G'day, I'm Melissa Shanhun founder of Digital Scrapbooking
HQ.com and today, we're here again for your letter of the
day in the ABCs of PSE. So, today's letter of the day is
the letter V and finally, we get to one of my top four tools
in Photoshop Elements, the move tool. So, let me show you how
the move tool works here. I have a digital scrapbook layout
that I have completed and we're going to have a play around
with this page to show you how the move tool works by default
in Photoshop Elements, the move tool is set to auto selects
layout. So, when you click somewhere in your Photoshop
elements document, you will get a blue highlight and then when
you click on it, you are then able to move that specific
layer or group of layers. So, let me show you how this works.
here. We have this blue part here is its own layer. So, when
I click and drag, I move this blue layer. When I click on
this text, again, it moves the whole text box. Now, when I
click on this group here, you can see here in the layer
panel, all of these letters are part of the a group moves them
all together if we don't have auto select layer which is how
Photoshop works by default. Even if I click over here and I
move, I'm still on that group of letters so I can select my
layers in the layers panel and then wherever I click on my
layout, I'm moving the photo so that can be handy. Want to move
just one layout within a group. If you have auto select layout
turned off, it won't accidentally move the whole
group or another layer. Now, some other options we have here
are show bounding box show bounding box shows you a
rectangle around the selected layer. For example, See this
dotted box here with the handles. That is the bounding
box. So, if we turn that off, you can't really see what
you've got selected but it it does give you a good preview of
exactly how your layout is going to look. We can also turn
off the show highlight on rollover. That means that it
tells me. if I click here, that's the layer I'm going to
select. If I click here, this is the layer I'm going to
select so on and so forth. So, I find the blue box helpful but
if you find it annoying, you can turn it off. So, we have
some other actions that we can do with our layers when we have
them selected with the move tool. So, for example, say this
one here, I can use the arrange tool to send it to the back to
bring it forward one layer at a time. Eventually, you'll start
to see it popping out or bring it the whole way to the front
and there's also keyboard shortcuts there. Control shift
close square bracket for bring to front shift control. open
square bracket for center back control, open bracket to send
backwards control close bracket to bring it forward and on the
Mac, those shortcuts are a shift command, square bracket
or com Uns skirt bracket if that makes any sense. So,
another option we do have is if we've selected more than one
layer, then we can use the align tools. So, Adobe in their
infinite wisdom have named these align tools slightly
differently to say Microsoft programs aligned top takes the
layers and aligns the to whichever is the highest
position on the page. The bottom tool aligns them all to
the lowest layer. If I select these and I click align center,
it will align centers between the highest and lowest point in
the layers you have selected. So, these Ts are slightly
taller. so everything else is centered between that but the
other kinds of alignment, it'll should be easy to show you that
with the letters as well align left, they all align to the
same left hand margin align, right? They all go to the right
hand air for the middle. they all go towards the middle
because it was centered on the page. It ended up in the center
but if we move these over here and then do middle it would
position them to the middle of that group. It's nothing to do
with the middle of the actual canvas. Middle is what's
probably known as center in other programs and center is
actually the vertical center. So, just keep that in mind.
Now, distribute will distribute layers between the top most
layer and the layer that is the lowest Centre will distribute
the centers starting from the layer at the top of your layers
panel down to the bottom and bottom will distribute again
from the top to the bottom but is using the bottom point to
evenly distribute the layers. So, as you can see, you can get
a less perfect alignment of your letter stickers if you
want to use that. if you click distribute left edges, it will
it will go from left to right and it will evenly put the left
edge along. So, as you can see, the U is wider so we end up
with a bit of overlap with the middles and with the right
edges, it's evenly distributing these right edges. That's
really all of the features of the move tool just to run
through a couple of other things about the move tool. If
you want to select more than one layer with your move tool,
just hold down the shift key. As you click each layer, it
will select and you can look in your layers panel to see which
ones are selected and then, if you click on the layer again,
it will the select it. So, when you move items, only the
selected layers are moved. So, don't forget, you can always
undo if you accidentally don't select every item I love the
move tool. I use it all the time. I especially love those
align and distribute for my scrapbooking but they come in
handy for all kinds of photo editing. I hope you've enjoyed
this video. If you've liked learning about the move tool,
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