Kubota Blog

I just returned from a few days in Washington D.C. teaching a RAW workflow workshop. It was great to be in our nations capitol and to see how the atmosphere is completely different. EVERYTHING revolves around politics – and understandably so. I spent some time with fabolous ex-press photographers, pulitzer prize winners, and presidential photographers. I also spent a day consulting with the International Monetary Fund, which was unexpectedly pleasant. They have a very high end digital studio that produces and astounding amount of imagery and related printed materials. They are, of course, shooting all RAW.

Speaking of watching your steps. I wanted to share a little Photoshop tip that some may not know of. Often I work on images, running various actions, and doing myriad adjustments. It’s usually easy to tell what I’ve done to the image, but occassionally I’ve combined actions or gone back and forth and can’t really remember how I got that cool new look. Here’s one way to keep track.

Open Photoshop CS2 and open the General Preferences. At the bottom of the window, enable History Log. Check Metadata, and set “Edit Log Items” to Detailed.

Now everything you do to an image is recorded and saved in the images metadata – which you can refer to at any time. It will list every tool used, settings used, and actions run.

To see the details, open an image that’s been worked. Goto File: File Info and click on the History link in the left panel. Everything will be listed there.

While you can’t just click on a step to go back in time, like on the standard history palette, this information is permanently preserved – unlike the history palette, and it takes very little extra storage space in the file. It is also preserved even if you flatten an image and save a JPG copy of it because it’s part of the metadata.

Speaking of government spies, remember that this info WILL be in every image you create, so if you DON’T want someone to be able to see what you’ve done to an image, turn the option temporarily off.