Featured
Soul Warming Recipes!
Big Green Egg
Featured
Hot & Spicy!
K’s Choice
Peppery Chicken Curry
Translator
FM
Photoshop: snapshot
The quickest photoshop tips that improve your work flow are the best, right? Now I’m sure many of you know this already, but for those of you who don’t… here’s a very handy photoshop tool called snapshot. It does exactly as the name implies; it takes a snapshot of your image. Especially useful tool when you’re using actions!
Snapshot:
Editing this photo. Nothing wakes you as fast as having a three-year-old jump up and down on the bed, occasionally smacking you over the head with a pillow. Love the photo, it’s so J-man. Even though he was in dire need of a haircut in this shot.
When you’re editing a photo, this is what you see; the layers window with all the steps you’ve taken. Now I want you to click on the history tab.
This is the place to undo every move you make. See the photo thumbnail? If you want to go back to the unedited photo, you click on the thumbnail. It’s a snapshot of the image as it was when you first opened it.
But sometimes you don’t want to go back to square one; you want to maintain what you’ve already edited. Especially before running actions that will flatten your photo. How I dislike actions that flatten your photo, but that aside.
This is the snapshot button. What it does is simply take a snapshot of your photo with the editing you’ve done up until now.
Click it and a new thumbnail shows up. Double click the name to rename it. Give it an appropriate name. I’ve named mine My B&W, because this was after my B&W conversion. If you’ve tweaked the saturation name it something like “After color pop“, names like that, just so you know exactly what the snapshot is all about. You can make as many snapshots as you like and they”ll all end up here.
Note:
The snapshots are not saved along with the photos, keep that in mind. Once you close the photo, that’s the end of the snapshots.
I use the snapshot feature so often I even turned it into an action for quick saving. It’s not only an extra backup, but you can also compare different editing techniques or see before/after effects in the blink of an eye this way.
11 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
What a picture! Fantastic one. Your son are sooo sweet.
Best wishes from a rainy Sweden,
Nadja
I love all your photos. They are outstanding. Could I ask what action you have used for this photo. I love the gold tint to this bw photo. Do you use any commercial actions and if so which are your favourite.
@Teresa:
Thanks! I only use my own actions, no commercial actions. They’re way too expensive :)
Wow you are good. Would you be able to give us a tutorial on how to achieve this bw with the gold tone on Photoshop please. Thanks.
@Teresa:
That’s the only tutorial I think I’ll never give. Every photographer has its own signature b&w, this is mine. It took me a long time to come up with this technique, add lights and mix of color overlay. I wouldn’t want to see it pop up everywhere, you know :)
Ok I understand. I have to say I love your signature b&W. I haven’t seen it anywhere else and it is unique.
@Teresa:
If you look in my photo section (Kayotic Darkroom) there’s a tutorial on how to add a color layer to a photo. If you add that to a B&W photo, you’ll add a little life to it. You can try different colors to see what you like best.
My B&W is a very complicated action because it creates different layers, different lighting techniques, and it combines a lot of things. It would probably be too complex to try and explain it all in a tutorial.
Thanks. I am going to play with the color layer.
I think in Photoshop CS, it introduces what is known as “layer comps”, which are basically like snapshots that you can save per file, so you can hold as many variations of one photo in one file. And in later versions, you can rename and organize your layer comps into folders. :)
Here’s a pretty good explanatory tutorial I found: http://www.depiction.net/tutorials/photoshop/layercomps.php
@Jessica:
I played around with layer comps a bit, but haven’t really used it since. I don’t really like the way everything piles up in my layers palette. It takes a great deal of organizing to have full effect, and I don’t always have time (or the need) for that when I’m editing photos. But it’s a nice feature, I agree!
So easy!
thanks for the tip!