Undoing What You ve Done

Even the most accident -prone among us will find that it s almost impossible to do any permanent damage while working in Photoshop, because Photoshop can instantly undo errors. You never have to compromise, because you can reverse any operation. With this in mind, you can feel secure while experimenting freely with your images.

The Undo Commands

There are several techniques that reverse unwanted edits. Let s say you are carefully cloning out the blemishes on Uncle Herman s portrait. You ve had one too many double espressos, and your hand is a bit jittery. You slip, you drag a little too far, and you place a rather unsightly blotch on the tip of his nose.

An easily corrected mistake? Yes! The first course of action is to head straight to the top of the Edit menu and choose Undo, which will instantly revert the image to the moment before you made the ill-fated clone stroke. When you choose Undo, you get a new command on the Edit menu ”Redo ”which restores the undone action. You can toggle back and forth between the previous artwork (Undo) and the later look (Redo) by selecting the command again, or better yet, use the key commands in the upcoming list.

There are two additional commands in the Edit menu that apply to the Undo operations:

Step Backward This undoes the last command and then continues backward through the operations you ve performed, undoing them one at a time. As the operations are undone, you see them disappear one by one in the image window.

Step Forward If you ve applied the Step Backward command more than once, you can restore the undone operations by choosing Edit ’ Step Forward. As the operations are redone, you see them appear one by one in the image window.

Note  

As you apply them, the Step Backward and Step Forward commands move one by one through the state list in the History palette. See Working with the History Palette section later in this chapter.

You ll use these operations so frequently that it s worth remembering their corresponding key commands:

Command	Windows	Macintosh
Undo	Ctrl-Z	-Z
Step Backward	Ctrl-Alt-Z	-Option-Z
Step Forward	Shift-Ctrl-Z	Shift- -Z

By default, Ctrl/ -Z will toggle between Undo and Redo in Photoshop, although in ImageReady, the default command for Redo is Ctrl/ -Shift-Z (see Chapter 25, Web Design with Photoshop and ImageReady ). In Chapter 23, Automating the Process, I ll show you how to make custom key commands.

New Beginnings

Another lifesaving operation reverts the image to the last time you saved it. Suppose you ve been working on an image for 10 minutes since your last save, and you decide that somewhere along the line you went astray and the image is not going in the direction you want it to. You have gone too far to make corrections, so you decide you want to begin again. Choose File ’ Revert, and the image will be reopened to the last saved version.

If you are working on a newly formed image that has not yet been saved, the Revert command will be grayed out in the File menu.