How to Recover From CTRL-2 in Photoshop
If you accidentally press Control-2 (Command-2 if you're on the Mac) while viewing or working in a color file in Adobe Photoshop CS3 or earlier, you'll probably wonder what happened to your image, since it suddenly looks like a black-and-white photograph. Actually, nothing's happened to it. You're just not seeing all of its color information.
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Instructions
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Go to the "Window" menu and Choose "Channels." The palette that comes up shows the channels in your file: Red, Green and Blue in an RGB document; and Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black in a CMYK document. Notice that only one channel has an eyeball shown in the column to the left of its name in the palette, indicating that the channel is visible. In an RGB file, it's the Green channel.
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Press "Ctrl" and "~" ("Command" and "~" on the Mac) to return to the composite (full-color) view of your file. That squiggly character, called a tilde, is located to the left of the exclamation point on the top row of your keyboard. (To use your mouse instead of the keyboard, you can click in front of each channel whose eyeball is turned off to make the invisible channels visible or simply click in front of the composite channel.)
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Look at your image again and you'll see that it looks normal now that you're seeing the full composite view. Remember that making channels invisible temporarily (by accident or on purpose) doesn't delete any information from your file, but simply hides it.
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Experiment with turning the various channels off and back on again to see how they look by themselves and in pairs. You can turn channels off individually by clicking on their eyeballs in the "Channels" palette.
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Look at the "Channels" palette closely and you'll discover the individual channel-specific keyboard shortcuts to the right of the channel names. The most important shortcut to remember is the one that returns your file view to its composite form.
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Tips & Warnings
The Channels palette doesn't need to be open to switch among channels using the keyboard. The same shortcuts work regardless of whether your file is in RGB, CMYK, Lab or any other color mode. Use "Ctrl" ("Command" on the Mac) plus the numbers up to nine to access channels beyond RGB, CMYK or other color modes, including alpha channels if your file contains them.
In Adobe Photoshop CS3 and later, Adobe Systems changed the keyboard shortcuts for switching among image channels. In these versions, the keyboard shortcut for switching to the composite (full-color) view is "Ctrl" and "2" ("Command" and "2" on the Mac), and the numbers in the shortcuts to access individual channels are incremented by one as well.
