Much as we wish otherwise, Photoshop does not have an object-oriented conceptual model. You can’t just click and act on an element of a composition. You need to find and select the layer on which the element resides.
Someday someone will demonstrate how much funner graphics work can be if the bitmap manipulation capabilities of Photoshop were combined with the object-oriented approach of OmniGraffle, Visio, Stone Create, the old ClarisImpact and many others. With those apps you select an item merely by clicking on it.
In the mean time, Photoshop users are stuck with having to select layers. Unfortunately they don’t make it easy. To select one of the rounded rectangles in this example, you have to try and discern the layout from the nasty layers palette (at right):
To make life a bit easier, Photoshop lets you right click to see a list of layers under the cursor (assuming you are in the right mode):
So what’s the problem?
To come up with a better solution, it’s important to get precise
about what you’re trying to fix. Here, the issues are:
- Who knows what the name of the layer is? Most layers are never labeled.
- And even those that are labeled requires the designer to mentally map what they see into its name, which requires thought. Is there a more direct way?
- Photoshop doesn’t indicate what layer is selected on the canvas. So even if you have the right layer selected, you can’t be sure. You either have to assume you do (which leads to the frequent and maddening wrong-layer error), or look over at the layers palette to check.
- Even if you check with the layers palette you may not succeed: the thumbnails are small and you may have multiple layers with similar looking thumbnails. The remedy is to hide and show the layer and see if it’s the one you were expecting.
Can we do better? Is there a more direct and sure-fire way to select a layer without guesswork? Can we do it visually so the user doesn’t have to enter the world of words?
Selecting layers graphically
Here is how a graphical layer selection menu could look:
a graphical layer selection menu
Some elements of this approach:
- The graphical menu includes the name of the layer for the use cases where that is needed and used.
- Rolling over an item in the menu highlights the corresponding item in the layout. This helps when there are multiple similar looking layers.
Variants of the idea
1. Skew the layers to emphasize that you’re looking at a stack of layers:
2. For some extra (Mac OS X-inspired) bling, rapidly animate proxies of the layers from their spot on the canvas to the stack of layers.
3. Let the user press a modifier key with the right-click to line up all the currently visible layers. Maybe even the invisible ones, too, to facilitate finding and turning on a wanted hidden layer.
This idea isn’t limited to Photoshop and its layer issues, by the way. It can be hard to select the right object in a layered composition even with the object-oriented graphics apps.
[Readers: Do any current apps do this well?]
The latest version of Photoshop has a “layer autoselect” feature, which allows you to select elements by clicking on them without selecting their parent layer first. Good thing it can be clicked off, for it is extremely annoying…