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Believe it or not I'm going back and learning some of the basics I "skipped over" while self teaching myself PS. It would be wise for me to note here that I NEVER read assembly instructions either. [shhh]
In any case, what is the difference between the History pallet and the Edit>undo command. When I want to correct a mistake I have just gone in and deleted that History state. Although it gets the job done maybe this is not the best way to do it.
What is the difference between the two way of backing up and when do you use each one.
Well, Lee, if you are now willing to read what the differences are between History and Undo, now would be the perfect time to read those "assembly instructions" that came with Photoshop, called the User Manual. You can access it at anytime by pressing F1.
If you take those few minutes to read about the History Palette, and the Undo command, you should get a better idea of the differences between them, and just might learn more about "snapshots", "setting History options", and other REALLY COOL stuff!!!
And if you think about it, it's really not that much different from reading similar answers on Forum boards, except you don't have to take the time to ask and wait for an answer, because the answer is already at your fingertips; AND, you'll get the complete information, not just distilled interpretations, which may not be complete or necessarily accurate.
Who the hell are you, Ms Oz? . Were you hired by Mark to tell people to read the manuals and not ask questions here? Since when? I've been involved with this forum for almost a year. MOST folks are VERY helpful here.
For your information I WAS reading the CS manual as when I logged onto the forum. I did not completely understand what I was reading so I asked the question. That's what these forums are for - to ask questions when you don't understand something. Interesting concept, isn't it?
From here on out, don't replay to my posts ever again. You are not an asset here. You are a smart ass, self righteous and arrogant liability. There is not manual for my post so is there anything I've written you didn't understand?
The way I work with it is Undo (Command/Control Z) immediately undoes the last action but that's all. Clicking undo a second time just undoes the undo so you can basically undo and redo one action over and over. The history palette keeps a series of steps you've taken in memory so you can go back however many steps (states) which are recorded in the palette. The number of remembered history states (which you can think of as possible undos) is specified in preferences and it is always a balancing act between the number of history recorded and the amount of memory or scratch disk space used. History uses a lot of resources as you are effectively storing your image over and over. I think the default is 20 and I usually have it set from 30 to 50 but have over a GB of RAM and a dedicated 30GB partition on another hard drive set as my first scratch disk.
Anyway, the history palette enables you to go back any number of states. Additionally you can take a snapshot at any point of your work which will save the current image at the top of the History Palette. Clicking on that will revert to that state so it is a valuable tool when you get to saving points in you work. In fact you can use the options of the history palette to save a snapshot every time you save a file while you are working on it.
Then there is the capacity to select a saved history state and use it for painting with the history brush which paints into the current image from the selected history state.
While you are exploring the options of the history palette, available from the little triangle in the upper right hand corner of the palette, try out the non linear history. Some people like it. I prefer the linear history as I tend to get confused by the non linear.
I'm still not clear though between the History Palette and the Edit>Undo tool, though. They seem to do the same thing and the manual did not make it clear (to me anyway) what the difference was.
Edit > Undo undoes only the last item in the history palette. You can't keep using Edit > Undo multiple times and have it work it's way back up the history palette whereas you can undo multiple steps by clicking on any history state in the palette.
I'm not sure it makes sense but that's the way it works.
Sorry, Welles. My fault. I was thinking of the History palette options in the drop down menu as "undoes" and mistakenly said that instead of the proper term Step Forward (shift-Ctrl-Z) and Step Backward (Alt-Ctrl-Z) controls.
Why have those options both in the History palette itself and under Edit when all you have to do is click on any state you want in the History palette (as you mentioned). That is much is faster than hitting the Step Backward option 10 (or whatever) times. Are they somehow separate controls that do different things or just redundancy?
Redundancy. The undo was part of Photshop long before the History Palette and has been kept probably for the simplicity of using the key commands I would guess. I still use Command/Control Z regularly but never use keyboard commands to navigate the history palette, favoring the mouse click.
You know, it's funny but every now and then I get in a similar mental 'Why' loop. Inevitably, when it comes to computers, the only Why is because it made sense to some programmer and has no other valid reason. I almost always give up on the Why of computerish things in favor of the How. They are such arbitrary structures built by so many different people that there is really no underlying principle to be found. I am amazed that computers work at all...much less in a fairly consistent manner.
Lee it sounds llike you are alot like me, If all else fails then read the directions. [bustagut] [bustagut] [bustagut] [bustagut]
But Welles good info there Bud
As far as I understand it using the History states is the best option, as ther History store individual snaps of your work in memory, so by deleting the history state you free up some memory as well. [confused] [confused]
Correcting Mistakes 
Linear Mode
