Skip to main content
Participating Frequently
January 15, 2017
Answered

Grabbing/dragging a layer from a transparent pixel

  • January 15, 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 1242 views

Back in CS5, if you held cmd/ctrl to quick-grab/drag the contents of the working layer, you could grab anywhere in the layer, or at least anywhere in the bounding box, and it would drag the whole layer/selection.  This worked even if the point you clicked on was transparent in the currently selected layer.  Iirc, this was also basic behavior on the move tool when selected normally.  I could have sworn it behaved this way even fairly recently in CC, to the extent that I've been using CC on occasion at work and as a floating license on my travel laptop.

My main desktop on which I was still nursing my old CS5 license finally gave out, so now I'm on CC across the board, and one of the first things I noticed while trying to work with a document containing many sparse but precisely pixel-aligned layers is that whenever I tried to grab layer content by a transparent pixel, rather than moving the current layer, it would instead change layers, selecting the topmost one with opaque content and move THAT one rather than the one I was actually working in.  This is a major workflow impediment when working with e.g. spritesheets or tilesheets where a great many layers may only contain a handful of pixels representing small variations between frames, where it's not always obvious which pixels belong to the current layer, let alone easy to grab them once located, and where grabbing/moving anything but the intended content is guaranteed to throw the whole sheet out of alignment.

Is this simply the new permanent behavior of the tool, or is there an option to revert it to the classic behavior?  If there is an option, where among the hundreds of preferences is the option located?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Benjamin Root

Upper left of your screen in the tool options there is "Auto-Select" - make sure that is off...

4 replies

Participating Frequently
June 24, 2019

more unnecessary default behaviour changes from adobe - cheers!

Participating Frequently
January 15, 2017

Thanks!  Is there a hotkey for this that I may have glanced by mistake?  Seems odd that it would suddenly have been the default after multiple installations of not noticing it...

Benjamin Root
Legend
January 16, 2017

You're welcome!

Ctrl/Cmd is the shortcut to temporarily toggle auto select, but I'm not aware of any default shortcut to actually toggle on/off permanently.

Benjamin Root
Benjamin RootCorrect answer
Legend
January 15, 2017

Upper left of your screen in the tool options there is "Auto-Select" - make sure that is off...

Participating Frequently
January 15, 2017

If you are using the move tool, you may have auto-select activated in the tool options.