3.2 Operation Tool

Hi, welcome back. In this lesson, I'll be showing you the tools you use to manipulate objects on your canvas. You can see I've already drawn a circle on the canvas here, and the way in which we're going to manipulate that is using the operation tool. So, you can either press, o, on your keyboard, or you can click on this icon, which is a cube with a cursor pointing towards it. And this acts very much in the same way as the Move tool in Photoshop. So, if I select that tool, and then click on my circle, I can move that anywhere I like on the canvas. It differs slightly from Photoshop, in that it also incorporates elements of the Transform tool. So if I right-click on this circle, I can then choose Free Transform, and move any of these points around or rotate by dragging outside of the box. If I don't like the changes I've made, I can press Esc on my keyboard, and it will revert to how it was before you made any changes. You can then try again, and once you have the changes you like, you can press Enter on your keyboard, and they'll be saved like that. You may have noticed that we also have different tool properties. So we've gone to a different tool and different tool properties have popped up in our tool property window. If we click on the first drop-down, you can see that Select layer is ticked. So if I make another layer, and draw a line in that one, go back to our operation tool. And because we have Select Layer ticked, you can see at the moment we're in this line layer, if I then want to select this circle, which is under a different layer, I can just click it and then it will start to move around. And we've automatically shifted to that because we've got Select layer ticked. Now the operation tool doesn't just work on drawn items. If you click on the Selectable Object drop-down, you'll see all the different things that it will work on. So at the moment it works on raster images, vector images, image material, so that's imported images, 3D objects, text balloons, frame borders, gradients, fills, rulers, and lines. So if I create, for example, a linear ruler, like that, I'm able then to manipulate this ruler. Say I wanted to change the angle where I've drawn that line. I go to my operation tool, click on my ruler, I can then move the anchor points around, I can rotate it with this little handle here, and I can scale it by dragging on the corners on these edges here. We also have a different option for the operation tool. So, if you click on Operation of transparent part one more time, you can then tick on Select multiple by drag. Now this only works on objects like rulers or vector objects. It won't work on these raster parts here. But if I click on that, and I'll create one more ruler, go back to the operation tool, and, now, because we have Select multiple by drag ticked on, I can drag a bounding box. And I've selected both of these rulers which I can then rotate as a whole, I can scale them as a whole, but I can also drag individual parts around like that. You know, I've also noticed that because we're on a different tool, we also have a few sub tools. At the moment we're in Object, so that means we're modifying all of these objects here. But if we change that to Layer Selection, what that does is basically select a different layer based on where we're clicking. So, at the moment we're on our circle layer. And if I click on this line, I've gone to this line layer here. Now you may wonder why you'd want to do that because we have that same behavior when we're in Object mode. But, the benefit here is that we can actually filter the kinds of layers that we want to select. So, if you're very heavy on layers and you don't want to select your draft layers or any text layers or any lock layers, you can click any of these icons here. And, then, whenever you want to select an object, rather than going through all of your layers, you'll know that you can't select a text layer or a draft layer, you'll just be selecting your finished line work that you want to select. The operation tool is also used to get rid of objects on our canvas. So when we're in Object mode, say we're finished drawing our straight line with our ruler, I click on our ruler as if we're going to edit it, and then I can just press Delete on my keyboard and delete each ruler like that. Another way in which we can manipulate objects on our canvas is by choosing the move tool. So, the move tool, by default, works in the very similar way to the operation tool, but you can see that it isn't at the moment selecting this line layer here. So if we're in the circle layer, everywhere I click moves just the circle because that's the contents of that layer. But we can also turn on Move the object at clicked. So, there we're moving our circle, but now when I click on the line, I'm moving the line. Now the benefit of using this tool is that we're not actually shifting our layers, so I'm in the circle layer, but I'm moving this line and staying in the circle there, so that's really good. If, for example, we have a draft drawing underneath which needs to move, but we want our ink line work to stay on top, we can keep drawing in our ink layer, move our bottom layer, and then carry on drawing again, and we won't be accidentally drawing in a different layer. We can also tick Move layers in selected area. So if we wanted to move all of these objects, we can now choose our lasso tool, move around them, go back to our move layer tool. And you can see that even though we're in just the circle there, we're moving everything that's actually in our selection there. And that's how you manipulate objects in Manga Studio. In the next lesson, I'll be showing you different ways in which you can make and modify selections.