Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One

9. Save a snapshot of your selection. Given the amount of work
   we’ve accomplished so far, it would be nice to bookmark this
   place in the selection process in case we want to come back to
   it later. Photoshop gives you the ability to do this using the His-
   tory panel. Here’s how it works:
   
   
   • Open the panel by choosing Window→History or pressing
     Alt+F9 (Option-F9 on the Mac).
   
   
   • As you can see in Figure 3-35, Photoshop has been keep-
     ing track of each step in the process so far. (One look at all
     those passes and you might think the quick selection tool
     needs a more accurate name.)
   
   
   • You can click any entry in the history and your image will
     be restored to that particular state, including the state of
     your selection.
   
   
   • Press the Alt (Option) key and click the icon at the bot-
     tom of the panel to take a snapshot of your current state.
     In the New Snapshot dialog box that appears, name your
     snapshot “Quickblade” and press OK.
   
   
   
   

Pressing the Alt (Option) key while you click the icon allows you to

name the new snapshot while you’re creating it. As we’ll see, this works

the same in many Photoshop scenarios when you’re creating something

such as a snapshot or a layer.

Once you’ve created a snapshot, you can simply click the Quick-

blade entry in the History panel and restore this state of your

selection. However, you lose the individual history states in the

list, as indicated by their being dimmed in Figure 3-36. If you

were to restore with the snapshot and start performing new

steps, you’d lose the ability to revisit any of those individual

states and Photoshop would start recording a new history of

your activities. To bring back those individual states, click the

final item in the list before doing anything else.

You can save up to 20 history states in Photoshop, but they are active

only while you have the image open. If you close the document or close

Photoshop, the items and your ability to step back through them are

gone. However, you can save entire selections. In Lesson 10, I’ll show you

how to save a selection as an alpha channel, which is how I was able to

create ToothlessSaw image.jpg, the catch-up document with which we

started this exercise.

Figure 3-36.

Figure 3-35.

84 Lesson 3: Making Selections