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PHOTOSHOP SECRETS
When you use the History Brush, you're painting with the past.
By David Gewirtz
Photoshop and its little brother, Photoshop Elements, are amazing tools. They're also amazingly complex. In fact, you can use Photoshop for years without ever tapping its full potential. In our new Photoshop Secrets series, we're going to take one small feature of Photoshop per article and help you understand what it does. This week, it's the History Brush.
To understand the History Brush, you first have to understand how Photoshop handles history. You've probably discovered the History Palette, shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
This History Palette has two snapshots. Click picture for a larger image.
The History Palette records two types of information. As you can see in the above figure, at the top of the History Palette are snapshots. In this case, we have two snapshots, one of the original image with some improved saturation and one called "Autumn Leaves". You'll see what we're doing with the autumn leaves in a minute, so stick with me.
In the lower section of the History Palette, you can see I did a number of color management procedures. The lower section records a series of steps and lets you step back, one step at a time, to see everything you've done.
Before we go on, let's look at an image from my "Wow, I have a digital camera, let's shoot some stuff" collection. Figure B shows a lovely shot of some trees and a walkway sometime in the fall.
FIGURE B
Here's a nice walkway in North Brunswick, New Jersey. Click picture for a larger image.
Notice that this image appears to be taken in autumn. You can see the yellowed leaves. But I put them there with Photoshop magic. The snapshots in the History Palette now make more sense. The first was an original image with green leaves and the second is the one with all leaves turning colors.
For the record, the actual photo I took is the one in the "Better Saturation" snapshot, shown in Figure C.
FIGURE C
Some leaves are on the ground, but the trees are green. Click picture for a larger image.
What made the autumn effect seem all the more real is that there were already some leaves on the path. So even though the first one was taken in the summer and there were just leaves there (there always are, on this path), it's easier to make it seem more like autumn.
But this time, we're not talking about colorizing effects. Instead we're talking about the History Brush.
This might help make the History Brush more understandable. First think about layers. When you work with layers, you're working with images stacked on top of other images. If you erase part of a layer, you can see through to the lower layers.
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