For this week’s tutorial I’ll be quickly looking Photoshop Snapshots and how they’re pretty handy.

I’m using Photoshop CS4 as ever. Not so sure about how long this feature has been in Photoshop.

Snapshots are part of the History palette and can make a temporary save of a document’s current state which is remembered for as long as the document no matter how many History States you have set.

You will find the Snapshot button in the History palette, at the bottom, in the middle of the three buttons. When this button is clicked Photoshop creates a Snapshot of the current state of the document, saving where the layers are, how they’re arranged, appearance etc.

This Snapshot will appear at the top of the History palette next to the starting Snapshot which Photoshop autmatically creates whenever a document is opened.

You can right click on it and rename it, delete, create a new one and delete the History.

Remember, this is only temporary. When saved Photoshop only saves what the document currently looks like and gets rid of any Snapshots. But they stick around for as long as the document is open, even if Photoshop has lost that History state.

Also

Using Snapshots also allows you to use the History Brush Tool, it uses an existing Snapshot to paint from but I’m not going to go into the details of that.

If you want to increase the number of History States Photoshop uses you can change it under Edit > Preferences… > Performance…

That’s all folks.