While not as versatile as Apertures versions, Beta 4 of Lightroom has improved its History Snapshot feature into a usable versioning panel. It’s easy really.
First edit your file in Develop. If you look at the History pane (behind Presets), you’ll see a list all the actions you have taken so far. If you go down to the bottom, you’ll see the Add and Remove buttons. Click ‘Add’ and all of these actions will compress down into a date. Now a date is not useful for versions, so we Double click on the date and it will become highlighted. From here simply rename our version to something useful. If we continue to edit, including cropping, we can Add again and rename again. If we have a few versions in the panel then rolling our mouse over the names of our versions will give a little preview in the Navigator window. Also if we change settings we don’t need to create a new Snapshot, we can right click (or Ctrl Click on Mac) and update settings on our snapshot to reflect the current look.
Update: Just thinking about this further. If Adobe added a right click command to ‘Show In Library’ on our History Snapshot, then we would effectively have an equivalent to Apertures versions. This would be good because, although we may have multiple snapshots, we might only find one or two actually useful.
More updatesOnly the most recent history state is saved when you Export as Photo Binder. When this was mentioned in a post recently, Mark Hamberg replied stating :
“We’re looking at doing versions/snapshots/renderings/renditions/whatver-it-is-we’re-calling-it-today and we knew that would probably have some consequences for history so we decided to pass on writing out history into B4 Photo Binders.
Mark”
At least it a comfirmation of Versions. I’d still like to see history states being saved.
I agree with the last poster, RSP or C1Pro both do a very nice job of developing different versions, much better than Lightroom. Mike S
Using the history panel to crete different versions of a file is extremely primitive and lazy (by the programmers) way of solving this need!
I hope that they use the RSP way of solving multiple versions. Logical, simple and very quick/effective.
This type of versioning is only ‘linear’, isn’t it? I can’t create a cropped B&W; version and a full-size sepia version of the same original, or am I missing something?
Regards,
Theo-Paul van Kampen
Great blog. Appreciate all your comments in the LR forums.
The history panel works quite well – still a bit clunky. I wish there was a way to back up these history states.
I exported a shoot to a binder. Then reimported reimported the images after removing them from the library. The only history state to be saved was the most recent.
Hi, nice webpage! I was curious if you knew how to link and listen to the .wav files created with the Canon 1D Mark II that I use for caption info in the field when using Lightroom. Thanks!
-jason
History panel with the previews is brilliant. Thanks for pointing it out.