Participant

Answered

Mistaken use of Control-Y (CTRL-Y) to Redo

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
May 10, 2016
13 replies
164104 views

I recently thought that I lost hours of work (in Adobe Illustrator) when I accidentally used control-Y (CTRL-Y) to redo something after I used control-Z (CTRL-Z) to undo a change. When I used control-Y, a white background with only fine outlines of my work remained. After trying to use control-Z (to undo my mistaken use of control-Y), and finding that it did absolutely nothing to resolve the problem, I began to experiment with the remnants of the work.

I selected the entire image (which was only fine lines), used control-C (to copy the selection), then opened a new document and pasted the contents using control-V. Like magic, all of my work was on the new document - details, colors, everything! I can only theorize that the original work was not really lost, only hidden in a way that I was unable to recover on the original document.

Wondering if anyone else has a solution for the mistaken use of control-Y in an Adobe Illustrator document.

Correct answer Larry G. Schneider

Cmd(Ctrl)-Y is the keyboard toggle for Outline View. If you had used the same combination again in your original file the view of everything would have returned (as you found when you moved it to a new file with Preview active).

B

benjiblues

Participant

CTRL+Y is Proof Colors, very top of the View menu.

View > Proof Colors

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

CTRL+Y is Proof Colors, very top of the View menu.

View > Proof Colors

By @benjiblues

Only if you've edited your shortcuts. By default Proof Colours has no shortcut and Ctrl + Y is Outline mode.

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benjiblues

Participant

Ohh! Thanks for the clairification. I was wondering. I must have forgotten that I edited the shortcut.

S

sharmeen34482305thgx

Participant

Thank you so much. It worked

entroid

Inspiring

OMG I HAVE THE SAME ISSUE, how can these guys have such a horrific UX? ctrl + y is used pretty much everywere as an undo control but here, itjust messes everything up and does something that no one knows nor wants. Really these guys i feel like i wnt to ill people right now. and don't offer a way to fix it? wtf just happend to my design

Monika Gause

Community Expert

@entroid schrieb:

OMG I HAVE THE SAME ISSUE, how can these guys have such a horrific UX? ctrl + y is used pretty much everywere as an undo control

Everywhere? I'm seeing it used basically nowhere at all. The standard is Ctrl+Z for undo

Are you sure you are not using the wrong keyboard language?

Doug A Roberts

Community Expert

Do they mean Ctrl+Y as redo?

T

tipali31327762bwsv

Participant

ctrl y is answer of ctrl y ( outline)

D

Davin26607045m35g

Participant

FIXED: VIEW - PROOF SETUP - INTERNET STANDART RGB (sRGB)

D

defaultb0sfti1tmatf

Participant

Oh Jesus..it happened to me for the third time when I accidentally changed the keyboard settings while working..thanks for the post! I could manage to get back everything as it was before.

KazVorpal

Participating Frequently

It sounds like you do hours of work on a single layer, the one you were able to copy and paste to another document, instead of preserving most of what you do by using multiple layers, smart objects, adjustment layers, paths, et cetera.

Or at least you did way back when you wrote that.

Since this came up in search results, I'm going to write a suggestion for anyone reading it:

Constantly editing a single layer and counting on Undo for any revisions is generally a mistake, for multiple reasons:

Editing like that is called a Destructive Workflow

By using it you are forced to give up all subsequent edits when you undo.
You also lose your undo chain when you save and close the file.
Oh, and if you ever learn Illustrator, its design team are blindered about undo, and won't even let you see your edit history like in Photoshop, so you have to undo blind.

Instead, use a Non-Destructive Workflow:

As a simple starting point, any time you're going to make some radical change, you can simply hit control-J to make an extra copy of the layer before it's altered. You can end up with a small stack of layers that show major steps in the process of creating the finished product. But you can gradually move on to steps that give you a lot more power to control previous changes you made to the image, as follows...
If you keep each new paste or image on its own layer, you then can revise each of those layers separately, preserving most of what you'd done since, and can "undo" after reopening the file.
And layers can usually be turned into "smart objects", which then secretly keep an original version of that layer, with all of the changes you make to it preserved separately, so you can turn off a change or even adjust it later.
You can't erase bits of a Smart Layer normally, but you can create a Layer Mask that lets you conceal parts of the layer EXACTLY as if you were erasing them. You "paint black" on the mask and where you paint becomes invisible, and you can then unerase parts by painting white over the black.
You can also change all of the visible layers at once non-destructively, with "adjustment layers" that alter what every layer under them looks like.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

This is about Illustrator, so Smart Objects and Layer masks are not a thing.

There are opacity masks though.

KazVorpal

Participating Frequently

Ugh, I hate that about Illustrator...the lack of undo history. In a way ALL layers in Illustrator are smart objects. But the lack of layer masks is kinda dumb, they'd add more ability to change the vector graphics in an organic way.

I often pull things into Photoshop instead, thanks to limitations like those, whenever there won't be a scaling issue or such with the final product.

Odd, I was doing a photoshop search when I hit this result. I'll just leave it up here for photoshop users who drive by via Google, if it's okay.

omniaabdelgawad

Participant

what is the answer exactlz _ i canät seem to find it , iäm having the same problem

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malcolms97644040

Participant

In Photoshop 2018 this toggles the Proof Colors option. To untoggle the options, go to the View Menu in the top toolbar and click Proof Colors to uncheck it if it's already checked.