Wish you were quicker in photoshop? About 3.5 years ago I was greatly humbled when I learned that I was ignorant of one of the most helpful photoshop tricks, the amazing ctrl click layer selection technique. By default, if you hold down control and then click on a layer, photoshop will select the parent group of that layer in the layers palette. Though I’m sure that selecting the group could be helpful for some people, I’d prefer to select the layer. So how do you change the behavior?
How to use ctrl + click to select layers
If you switch to the move tool with the V key you’ll see that there’s an option called “Auto-Select”. As you can see the default value in drop down to the right is “Group”.
Photoshop's default for layer selection.
By changing that value from “Group” to “Layer” you can change the ctrl + click behavior to select layers instead. It feels weird to change the setting in this way, but that’s how photoshop chose to do it.
Change Auto-Select to "Layer"
With that change, now hold down the ctrl key and click on the layer you’d like to select. As you can see, that layer is now selected in the layers palette.
Single layer selected
Hold down ctrl and shift and you can select multiple layers.
Multiple layer selection
Hold down ctrl and shift you can click on a layer (in the main pane) that is already selected to un-select it.
More technique
One technique that I often do is ctrl click a bunch of layers so I can group them together ( with ctrl+g).
Occasionally while selecting multiple layers I want to select only one of those layers. Generally you would just have to select a completely different layer and then ctrl click the layer you want. A few days ago a learned that you could use alt + right click to select only one of the currently selected layers. Though a bit awkward, I like this because I can keep my focus just on clicking in the main area instead of having to switch over to the layers palette.
Don’t get messy though!
When I learned that I could select layers with ctrl + click I noticed that two things happened immediately. 1) My speed greatly increased and 2) my PSDs started to get messy. I no longer had to depend on an organized layers palette in order to quickly find layers, I could simply click around and select what I needed.
Messy PSDs are fine if it’s a quick throw away mockup, but if it’s a bigger project I recommend keeping tidy as you go.
As always, happy photoshopping!
