I love Photoshop. I use it almost every day, and I’ve been using it since at least 1994. It really is a great program. And I fully realize it’s a program for professionals, which means a lot of it is optimized for efficient workflows for professionals, as opposed to being optimized for a shallow learning curve for new users.

But for the last few versions of Photoshop I’ve been driven crazy by what appears to be an oversight by the Photoshop developers in how their vector art tools work. The problem is not entirely apparent until it’s been seen in a real situation, so let’s walk through one.

The problem

Here’s a clipping of the image for my blog and homepage. The entire image was done in Photoshop, and a lot of it is done with Photoshop’s Vector tools. I’ve simplified the document to isolate just a few elements, in order to make things easier to explain. Here you can see we’ve got three vector art layers:

The problem I’m running into is with Photoshop’s two vector selection tools, the Path Selection Tool and the Direct Selection Tool. These two tools are used for manipulating control points on vector shapes, and they have an auto-layer-select function built into them that is flawed. Let’s say I’m trying to select and manipulate the points in the upper-left serif in the H logotype. I can use the Direct Selection Tool to do so, and if I click inside of the H or directly on the points, I’m okay:

But if I accidentally click outside of the H and on one of the purple hexagons, Photoshop automatically selects the hexagon layer:

But there’s a quirk to Photoshop’s auto-layer-selection feature in the Direct Selection Tool. Attempting to click back on the H does not auto-select it:

No, clicking on the H like I did in the image above doesn’t auto-select. In fact, when auto-select does occur it tends to not let me use auto-select to get back to where I was. The behavior of this tool seems difficult to predict, doesn’t it?

And when Photoshop auto-selects a layer, it scrolls the Layers Palette to the newly-selected-layer’s location. My original document has about 50 layers, with the H being near the top, and the hexagons at the bottom, so re-selecting my H layer using the Layers Palette is not a trivial thing. I have to scroll back up the Layers Palette looking for my H layer.

While working on the original image I was constantly fighting Photoshop for control of the H layer, and not simply because I was mis-clicking. The Direct Selection Tool and the Path Selection Tool both have the ability to drag-select multiple points. That is, I can click and drag a bounding box out to coral the control points I want, and it’s an extremely handy feature that I use a lot when editing vector shapes.

That is, I attempt to use it. But the same auto-layer-select issue occurs when attempting to drag-select points, and it occurs on the mouseDown, before I even let go of the mouse button. What I want to do is this:

(note I faked the above screenshot to show you how it should work) But instead, the hexagon layer gets selected again even before I let go of the mouse button, and the drag-select never occurs:

This renders the drag-select feature of these tools next-to-useless in documents with even mild vector complexity in them. When working on this image I must have run into this at least a dozen times while attempting to drag-select. I continue to try to drag-select while working on the document because when it does work it feels so right and natural. And again, the quirk in the auto-select means that once the hexagon layer is selected, I can’t click on the H to get back. In fact drag-select in the hexagon layer seems to work just fine, even when I clearly start outside the hexagon and inside the white of the H:

The behavior of the auto-layer-select tool is maddeningly unpredictable. I fight with this tool tooth-and-nail every time I use vector shapes. But I want to stress that it is not the tool’s unpredictability alone that makes this frustrating. Even if the vector tool consistently auto-selected layers, it would still render the drag-select feature of the tool useless in a lot of cases, like trying to select the two control points in the upper-left of the H:

Even with consistenly working auto-select, attempting to use the drag-select functionality here means the auto-select of the hexagon layer.

Why the Auto-Layer-Select is unpredictable

I’ve been using Photoshop’s vector drawing tools since they first debuted in Photoshop five years(?) ago, and I’ve never been able to figure out how and when these tools will auto-select a layer. But when putting together the examples for this blog entry, I was finally able to figure out why auto-select sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t.

After a lot of trial-and-error and head-scratching I discovered that if I click outside of the currently-selected vector layer’s bounding box that auto-select kicks in. For example, when the HL logotype layer is selected, I can click and click-drag anywhere inside the HL’s bounding box (which is normally invisible but I’ve rendered into the screenshot with a cyan outline) without selecting any other layer:

Even clicking on the hexagons is fine if they are inside the bounding-box of the currently-selected HL layer. But if I click on a hexagon to the upper-left of the bounding box with the Direct Selection Tool, the hexagon layer gets selected:

It is clear now why clicking back on the H won’t auto-select it. The H is completely contained within the hexagon layer’s bounding box, and in fact clicking on the L does indeed re-select the HL layer.

But I want to point out that in five years of using Photoshop’s vector tools I never discovered this (and I doubt it’s widely known), and that even though I now know how it works, auto-layer-selection is still cumbersome and crippling in many scenerios, especially with drag-select and when the bounding-box of one vector layer completely encases another layer. It’s still not very predictable because with a lot of vector layers there are a lot of bounding-boxes to deal with, and their edges are not always obvious. In short it’s unacceptable to ask a user to understand the way it currently works and then try to predict the outcome.

My Suggestions

I love the way the majority of Photoshop’s tools work: I select the layer I want, and then I work on it without worrying about the layer above it, below it, and around it. That is the power of Layers, and what makes editing in Photoshop a joy. So my first suggestion is:

[1] Remove the the auto-layer selection with the Path Selection and Direct Selection tools. There are already plenty of ways to visually select layers, including auto-selection with the move tool, and ctrl-right-clicking (although that has some problems of it’s own).

My second suggestion would be to allow the user to turn auto-selection on and off like the Move Tool has, but only if Adobe makes other changes:

[1] Make make auto-layer-selection occur on the mouseUp event and only if there was no dragging. That would always allow drag-selecting, even when starting outside of the bounding box.

[2] Get rid of the bounding box requirement. Auto-layer-select should be based on the the actual shape: clicking on a shape means it gets selected, no matter what.

[3] I can’t stress this enough: allow users to turn auto-selection on and off like the Move Tool allows. Photoshop has a consistent interface, and having some tools do auto-layer-select while others don’t is quite upredictable. Let me turn it off.

I hope that Adobe addresses this problem in the next version of Photoshop. It seriously hinders the otherwise-wonderful set of vector art tools that I truly love using.

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