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Last week we talked about the Info palette and
its hidden secrets. I want to talk more about Photoshop's little
secrets, this week discussing the move tool.
When you select the move tool, the options
palette at the top of your screen shows a few new options to
choose from. Look at the image above. You can select the Auto
Layer Select Checkbox and the Show bounding Box checkbox. What
do these mean you say?
The Auto Layer Select options is really cool.
Basically what it does is check to see where the cursor is
inside the image area and when you click, Photoshop
automatically switches to that layer. It works pretty much like
a vector drawing program such as Illustrator or Freehand. You
just click on the thing you want to move, and it selects. Saves
you a lot of time when you have a lot of layer in your image.
The Show Bounding Box option is also sort-of a
cross-over from vector programs. What is does is it shows you
the boundaries around your particular selected layer. So if you
click this, you can resize, rotate and otherwise transform the
layer that is selected in the layers palette. Works just like
vector programs. Actually it works pretty much just like using
the Free Transform option in Photoshop, minus having to click
Command-T every time you want to do it.
So now you know what those two checkboxes mean,
but what about all those buttons that appear to be not working.
These are alignment function that can take several layers at a
time and align them according to how you want. It's a pretty
cool feature, that's really hard to explain. Your best bet is
just to play around with it a little bit and get a feel for what
it does. I will explain to you how to get it to work though.
You have to have more than one layer first.
Create 3 for practice and place a small square on each layer.
Select the layer that you would like to align to and the hit the
link box at the left of each additional layer you want to align.
See next image.
Just click in the area I have circled and that
will link all the layers together. Once you do this all the
alignment options should become active. Remember that the layer
you have active (highlighted in the layers palette) is the one
that everything else will align to. This is important to know
since you want to do it just how you want. Once you play around
with each different button, you will know how they all work. If
you place your mouse cursor over each button for a second or
two, it will tell you how that button aligns the object to all
others.
I really love this tool, and most people don't
know about it. But you and I know, and we'll keep it our little
secret. I especially love the Auto Layer Select option. What a
time savor that is. No more hunting around for the layer that
you forgot to name! This is just one click and move. You gotta
love that man! |