Working with History and Snapshots in Lightroom
Snapshots
Snapshots as shown in Figure 2 is a lot like the photo states in the History palette of Photoshop. It records or saves the state or condition of an image at certain points in your adjustments. You can record these Snapshots of any image as seen in the central work area. This can be when you have reached a certain stage in the process that you want to remember or you can go back to the History, click on a certain point there, and record that adjustment as a Snapshot.
Figure 2: Snapshots is similar to the photo states in the History palette of Photoshop.
Snapshots is not just about remembering your adjustments. You can also use this as a very powerful tool to try out different adjustments on a photo and compare them (Virtual Copies are another way of remembering different adjustments). Here are some tips for doing that:
- Once you've made an important adjustment, save it by adding it to Snapshots by clicking + and giving it a name in the dialog box that appears.
- Try an alternative adjustment to the original image. Make your new changes, and then save that to Snapshots.
- You don’t need to go in order. This is an important and freeing concept when using History. Click any point in History that you want to use as a basis for a new Snapshot.
- Make multiple interpretations of an image, saving each one by adding it to Snapshots. This is like having versions that can be used for a client, for your own experiments, and so on.
Where to go from here
For more information about Photoshop Lightroom, see the following:
