to do:

Go to Edit -> Preferences -> General

You’ll see the following dialog:

If you check the box that says “History Log” you can choose to save log items to the metadata, a text file or both.

I would prefer to save it as metadata so you can view it when you open the photo up.

Under the “Edit Log Items” drop down you have 3 choices:Sessions Only Keeps a record of each time your start or quit Photoshop and each time you open and close files (each image’s filename is included). Does not include any information about edits made to the file.

Concise Includes the text that appears in the History palette in addition to the Sessions information.

Detailed Includes the text that appears in the Actions palette in addition to the Concise information. If you need a complete history of all changes made to files, choose Detailed.

Using detailed makes the most sense since it records everything.

To look up the recorded history go to: File -> File Info -> History or use the keyboard shortcut – ctrl +alt + shift + I.

This is great if you want to go back and see exactly how you processed something. It also is helpful if you have to stop pp right in the middle of a file and come back to it later. You can go to the history info and see right where you left off.

Good luck – I hope you find this useful. Thank you to J.K. Michael’s Photography for sharing this information with me and giving me permission to pass it on to you.