Your Photoshop History Doesn’t Have To Be History Anymore

Have you ever created something cool, only to later forget how you did it? With History Log, you’ll have it down on paper or disk

With Photoshop CS and CS2, you can create a log of your file’s history (the commands and settings you applied to it since it was last opened). It’s a feature I’ve heard almost no mention of, but it’s definitely there. If you’re in a profession like forensics and you need to get down on paper (or metadata) all the steps you took in enhancing a crime-scene photo, or if you just have a killer technique for color-correcting a batch of images and want to give the process to the rest of your department, this may be helpful.

Go to Photoshop->Preferences->General… and you’ll see the section on the bottom of the dialog box for History Log. The available settings:

• You can save log items to metadata, a text document, or both.
• You can set the detail of the log with the Edit Log Items options.
• Sessions will record every time the file is opened, closed or saved.
• Concise will record the Sessions data plus History information.
• Detailed will include all the Concise data, the file path, details of the History information and other things not usually recorded to the history, such as preferences changes.

Jeff Tranberry’s Photoshop Blog is the source where I learned about this feature; the link is here.