Photoshop Move Tool Tutorial

Series Summary

Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for photo editing today. It is a program that gives users the power to manipulate colors and effects, layer parts of images in stacks, adjust balances and global characteristics with precision, and clean up or completely revision photographs. Photoshop offers unique features and effects, though some argue that it does not replicate natural media as closely as other painting programs. Despite the criticisms, Photoshop is also the standard program for artists outside photography who create images from scratch. The recent rise of digital painting is popular in fantasy and commercial art. Anyone with a computer and determination can learn Photoshop and reproduce the same quality art exhibited in magazines, comics, and web literature... although, as the purists will remind us, it still takes artistic talent.

In this free tutorial video series, professional photographer and business owner Julio teaches you the basic brushes and effects of Photoshop for digital photograph manipulation. You will learn how to use the brushes and tools, including the color doge, burn, patch, and clone stamp tools. Julio also gives tips for the liquify filter and other effects unique to Photoshop. You will be prepared to start your own experimenting after these informative videos.

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated, and I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Hi everybody, in this clip I'm going to be talking about the move tool. Now for those of you guys that know Photoshop, you know what the move tool is. And for the people who are watching this that are beginners to Photoshop, the move tool is the tool where you can see my cursor is pointing to right here--move tool--and you can see a "V" next to it, which is the shortcut for the move tool. So that means if I want the move tool without clicking, all I have to do is hit a "V", and there you go, you have the move tool. Okay. Now the move tool; basically you click and drag, and you can move anything on your image as long as it is an unlocked layer. For instance this one, I try to move it and it does not let me lose it--move it because the layer is locked. So you hit okay, and down over here on my layers palette, where you can see my little arrow is, double click it, and when you double click this dialog box comes up. You hit okay to unlock. Okay, now you can move around your image. Okay, if I want to move this image to another file, which I have here, a little rough draft ad for a company that I have done, what I can do is hold onto the shift key, and bring this over, and it should automatically drop it into the center. And it did. Now as you can see, it brought it into the layers palette right over here, and it is now a--it's own separate layer, in a totally different file. Now we can get rid of this one, and now we're working with this one. Okay, now what you can do with the move tool, is you can move things all around your image. If you--you know, I lost my logo as you can tell, when I dropped this image of two rings onto my file, so what you need to do is bring this down underneath and--the logo layer, and now your logo gets popped up right there. If you want to move a certain thing, like the logo, you'll have to actually click on the layer down over here on the layers palette. And it needs to be highlighted, like in blue, like it is right here, and now you can actually move stuff around. Now in this image you cannot see the rings, and I want to see the rings, so I'm going to move this logo over here, and now it is being hidden by this church picture. So what you want to do is you want to actually move the church picture over with the move tool, and now the two pieces of tape I created on two separate layers are right here. Now, instead of moving one at a time, what you can do is hold onto your shift key and click onto two layers, and you can actually highlight two different layers, and now I can move both the tapes together and they stay the same distance apart from each other. Now what I want to do is move my logo just a little bit lower, choice of state which is a void facility, and now what I want to do is actually bring down the opacity of the ring picture, by going to the opacity button right over here, and you just drag along it, hold and click, and you kind of have something that looks like this, which is the start of an ad. It's not completed, but you get the idea of how to use the move tool, and a couple of other things I kind of talked about there too. So basically, this is it for the move tool. Thank you for listening, bye."