Snapshot your way through your next photoshop design

Ctrl Z, Ctrl Z, Ctrl Z… dang I ran out of history states! Every UI designer knows this feeling. You explore a new direction only to realize that you have strayed way off course. Edit > Undo can only take you back so far and doesn’t undo things such as hiding layers (so annoying!). If there were only a way to stick a bookmark at multiple points of your design and easily go back to that point… there is!

These bookmarks are called snapshots, and they are awesome! I use them pretty much everytime I touch photoshop. Maybe an example would help. Say you have a nice looking homepage with a white header. You decide that a black header might look better. Before you touch anything, take a snapshot. Do so be going to your history pallette and click the snapshot icon in the pallettes footer (the icon looks like a camera). Now go ahead and switch your background to black, your text to white, your button to green…etc. Now take another snapshot. You will see the snapshots begin to stack up on themselves. Now make a green one, red one, purple one, blue one. Snap shot all of them. Now that you have all of these versions you can simply click on the snapshots to switch between them. Snap shots do not only maintain the layers, they also maintain history. So if you go to the white header snapshot you can ctrl z your way through actions you made 2 hours ago! Pretty cool.

Some things to note. Before you start going back to other snapshots, make sure you do a current snapshot, otherwise you could go back and not have a way to jump forward to where you were. Also, snapshots are not saved when you close a file. So if you plan on showing your team those different color headers, make sure you save out each one individually before you close the file.

If you knew you could ctrl z anything wouldn’t you be more adventurous? I would. Be adventurous in your desings, try something crazy. You never know when a happy accident will ocur or when doing something unconventional will result in your new favorite design. Just remember to take pictures along the way…wow cheesy, sorry.