Working with the History panel in Lightroom
The History section of the left panel in Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom™ serves two purposes. The first is to display a history of what you’ve done to an image (Figure 1). This history can be helpful for a variety of reasons—for example, you may want to see the order in which you applied adjustments or to see whether you already applied a particular adjustment. Just as evaluating metadata for your images can be helpful in capturing better images in the future, evaluating your history for an image can be helpful in producing the best results when optimizing your images.
Figure 1: The History section displays a list of everything you’ve done to an image, and provides the ability to step back to any point in the process of making adjustments.
Although seeing what you’ve done is helpful, the biggest value comes from being able to undo something you’ve done when you’re not happy with the results. If you’ve used Adobe Photoshop for any period of time, you’re likely familiar with the History palette there. Lightroom takes that concept to a higher level.
Requirements
To follow along with this article, you will need the following software:
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Prerequisite knowledge:
Basic knowledge of working with Photoshop Lightroom
About the authors
Digital-imaging expert Tim Grey is the author of many books and articles on Photoshop and digital photography, including the Tim Grey Guides series from Sybex, an imprint of Wiley Publishing. Tim is Microsoft's chief ambassador to professional photographers and presents workshops around the world on digital imaging. He also publishes a daily e-mail list for photography enthusiasts, "Digital Darkroom Questions."
Excerpted from "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Workflow: The Digital Photographers Guide," by Tim Grey. Copyright © 2007 Wiley Publishing, Inc. Used with permission of Wiley Publishing, Inc. To purchase the full retail version of this book, visit www.wiley.com.
