I have ranted in various places about how disappointed I am with Photoshop’s current trend of adding auto-layer-selection to tools. I’ll give you the micro-version of the rant:

One of Photoshop’s most power features is its layer palette panel. You pick the layer you want, and then work on it with the tools, not worrying about what’s in front of it or behind it. In more recent versions of Photoshop some tools have started to automatically choose a layer for you when you click in the document. Some tools have this as an option, like the Move tool, but others are not optional, like the Text tool and the Vector shape selection tools. The problem is that these tools break the model of “pick then layer, then work on it in place”. I have to watch very closely every move I make with the Vector layer tools and Text tool or risk accidentally selecting another one.

That’s my rant in a nutshell. Recently I’ve started to believe that Adobe’s new love affair with auto-layer-selecting tools is actually a suboptimal cure for a root problem: Photoshop’s power has outpaced its generalized layer selection tools.

Back in the old days the Layers panel might have been fine for layer selection, but nowadays its not uncommon to see documents with 50 or more layers of all different forms. You’ve got pixel layers, you’ve got vector layers, you’ve got adjustment layers, text layers, Smart Object layers, layers inside of layers, folder layer … and it keeps going and going.

So the problem, in general, is really that we don’t have the tools we need to find the layers we want quickly. There are some keyboard & mouse contortions we can use to pick layers visually, but they’re impossible to discover and difficult to use.

One part of the solution: The Layer Picker tool

Here’s my wish … one that I think would go a long way in solving our layer problems. It’s the Layer Picker tool. Here’s how it works. The button for the tool is in the Layers panel, not the tool bar, like so:

I’ve rendered in a little callout to make it obvious. Why is it in the Layers Panel? Because that’s where my mind is when I’m thinking about picking layers. This needs to be discoverable when you’re looking for layers. I really believe it needs a real button and not a hidden keyboard shortcut.

Clicking on it would toggle it on and off. When its on, you can move your cursor over the document and you’ll get a little pop-up in realtime showing you just the layers that have opacity under the pixel you’re currently on. Let’s look at an example of how it would work on a document with a lot of layers, like the one from my UI portfolio homepage.

There’s a few important facts to glean from this example. It is only showing layers that have opacity where the cursor is. It’s not showing sets. It has visual representations as well as the text. I’m also hoping that even for vector layers it would render a simple image instead of the color/shape combo.

The specifics of how this popup works is not important, although it should be easy to find the exact pixel you want without a lot of trial-and-error -- clicking and dragging should let the menu track your cursor and update in realtime. I imagine being able to shift and ctrl click the layers in this popup in order to do multiple select.

I think this tool would go a long way towards solving Photoshop’s layer selection problems. It would:

• Make it easier for people to discover layer selection tools
  
• Use visual cues in addition to text cues
  
• Rigidly conforms to just the location the user is interested in

Once we have an easy-to-use tool like this, having auto-selection in specific tools becomes less important. All tools with auto-layer-selection built into them should be optional.

What we have today

Whenever I post anything like this I always get some comments about today’s workarounds. I’d like to discuss this a bit. One thing we have today that you may not be aware of is ctrl-alt-right-click to select the topmost layer with opacity at the location you clicked. While it’s nice, it only does the topmost layer, and it’s so obscurely hidden it took me years to discover it, and I still don’t remember to use it all the time.

Another way is to use Ctrl-right-click with certain tools like the Move tool. This will pop up a menu that is similar to the Layer Picker menu I described above. It used to be very powerful, but in recent versions its been crippled by trying to cram too much functionality into it. Let’s take a look at in the same example document I used above:

Although its not obvious, the pixel location I clicked on in the example above only had five layers, but the popup shows 11 entries. Trying to find the layer I actually want in this list is difficult, and in this document I took the time to actually name the layers. I have found that the only reason I’ve ever had to name layers is to make this popup actually useful.

But the problems with this popup are many. Firstly, it’s not showing me just what’s under my pointer, it’s also got every layer set in my document in there! It’s impossible to tell though because there’s no way to tell the difference between a layer set and a regular layer. Is the “HL” entry an actual layer I clicked on, or is it an unrelated set? There’s no way to tell. What about the “godrays” entry? did I actually click on a godray layer, or is that just the godray set showing up? This popup has no context anymore.

This popup is a mess. I still use it, but it forces me to name more of my layers, and I’ve resorted to adding “>>” in front of the names of my sets so I know what to ignore when using this And when I do use it I have to study it for a long time to understand what I’m seeing. In short, this menu is ineffective, and still very difficult to discover in the first place.

The current solutions are not good enough. I hope Adobe reads this and considers improving the layer selection tools in the next version of Photoshop. I love the tool and wish it the best!

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