Viewing an Image’s Various States in Photoshop

You can move back to any state listed in the History palette, remove a state to cancel a step, or perform other time-travel stunts with the History palette. The following sections outline some basic time-shifting techniques you should know.

Going back to a particular state
To go back in time and resume editing at a particular point, just click the state you want to return to. All subsequent states appear grayed out, or what Adobe calls undone. Then begin editing your image as usual. As soon as you perform a new step, all the states that follow your re-entry point vanish. It’s like applying the Undo command to a group of steps with one click.

If you intentionally (or accidentally) begin editing while a previous state is highlighted, and you change your mind, immediately undo your first action — press Ctrl+Z (Ô+Z on the Mac). The subsequent steps that were removed reappear.

Reviewing your image at different states
To review how your image looked at various previous states, just click the state you want to take a look at. (You can also drag the active state marker up and down the list.) The document image immediately changes to reflect that earlier state. You can move back and forth between any points in the history list if you like. As long as you don’t make any editing changes during your time-traveling jaunt, your current history list is preserved.