Working with the History panel in Lightroom
Using the History feature
To really appreciate the value of the History feature in Lightroom, it is important to understand what’s going on behind the scenes. First, it is helpful to remember that Lightroom is a nondestructive editor, which means that it never alters the original pixel values in your images. Instead, it remembers what changes you want applied, and then shows you the effects of those changes on the fly. What you’re seeing is a translation of the changes you’ve applied to your image, not a modified version of the original.
That’s an important distinction because it means you will always have the original pixel values preserved. As an additional benefit, it is easy for Lightroom to keep track of a large number of changes you’ve applied to your images. They’re all simply instructions that require very little storage space to remember, as compared to the huge amount of space that would be required to save multiple versions of your image so you could step back to any version at any time.
The History feature in Lightroom shows you a list of what you’ve done to your image and gives you the opportunity to step back in time to any point, effectively undoing anything that had been done after that step. However, because Lightroom remembers all of the things you’ve done, stepping backward in History is never a permanent action. You can bounce back and forth as you see fit (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Lightroom’s History feature allows you to bounce around between various states of an image as you see fit, always remembering everything you’ve done to an image.
For example, if you’ve adjusted a color image to improve saturation, then applied a grayscale effect, and then applied a color tint, each of those steps will be remembered in History. You can then click on any of the steps in History to go back to the version of the image as it was at a particular moment in time. You can go back to the color version, then come back to the grayscale version, and shift back and forth between any of the versions in this manner. The version of the image you see depends on which step you’ve selected in History.
What this means is that you never lose any version of your image in Lightroom. You can always switch between versions, effectively undoing and redoing any of the adjustments you’ve applied along the way.
Note: The History is available only in the Develop module, meaning tasks you perform in other modules can’t be undone by using History.
The most common way to work with History is to undo something you didn’t intend to do or aren’t happy with. When such a situation exists, scroll through the History list to find the last step you want to keep applied to your image, and click on it. You’ll see the image updated to reflect the way it appeared when that step was applied to the image. Because you’re able to click on any step in History to see what the image looked like at that point, and because all History states are retained for the life of an image in Lightroom, you don’t have to worry about experimenting to find the appropriate step to click on. You can just click on the step you think is right, and then click on others until you find just the right one.
Note: You can clear the History by clicking the Clear link to the right of the History label on the left panel, but this isn’t something I recommend.
Where to go from here
For more information about Photoshop Lightroom, see the following:
