Changes, Versions and History
Press ⌃6 for Changes. The other five tabs are made of controls, and a control shows one setting at a time: standing in Tone you cannot see that the frame also carries a crop, a mask and some grain. This tab is made of the settings themselves. Its pill wears a count rather than a dot — how many adjustments are on the frame.
The list of changes
The Changes section opens first. Every adjustment on the frame, with the one exception below, is a line with an × beside it. Press an × and that one thing goes and nothing else does: the crop without the rotation, the second mask without the first and third, Blue saturation −30 without the other twenty-three colour-editor numbers. It is one undo step, so ⌘Z brings it straight back.
The lines sit under captions, in the order the adjustments are applied to the photograph. The captions, shown in capitals, are the groups the app files settings under, and they are not always the panel's section names: spot clean and lasso removals, lens corrections, perspective, crop and geometry, film simulation and look, white balance (Temperature and Tint), tone and colour (Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation and Vibrance), subject scope, local adjustments, presence (Clarity, Texture and Dehaze), tone curve, hsl and point colours (the colour editor), black and white, colour grading, detail (Sharpening and Noise reduction) and effects (the vignette and the film grain together). Only the groups that hold something are shown.
A line is one thing you could put back the way it was: a slider (Exposure +0.40 EV, Clarity +30), a colour wheel, a tone-curve channel (RGB, red, green or blue), a crop, a straighten, each mask, each clean region and lasso loop, each sampled point colour. The settings that only qualify another — a sharpening radius, a vignette midpoint, a grain size — get no line of their own; each travels with the thing it qualifies, and removing that thing takes it.
Levels is the one adjustment with no line: its three numbers are listed nowhere here, and the way to take them off is the reset arrow on the Tone curve section, which clears the whole section. The curves beside it are listed as usual, the R, G or B trim that Levels needs to stay on at all and any RGB curve you drew before switching, though the frame renders through Levels in place of the RGB curve while that mode is on. See The tone curve and Levels.
To remove everything at once, use Reset all in the panel's header: one press, one message, one ⌘Z.
Versions
The Versions section holds named snapshots of everything on this frame at the moment you save one. Its summary reads named snapshots of these settings.
- Type a name and press Save version — or leave the field empty and get Version 1 · 22:41, the count of versions on the frame and the clock.
- Each version gets a row with a swatch of this photograph under those settings, rendered the same way the simulation swatches are.
- Click a row to restore it. That is one ordinary write, so one
⌘Ztakes it back.
The row's … menu carries Restore, Compare and Delete version. Compare puts two swatches under the list — the version on the left, Now on the right — and only the right one moves as you edit. It is not the canvas's before/after, whose before is always the untouched original, and it is not the cull page's Compare, which C opens (Compare).
To leave Compare, open the … menu on the row being compared, which is outlined in orange while its version is on show, and choose Stop comparing, the item that read Compare. The two swatches go away. One version is compared at a time: choose Compare on another row and the swatches change to that version, with no need to stop first. They also close by themselves when you delete the version they show or move to another frame.
A version is a copy, never a pointer. Restoring one and carrying on editing leaves it exactly as it was, and so does resetting the frame or exporting it. Versions are stored beside the photograph in the library, so they travel with it. Save version is dimmed on a frame with nothing on it, because there is nothing to copy. Reset all keeps every saved version; only Delete version in a row's … menu removes one.
History
The History section is this frame's develop changes, newest first, one line per gesture — not one per slider tick, because a drag writes once when you let go. Each line names what moved, in the same grammar the panel uses (Exposure +0.40 EV · Shadows +18, Crop · Straighten, Tone curve), with a time at the right.
Click a line to put the frame back to the state that line landed on. That is itself a change, so it adds one new line — exactly one. Restoring the state the frame is already in adds nothing.
The list keeps the last 50 entries. Like the versions, it is stored in the XMP file beside the photograph, so it travels with it. Reset all keeps it and adds a line for the reset, as long as that file has something else to keep: a saved version, or a decision, rating, label, keyword, caption or note. Every take on the edit page carries its decision, so there the history always stays. Only on a frame with nothing else on it, reset from the develop panel in Single, does the file go, and the history with it.
Changes or History
The two answer different questions. Take off the crop I put on an hour ago and keep the twelve things I did since is a sentence only Changes can say. Put the frame back to before I started fiddling is one only History can. They sit in one tab because you reach for them at the same moment.