Photoshop won't unhide

M

Morgan19

Registered
I've been working on a project in Photoshop CS (running Panther, 10.3.6) and was wrapping up on it. I needed a screenshot of the artwork so I started up Grab and took the screenshot. At some point in the process I hid PS but now when I'm trying to "show" PS it won't come back up. I can click on the icon in the Dock and it acts like it's in PS but everything in the menu bar except Hide, Hide Others, and Show All is greyed out and none of the document windows I had open show up.

I tried Show All, using Expose, Hide and then Show All, etc. and nothing's pulling the document windows in PS back up... I desperately need to get back into the program to save what I've been working on and have tried everything I can think of.

Thanks,
m19
 
A few things you can do:

From the Finder/Desktop click the apple menu and go to "recent items" and see if you can select photoshop CS.

Hit command + option + esc (but don't select or do ANYTHING in the window that comes up; do this to simply check if Photoshop is RED in this window. If it is, there could be an error happening within the program and you might have to quit photoshop to get it working again.) Sometimes, this is enough to "wake up" the offending program without doing anything, though.

Select Photoshop and hit the tab key; maybe you just hid the tools? Did you hide Photoshop in a certain mode? When you hit the F key you can toggle between window, full screen gray and full screen black modes. Maybe you are in full screen mode with your tools off?

Let us know if any of this works for you. Hopefully you don't lose any hard work. :(
 
- I don't have a recent items option in the Apple; if I recall correctly I removed it back when I first started using OSX. Any other way of getting to it?

- Photoshop looks fine in the Force-Quit window, nice proper black text and all. ;) Doing that didn't make it come back to life, either.

- I tried cycling through the view modes but nothing showed up. I don't think that's the problem; I'd assume all the menu options wouldn't be greyed out if I was just in a different view mode. It seems more like the machine just ran out of memory or something.

Thanks for the suggestions, at this point I'm trying everything twice. :)

m19
 
Go to System Prefs/General and select the recent items. Maybe some will show up after you reactivate this.

You could also try cycling through your programs by command + tab (from the desktop) and you will see each program you have open, one by one as you hit tab, tab tab with command still down.

I just had a thought. When you open photoshop, did you send your photoshop doc to the DOCK? Maybe it's just hidden in the dock and you can't see it because you double clicked on the top bar of the photoshop file's window? If it's in the dock when you select photoshop, the little icon will show up at the far right end of the dock and that should be your hidden document.

Hopefully this makes sense, I am a little sick today. :)
 
- Heh, I don't have a General category under System Prefs either. ;)

- Tried Command+Tab yesterday to no effect. :(

- Nope... I've got he PS icon permanently docked at the dock (you know, so it shows up even when the program's not active). I can click on it and I comes up as being active, but everything's greyed out which makes me believe it's hung. Definitely no hidden windows or docs anywhere.

Thanks anyway, I think I give up...
m19
 
just another idea before losing your work... when you tried to unhide PS, do the normal options (File, Edit,.....) appear in the upper menubar? try to go to window, arrange,and the Bring all to Front... just an idea, no particolar reason...
 
How much RAM do you have? Do you hear any disk activity going on? It could be that PS is trying to swap back in memory that it paged out, and it may take a second or two... how long have you let it sit there with PhotoShop "trying" to be the frontmost application?
 
Morgan19 said:
- Heh, I don't have a General category under System Prefs either. ;)
Click to expand...

So how did you manage to get rid of so many vital system functions? Why would you delete the General System Prefs? Just curious… :)
 
No... that's what I meant by "all the menu options are greyed out". :)

In any case, I restarted the system and just redid the work. Stinks, but it's done now.

m19
 
For what it's worth, this happens to me a few times a day on my
Dual G4 at work running 10.3.6 and PS CS. Usually, it's solved by quitting
extraneous apps, clicking to the desktop, then using App Switcher to cycle
back to PS so that it becomes the foreground app again. I have 1.5 GB of RAM, so I don't know that it's necessarily a RAM issue, though I do have a high percentage of RAM allocation set in PS; 70% I believe. I'll agree that it's hella annoying...
 
This happens to me sometimes too. Totally annoying.

I have 2 gigs of RAM and it doesn't seem tied to memory at all. Quitting other apps, as suggested by someone else, doesn't work.

No normal method of selecting, tabbing, or cycling back to Photoshop works. "Finder > Show All" does not work. It simply won't show Photoshop, and won't show any of its menu dropdowns either. You can't access any Photoshop command or menu.

Force Quit is the only thing that seems to work. And the Force Quit dialog does not indicate that Photoshop is hung, nor does running Activity Monitor indicate any obvious problem.

I
 
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