لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Moving and Duplicating Selections
In the preceding steps, I mentioned that you can move either the selected pixels or the empty selection outline to a new location. Now it's time to examine these techniques in greater depth.
The role of the move tool
To move selected pixels, you have to use the move tool. No longer is it acceptable merely to drag inside the selection with the marquee, lasso, or wand tool, as it was way back in Photoshop 3 and earlier. If you haven't gotten used to it yet, now is as good a time as any. The move tool is here to stay.You can select the move tool at any time by pressing V (for mooV). The advantage of using the move tool is that there's no chance of deselecting an image or harming the selection outline. Drag inside the selected area to move the selection; drag outside the selection to move the entire layer, selection included. I explain layers in more detail in Chapter 12.
| Tip | To access the move tool on a temporary basis, press and hold Ctrl (z on the Mac). The move tool remains active as long as you hold Ctrl or z. This shortcut works when any tool except the hand tool, the direct selection or path selection tool, or any pen, shape, or slice tool is active. Assign this shortcut to memory at your earliest convenience. Believe me, you spend a lot of time Ctrl-dragging (z -dragging on the Mac) in Photoshop. |
Making precise movements
Photoshop provides three methods for moving selections in prescribed increments. In each case, the move tool is active, unless otherwise indicated:
First, you can nudge a selection in 1-pixel increments by pressing an arrow key on the keyboard or nudge in 10-pixel increments by pressing Shift with an arrow key. This technique is useful for making precise adjustments to the position of an image. Note that a series of consecutive nudges is recorded in the History palette (see Chapter 7) as only one history state, regardless of how much you move the selection. Choosing Undo will take the selection back to its original position in the image.
Second, you can press Shift during a drag to constrain a move to a 45-degree direction — that is, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.
And third, you can use the Info palette to track your movements and to help locate a precise position in the image.
To display the Info palette, shown in Figure 8-19, choose Window Info or press F8. The first section of the Info palette displays the color values of the image area beneath your cursor. When you move a selection, the other eight items in the palette monitor movement, as follows:
Figure 8-19: The Info palette provides a world of numerical feedback when you move a selection.
X, Y: These values show the coordinate position of your cursor. The distance is measured from the upper-left corner of the image in the current unit of measure. The unit of measure in Figure 8-19 is pixels.
DX, DY: These values indicate the distance of your move as measured horizontally and vertically.
A, D: The A and D values reflect the angle and direct distance of your drag.
W, H: These values reflect the width and height of your selection.
Cloning a selection
When you move a selection, you leave a hole in your image in the background color, as shown in the top half of Figure 8-20. If you prefer to leave the original in place during a move, you have to clone the selection — that is, create a copy of the selection without upsetting the contents of the Clipboard. Photoshop offers several ways to clone a selection:
Figure 8-20: When you move a selection, you leave a gaping hole in the selection's wake (top). When you clone an image, you leave a copy of the selection behind. To illustrate this point, I cloned the selection in the bottom image three times.
Alt-dragging (Option-dragging on the Mac): When the move tool is active, press Alt (Option on the Mac) and drag a selection to clone it. The bottom half of Figure 8-20 shows a selection I Alt-dragged three times. (Between clonings, I changed the gray level of each selection to set them apart a little more clearly.)
Ctrl+Alt-dragging (z -Option-dragging on the Mac): If some tool other than the move tool is active, press Ctrl+Alt (z -Option on the Mac) and drag the selection to clone it. This is probably the technique you'll end up using most often.
Alt+arrowing (Option-arrowing on the Mac): When the move tool is active, press Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) and one of the arrow keys to clone the selection and nudge it one pixel away from the original. If you want to move the image multiple pixels, press Alt+arrow (Option-arrow on the Mac) the first time only. Then nudge the clone using the arrow key alone. Otherwise, you'll create a bunch of clones, which probably isn't what you want to do.
Ctrl+Alt+arrowing (z -Option-arrowing on the Mac): If some other tool is active, press Ctrl and Alt (z and Option on the Mac) and an arrow key. Again, press only Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) the first time, unless you want to create a string of clones.
Drag-and-drop: Like about every other program on the planet, Photoshop lets you clone a selection between documents by dragging it with the move tool from one open window and dropping it in another, as demonstrated in Figure 8-21. As long as you manage to drop into the second window, the original image remains intact and selected in the first window. My advice: Don't worry about exact positioning during a drag-and-drop; first get the selection into the second window and then worry about placement.
Figure 8-21: Use the move tool to drag a selection from one open window and drop it into another (top). This creates a clone of the selection in the receiving window (bottom).
| Cross-Reference | You can drag-and-drop multiple layers if you link the layers first. For more information on this subject, see Chapter 12. |
Shift-drop: If the two images are exactly the same size — pixel for pixel — press Shift when dropping the selection to position it in the same spot it occupied in the original image. This is called registering the selection.
| Tip | If an area is selected in the destination image, Shift-dropping positions the selection you're moving in the center of the selection in the destination image. This tip works regardless of whether the two images are the same size. |
Ctrl-drag-and-drop (z -drag-and-drop on the Mac): Again, if some other tool than the move tool is selected, you must press Ctrl (Win) or z (Mac) when you drag to move the selected pixels from one window to the other.
Moving a selection outline independently of its contents
After all this talk about the move tool and the Ctrl key (z key on the Mac), you may be wondering what happens if you drag a selection with the marquee, lasso, or wand. The answer is, you move the selection outline independently of the image. This technique, which I used earlier in this chapter in the steps "Removing an Element from an Image," serves as yet another means to manipulate inaccurate selection outlines. It also enables you to mimic one portion of an image inside another portion of the image or inside a different image window.In the top image in Figure 8-22, I used the marquee tool to drag the skull outline down and to the right, so that it only partially overlapped the skull. I then lightened the new selection, applied a few strokes to set it off from its background, and gave it stripes, as shown in the bottom image. For all I know, this is exactly what a female Russian Saiga antelope looks like.
Figure 8-22: Drag a selection with a selection tool to move the outline independently of its image (top). Wherever you drag the selection outline becomes the new selection (bottom).
| Tip | You can nudge a selection outline independently of its contents by pressing an arrow key when a selection tool is active. Press Shift with an arrow key to move the outline in 10-pixel increments. |
For even more selection fun, you can drag-and-drop empty selection outlines between images. Just drag the outline from one image and drop it into another, as demonstrated in the first example of Figure 8-21. The difference is that only the selection outline gets cloned; the pixels remain behind. This is a great way to copy pixels back and forth between images. You can set up an exact selection outline in Image A, drag it into Image B with the marquee tool, move it over the pixels you want to clone, and Ctrl-drag-and-drop (z -drag-and-drop on the Mac) the selection back into Image A. This is slick as hair grease, I'm telling you.So remember: The selection tools affect only the selection outline. The selection tools never affect the pixels themselves; that's the move tool's job.
Scaling or rotating a selection outline
In case you fell asleep during the last two sentences, let me repeat the important part: Selection outlines stay independent — and entirely changeable — as long as a selection tool is active. In addition to moving a selection outline, you can transform it by choosing Select Transform Selection.
When you select this command, Photoshop displays a transformation boundary framed by eight handles, as shown in Figure 8-23. You can drag the handles to adjust the outline as described in the upcoming list. In addition, the Options bar gives you access to a slew of mysterious option boxes, as shown at the top of the figure. You can enter specific values to relocate, size, rotate, and skew the selection outline precisely.
Figure 8-23: After choosing Select Transform Selection, you can scale the selection outline (top) and rotate it (bottom), all without harming the image in the slightest.
The handles and Options bar controls work just as they do for the Edit Free Transform command, which I cover in gripping detail in Chapter 12. To save you the backbreaking chore of flipping ahead four chapters, though, here's the short course:
Scale: Drag any of the handles to scale the selection, as shown in Figure 8-23. Shift-drag to scale proportionally, Alt-drag (Option-drag on the Mac) to scale with respect to the origin (labeled in the figure). You can move the origin just by dragging it.Alternatively, enter a scale percentage in the W (width) and H (height) boxes in the Options bar. By default, Photoshop maintains the original proportions of the outline. If that doesn't suit you, click the Constrain Proportions button between the two boxes.
| Note | See that little replica of the transformation boundary near the left end of the Options bar? The black square represents the current origin. You can click the boxes to relocate the origin to one of the handles. Use the X and Y values to change the position of the origin numerically. Click the triangular delta symbol, labeled in Figure 8-23, to measure positioning relative to the transformation origin. |
Rotate: Enter a value in the Rotate option box or drag outside the transformation boundary to rotate the selection, as in the second example in Figure 8-23. The rotation always occurs with respect to the origin.
| Tip | To rotate the outline by 90 or 180 degrees, right-click (Control-click on the Mac) the image window and choose the rotation amount you want from the resulting pop-up menu. |
Flip: You can flip a selection outline by dragging one handle past its opposite handle, but this is a lot of work. The easier way is to right-click (Control-click on the Mac) inside the image window and choose Flip Horizontal or Flip Vertical from the pop-up menu.
Skew and distort: To skew the selection outline, Ctrl-drag (z -drag on the Mac) a side, top, or bottom handle. Or enter values in the H (horizontal) and V (vertical) skew boxes in the Options bar. To distort the selection, Ctrl-drag (Win) or z -drag (Mac) a corner handle.
When you get the selection outline the way you want it, press Enter or Return or double-click inside the boundary. To cancel the transformation, press Escape. Alternatively, click the check-mark button near the right end of the Options bar to apply the transformation or click the "no symbol" button to cancel out of the operation.
