Community Manager

Quick Compare is now in Photoshop Beta

Forum|Forum|2 days ago
September 3, 2026
4 replies
44 views

Quick Compare gives you a built-in view for toggling between your current edited state and the original — where "original" is how the file looked when you opened it this session.

Enter the modal view and zoom, pan, and move freely to inspect exactly the details you care about. Use Single View to flip between states, or Split View to drag a slider and reveal the before/after in place.

It's already resonating with how people work:

"A simple way to demonstrate the before/after view — great for visualizing the changes from a technique I just taught."
"I do a lot of rebuild work as a finisher for entertainment, and I have to make sure items don't jump too much. This would be SUPER helpful."
"Perfect for deciding whether I've gone too far when iterating through adjustments and manipulations."

Give it a test drive and tell us what you think — your feedback shapes where this goes next.

Mark_Dahm

Participant

@carlos

Thanks for the feedback!

We are investigating adding a vertical slider in addition to the horizontal one in there today. Agreed on the ability to define a different state for ‘original’. The History panel could store snapshots; we could load snapshots, however those do not persist beyond the editing session. Would this limitation reduce the usefulness of the feature?

@onazole and @Carlos_Oliveras, you can click the Quick compare button once to enter quick compare, then a second time to exit. If you set the view to Single view, then click the Quick Compare button repeatedly, it will toggle between before and after. Naturally, you would need to have created some edits worth comparing to the original to see the difference. Additionally, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to Quick compare if you prefer to use a keyboard shortcut.

On the side by side, that is doable, though at this point I’d rank that below having both vertical and horizontal sliders, and (depending in feedback), assigning different before states (but open to your thoughts here!).

On the crop, we had to make a call; keeping the crop on the Single Image view created some jarring effects (eg, very large original image, cropped, then the screen jumps around making comparing difficult. We could solve that by locking in that larger canvas size, but then large crops leave a small area left over to actually view the results. So either jumping around or not a full screen view; we opted for the cropped comparison, but technically it could be done, if we hear lots of enthusiasm for it and it outweighed the concerns. This is why we put things out in Beta; for exactly this kind of discussion, so keep the ideas flowing; thanks!

-Mark

Carlos_Oliveras

Known Participant

Thanks for the detailed reply, Mark!

Regarding the toggle, yes, assigning a keyboard shortcut to Quick Compare could certainly work. I was hoping for a specific solution or toggle inside this mode (for example, by clicking somewhere in Single View or using a temporary modifier/key), since I have too many shortcuts already defined and of course, no single keys available unless I remove some other shortcut first. But that’s a minor issue even for me so ignore this.

For me, probably the most useful improvement would be the ability to choose a different reference state. I actually think using a History state directly could be more convenient than having to create a snapshot first. Snapshots don’t persist beyond the editing session either, so I don’t think that limitation would significantly reduce the usefulness of the feature. In fact, it could work along with the History brush tool (if I’m painting from history, using a keyboard shortcut to toggle from/to that history state makes sense).

Regarding cropping, I may not have explained the issue clearly. I’m not really questioning which approach should be used. The problem I’m seeing is that Split View doesn’t seem to work correctly when the crop has changed. For example, if the original image is 3:2 and the current version has been cropped to 1:1, I can get strange fragments/shapes, or sometimes effectively nothing useful, instead of a properly aligned comparison. I don’t know if I can post links but if you look up my name in youtube, the latest video in my channel (as of today) shows this problem around 1:35.

Thanks again for the response 👍

Carlos_Oliveras

Known Participant

A very useful addition — thanks for implementing it. A few things I’ve noticed, along with some ideas from myself and other users:

In Single View, as Emilio mentions in another comment, there doesn’t seem to be a way to quickly toggle between the original and current state, for example by clicking or pressing a key.
Perhaps there could also be an additional side-by-side view (just the full versions, no moving divider).
When a crop has been applied to the current image, this feature doesn’t seem to work correctly, at least in my tests so far.
It would be very useful if other reference states could be defined as the “before” state from the History panel. Perhaps the History Brush source checkbox could even be reused for this purpose as well.
When dragging a guide onto the canvas from the rulers, you can hold Alt/Option to switch between horizontal and vertical on the fly. Maybe something similar could be done with the divider, allowing us to switch between a horizontal and vertical wipe. Maybe this isn’t strictly necessary, but since moving the divider feels somewhat similar to moving a guide, the idea occurred to me.

In any case, thanks for implementing this kind of feature 👍

onazole

Inspiring

“ Use Single View to flip between states”.

It doesn't work for me, I only get one state, I don't know how to switch between them.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.