Can one develop a program that can see and access the edits one makes to a file?

Question

I know about key loggers and root kits. I know it is possible for these programs to know what keys a user is pressing and what programs a user has open at any given time but, is it possible for a program (or background process) to know what commands (functions) with in a program are being executed?

e.g. A user is in Photoshop and does the following:

1. Opens the file called mountain.jpg
2. Crops 103 pixels off the top
3. Increases the Contrast by a value of 50
4. Saves the file as mountain-EDIT_1.jpg

Can a background process (daemon) understand that a user ran Photoshop's Open, Crop, Contrast and Save functions?

To be more specific, can a background process:

1. gain access to those unsaved edits like Crop and Contrast
2. take that data and save it else where

Also how does one locate where a program like Microsoft Word, Photoshop or ProTools is saving each of the edits a user makes?

Answer 1

The more close you would get to this functionality would be by using the photoshop's built-in scripts. I do not have enough knowledge to talk about this more, and I also doubt its the place to discuss this functionality.

On a more programming oriented point of view, you would need to look at memory photoshop is allocating for this image file and reverse-engineer photoshop's code to understand what happens on every edits you mentionned. I doubt its humanly possible.

If the user is saving the image after each edits though, you could watch for changes in the image, and try to look for the what you want to understand.

Answer 2

You may create a Photoshop plugin or script. But a generic software in such detail I don't think is possible.