CS5 history panel. Lost history state

[nebulaoperator]

Hi everyone,

Yesterday I was working on one image and did not save it for quiet a while. I normally anchor my image before I move onto next important step on History state slider. So i was ctrl+alt+z in my workflow and suddenly my image came back to where I was around 2 hours before( a lot of work has been done since) so I tried to go back shift+ctrl+z and was not able to get back and left with that older history state of my image. I was also grinding my teeth. just before that happened I thought I will do a little correction and save Can you explained me what happened and if there was a way to retrieve it. I doubt it is possible to do it now after photoshop was closed. Thank you, Neb

[John Wheeler]

Sorry about your troubles Neb.

That may be hard to debug. It certainly could have been a glitch yet it also could be pilot error and when you closed Photoshop you also threw away the flight data recorder (History State information) unless you had History Log turned on in your Preferences with it saving the details (how do you have that set in your Preferences?)

It is also difficult because errors can sometimes be related to additional keyboard shortcuts you may have set up (with a slight typing error)

Did you examine you History Panel? If yes, what was there?

Were you working on many layers in your editing sessions or just one layer?

Not sure we will ever know and I am sure you will be doing saves/snapshots more often after your experience. The rest could be guessing.

E.G of a swag
- you were editing on one layer and had selections turned on for the areas you were editing
- you accidentally typed CTRL+X instead of OPT+CTRL+Z to step back (unlikely yet same area on keyboard and this would remove all work you did on this one layer and put it in the Clipboard)
- In panic you tried to move forward in your History Panel by using Shift+CTRL+Z which would be ineffective because you are already at the end of the History States (i.e. you never stepped backwards to begin with)

This is very unlikely to be what happened yet you can see that without providing a lot more information of the steps you took how wild the guesses could be. Maybe another forum member experienced the exact same situation and provide a succinct answer.

Other than that, you may have to chalk this up to lessons learned. Sorry about that.

[nebulaoperator]

Hello John,

Thanks you for such in depth explanation.
My history was off. Now I switch in on. By the way after enabling it would I be able to recover states if anything happens while working?
If I understand you correctly by examine my history ...After that incident I was left only with two: one source of the history set and the one step forward. Nothing else.And yes I was desperately Shift+ctrl+z.
I had like 30 layers and was doing DnB on selected top two layers (curves).
I can thing of one thing straight away I mightv'e pressed ctrl+x to your refereed reply.
Thanks Neb