Lr 4, I cleared the History of a image by mistake, how do I get it back?

[Bill Koenig]

I imported a image into Lr 4 for editing, spent many hours of work, then wail trying to make a virtual copy I cleared the history of this image by mistake. The catalog has been backed up before this happened. Lr 4 is very new to me, and I tried a few things with out any luck, is there a way to get the history back?
I'm really starting to sweat over this as I'll have a very hard time reworking this shot.

As a side note, I exported a few different edits to my external hard drive (Export to Drive) so those have been baked, but I still see these in the current catalog, just no history.
If these can still be found on the catalog, does this mean that there hasn't been any output sharpening saved to them? That would help a little.

[JRSmit]

If you have a backup of your catalog, the lrcat file, which has the editing history, you can use that to recover the history.

[Bill Koenig]

If you have a backup of your catalog, the lrcat file, which has the editing history, you can use that to recover the history.

Thanks for the reply and good news. Now I need find out how do that, was it discussed in the Advanced Guide to Lightroom 4 as I have that, but don't remember seeing anything about recovering a Ircat file.

[john beardsworth]

Bill

Does the image look correct - ie adjusted as you want? This is the important thing - not the History panel steps. If the image looks correct, History steps really don't matter.

What has happened to the virtual copy?

John

[Bill Koenig]

Hi John,

Thanks for the reply. The image looks correct, so when I exported the image to my external hard drive with output sharpening for printing, those files are now Baked, but the file's in the catalog are just copy's of the exported file's without any output sharpening, yes? And the history is gone from all of these copy's in my currant catalog as I cleared it by mistake. Its to bad that I didn't know that I could have undone "clear history" I found that out after the fact.
I never did make a virtual copy as I cleared the history before could do that.
I would like to know how to get that history back, maybe a link to a tutorial.

The reason for not printing in Lr 4 is the fact that its a pano and to long for my Epson 3800 so I have to fudge it with the long print utility. I really like Lr 4 sharpening.


   

[john beardsworth]

Slow down, Bill.

"The image looks correct". The image looks right, so the settings in the right side are OK, and they're the only important thing.

I'd encourage you not to worry too much about the history or its loss. People generally think too much about history as a way to repeat or learn from what they've done, when history is as much about

• an undo that survives restarting LR
• about being able to set the Before / After's Before view

.

Assuming you've closed LR since clearing the history, it's gone, and there's no way to bring it back. Instead, just focus on the slider values on the right hand side.

How big is the pano? It must be pretty big to force such a workaround.

John

[Bill Koenig]

John,
All of the sliders are now set to zero, sort of bothers me, but the image has already been printed many times, and the print file has been saved to my external hard drive outside of the Lr catalog, so I guess I'm OK


Yes, its a B&W pano made up from 66 images, this was rendered in Auto Pano pro at only 50% and printed 42x16 on my 3800 using the ABW driver. I have go back to winXP pro to do this as the long print utility only runs on XP, but that's not so bad as I also had revert to old Epson driver to get it to work, but it works very well, just takes two people to handle a 50x17 cut sheet of paper off a 100' roll. Sending it out for printing would be expensive.
Saving Xp on a duel boot with Win7 64 turned out to be well worth the trouble.

Here's a jpg which really doesn't show this very well, you really need to see the print.

[Alan Goldhammer]

Wonderful image!

Alan

[dgberg]

Love the image!
 Except for that car.
Where was this taken?

[Bill Koenig]

Love the image!
 Except for that car.
Where was this taken?

Hi Dan,

This was taken at the corner of Water & Main in Stoughton Wisconsin, my home town, and where I still live. I once lived above the building on the corner, if you look close you will see the date at the top of the building, that was the year it was built, which was "1875" The detail in the print, even at 42x16 is so sharp it cuts. Taken with my Nikon D7000 Nikkor 85mm 1.8 @f8 3 exposures blended for HDR for each of the 66 stitched shots.

Glad you liked the picture, and guess what, I didn't like that car either, so I waited for almost a year (it had to be taken in winter with no snow) before I had a chance to reshoot that part, and got rid of it, I also brightened up that corner using the new gradient feature, which is the reason for bringing it into Lr 4
I'll post the final edit tonight.
There has been a lot of local interest in this pano, and I've sold many copy's.

Getting back to Lr 4, I used Lr for the sharpening on this print, both the capture and output sharpening. On a older version I did it in photoshop CS3 using smart sharpen, all I can say is, the sharpening in Lr 4 is way way better than anything I've ever used before. Makes me wounder if I ever did it right in photoshop.