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Lately, I've been thinking that I'd really like a feature in Photoshop which I could start and it would simply record each step of a session. This would be particularly valuable when I'm trying to create an effect and may have lots of attempts which are in the right direction but often backtrack. Sometimes I can't remember quite how I got a certain result. What I'd like is rather like the recording aspect of actions but applied to a complete history of a session. I'm not interested in saving history states or creating an action, more a text synopsis of the steps taken, perhaps with settings. Can anyone think of a way to do that?
You can get an input recorder that records keystrokes and mouse things. A real set back of this kind of set-up is that everything has to be in the same position when you play back a session.
Personally, a notebook and a pen work fine for me. I write down just enough for me to be able to decode and re-trace my steps later. No big deal.
Photoshop saves every brush stroke, every selection, every anything you do to your image as a state on the History palette (though the state only remains on the palette until you reach the maximum number of states or you close the document). There are three ways to move among states of your image.
? To revert your image back to a state, you can click on any state's tile in the History palette.
? You can move the active state marker to a state on the History palette.
? You can press Command-Z to step back to the last state (just as you've always been able to do). But you can also press Command-Option-Z to move backward one state at a time, and Command-Shift-Z to move forward one state at a time.
In general, when you move to an earlier state, Photoshop grays out every subsequent state on the History palette, indicating that if you do anything now these grayed-out states will be erased. This is like going back to a fork in the road and choosing the opposite path from what you took before. Photoshop offers another option: if you turn on the Allow Non-Linear History checkbox in the History Options dialog box, Photoshop doesn't gray out or remove subsequent states when you move back in time (though it still deletes old states when you hit the maximum number of states limit).
If you're doing straight-laced production work all day (the kind of work for which a single Undo is perfectly adequate), you may want to avoid the History feature's heavy RAM overhead by changing the History States value to 1 in the Preferences dialog box (press Command-K). Similarly, you can turn off "Automatically Create First Snapshot" in the History Options dialog box (which you can find on the History palette's popout menu). You might also want to turn off these functions if you're going to batch-process a number of images using actions or the Automate "wizards" (because in these cases, History isn't necessary).
Now if you just want to make notes or annotations to yourself you can use the much overlooked Notes Tool, or even the Audio Annotation Tool (as shown in the screenshot below).
Thanks C9Mouse for your clear explanations. I'm afraid my question wasn't phrased very well. I'm thoroughly conversant with the actual tools in PS. What I want is something like the Actions recorder which will provide a text file of the actions and settings of a PS session so I don't have to stop and switch to pencil and paper. When I'm in a flurry of creative effort I wish to just charge along but have a record to backtrack the actions which helped my successful results. As the necessary code tools are already in place in the Actions palette, implementing this concept should be fairly easy.
Actually, I'm going to post the idea on the Feature Request Forum found on the Adobe PS for Mac forum.
You can add notes and audio annotations anywhere on a Photoshop image canvas. When you create a note, a resizable window appears for entering text. When you record an audio annotation, you must have a microphone plugged into the audio-in port of your computer. You can import both kinds of annotations from Photoshop documents saved in PDF or from Acrobat documents saved in PDF or Form Data Format (FDF).
To create an audio annotation:
Select the audio annotation tool and set the options as needed. Enter an author name. Select a color for the audio annotation icon. Click where you want to place the annotation icon. Click Start and then speak into the microphone. When you're finished, click Stop.
To import annotations:
Choose File > Import > Annotations. Select a PDF or FDF file that contains annotations, and then click Load. The annotations appear in the locations where they were saved in the source document.
Thanks for all the replies to this thread. They helped me formulate my post for the Feature Request Forum, a part of the Adobe PS Forums. It reads,
"Much of my work in Photoshop is creating effects in imagery. I'd love to see an addition to the Notes tool which would work a bit like the Actions palette to automatically record your actions during a given session but only provide a step by step text readout of those steps and settings rather than a playable action. In that way I could recreate complex series of manipulations which were exploratory in nature. In my fevered imagination it seems that this could be a secondary option for the Notes tool. Too often I forget how I got from here to there and yet in the flurry of creation have not the patience to stop and write my steps in a journal."
It occasionally happens. I've helped with ideas for a several pieces of software which were adopted by the authors. The latest one which is in the works is Panopticum's LensPro 3. After discovering several problems with the latest version for Mac, I had a long series of exchanges with the lead software engineer (in spite of my nonexistent German and his halting English) during which I beta tested his fixes. Amidst that correspondence, I suggested that one feature which used Picts for image maps (Macs BMPs on Windows) could be used with Tiffs and allow masks to be included. He's going to try and include that option in the next release. So feedback from users does assist the software creators, on occasion.
Of course with Adobe it is much less likely as they are assailed with a non-stop litany of suggestions. Many are very good ideas, too. Who knows though, if you never try there's no chance, that's for sure.
Recording steps taken during PS session. 
Linear Mode
