Transcript:
Hello. Blake Root is here with f/64 Academy and f/64 Elite. And today we’re gonna discuss snapshots and Photoshop. It’s not any crazy cool effect action thing that we’re gonna do. It’s just a very helpful thing for you and your workflow as you work in Photoshop so Photoshop, it takes snapshots on Photoshop now camera, not not quite Photoshop can take a snapshot of any instance of any part of anything in your workflow. Okay, so basically, we have to really talk about history. States before we talk about snapshots, cuz it’s all kind of the same thing, so in order to use these snapshots. The first thing you have to make sure you’re doing. You should always have this available to you. In your in, your workspace is the history palette, okay. This is the history palette. So if you go to window and you go up here and you click on history. It might show up free-floating. It might show up in some weird spot. I don’t care where you have it. Just make sure you have your history available too. Because basically, the history is kind of like a snapshot at any given time anyway. Your history palette is like a bunch of running snapshots of what’s happening during the process, so if we were to go over to the history palette and click back here to modify exposure layer. This is gonna take you back to a time where I had put an exposure layer into my photograph. So you might be thinking well, okay. If you have this ability to go back and forth in your history. Why would you even take a snapshot in the first place? Well, with these snapshots, allow you to do, is they? Allow you to copy a certain point of your workflow, regardless of the amount of history States that you have available, so for the sake of this tutorial, what I’ve done beforehand as I’ve made my history States limited to ten history States at any given time And I’ll show you why in a second? Let’s say I go to buy crap. Actions calm, and there is an action in there that when you run it, it flattens all of your work destroys what you’ve done and runs what it wants to do like, say a black and white adjustment. So if I go into my actions here and you see this dummy action here, there’s black and white conversion. I’m gonna press play when I press play on that action. It flattens all my work. I no longer have any of my layers. There it puts the Grady map on there makes it look like a decent black-and-white image, but the problem is if I try to go back in my history states here. Look what happens, I can only go back to this modified gradient map layer. Well, thankfully, Photoshop does this thing where it automatically takes a snapshot from something that’s been opened in Photoshop, and that’s right here That’s essentially a snapshot notice how I have all my layers back here again, but here’s the cool part. Let’s say we had all the other stuff that we had going on, and we know we’re gonna run this crap, black and white action What I can do here is I can press this little camera icon, it says, create snapshot and by default. It’s just gonna open up a snapshots, a snapshot one right underneath all my work. Okay, if I click on this snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of anything that I’ve done in this layer’s palette, even down to the layer that I have selected at that given time. It’s how accurate these snapshots are in their recording process, so let’s go ahead and open up our crap. Action and press play notice. What happens again, it flattens all of our work down. We lose all of our layers. We have a decent black and white photograph, but we’ve lost all of our work if we go ahead and press this snapshot button, though it takes us back to all the stuff that we had in our layers palette. Now you might be thinking well. Why don’t you just click on this one? It’s the same thing. Well, the thing is. I opened this PSD document. That has all of these layers in here, But let’s say that this object that I opened or this image that I opened had no layer work on it whatsoever. That’s gonna be your first snapshot and the reason why is over here? You have these options for your history palette. So if I were to go to history options, this gives me a list of things that I can do with my history palette, so it automatically creates that first snapshot that Photoshop automatically does. Then that’s that first snapshot that’s at the top. That’s actually the exact given name of the object that we have in here. So if this was DSC F 0 0 to 5 1 which would be like the file number of the image, that’s what that snapshot would say there and it would be just whatever it was open from Adobe Camera Raw or maybe you opened it JPEG or it is. It’s gonna have the file name. As the name of the snapshot we can automatically create a new snapshot every time we save, which is a really good idea. Because anytime we save press ctrl s to save. It’s not only going to save the image somewhere in our computer. We have it set up. It’s also gonna create a snapshot in the document with the date on it of when we saved it. So at any time, you can go back to those things. That’s a cool thing to check there right here. It says show new snapshot dialog by default. That’s a good one too. Because if we press OK, and we go ahead and create a new snapshot now. This box opens up and says. What do you want to call this snapshot? Well, we’ll call this snapshot before crap action. OK, and what do we want to do? Do we want to create this snapshot from the full document with all the layers here? Do we want it from a merged set of layers, which would be if we were to merge down all those layers and it would just give us that one or do we want it from a very specific layer? This can be helpful if the one layer that you’re working on is what you want to create that snapshot from. I’m just gonna say full document press. OK, but now you’ll see here. It gives me that option anytime. I press the snapshot button. It’s gonna give me the option to rename that snapshot, whatever. I want another thing about history states in this whole little thing here. If we go to edit and we go to preferences and we go up to performance. What you’ll see here is that these are the history. States and I told you that when I first started this video, I had it set at 10 and I think 10 history states is just absolutely ridiculous. I would never set my history States to 10 because I need all of that information over there. I usually set mine to 99 I can go higher than 99 but 99 is a good number for me. It’s not necessarily arbitrary, it’s. Basically telling me that. I got 99 problems, but my history states aren’t 1 Okay, bad joke, but set your history States to something that’s manageable for you. I like them set at 99 I’ll just press, OK? So at this point, instead of having just 10 history states over here, I’ll get up to 99 history states, which will allow me to go back further. It really kind of alleviates the need for having many snapshots because each history state is kind of like a snap shot. Another cool thing about snapshots is this is. Let’s say we go back to this snapshot. Okay, and we have all the work down here of all the stuff that we’ve done at any time. We can create a duplicate state of that, which creates basically a whole new document, too, so we can create a whole new document in our Photoshop from any of those snapshots, which allows us to continue doing all of the work that we would want to do on this image, but maintain all the layer data that’s happening in that snapshot. Okay, so that’s the basics of these snapshots in Photoshop. It’s a very effective tool for maintaining all of your work as you progress through your workflow on some of these really heavy images, you know, they can be very effective used before actions. Maybe you’re a portrait photographer, and you’re about to use the liquify tool that can be good -. It’s different than smart objects, Smart objects maintain all the filter data in a layer, whereas this creates a snapshot of all of your workflow at any given time, so you can go back and forth as you see necessary so again. My name is Blake Grutas with f/64 Academy in f/64 Elite. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to watch this. If you liked it, please comment share it. Tell a friend and subscribe, because if you subscribe and you click the little notification icon there. You’ll get updates every time. I put a new video on Youtube. Thanks again and have a great day [Music].