In your Layers Palette, make only those layers you want to affect visible. Click the little eyeball icons to hide the others.
Make sure the top layer in the stack is active and highlighted.
"CTRL + ALT + Shift + E" will put a composite of all those visible layers in a new layer at the top of the layer stack.
Make your marquee selection; "CTRL + Shift + I" to invert the selection. Delete.
Now, you’re left with the rectangular area you want to move, and it’ll contain all the elements from the multiple layers you composited to the new layer.
MMTBB,
Hopefully what Phos described is actually what you’re wanting to do. What I read though, is that you want to keep the selected area of each of several layers intact on their respective layers, yet move all of them concurrently. If so, then that cannot be done.
The root problem here is that you cannot have an active selection across multiple layers…at least not to my knowledge. Instead, I believe what you’d have to do is indvidually make the same selection to each layer and manipulate the selection as desired. If you’re concerned about being able to make the same selection, just make the desired selection and perform a Save Selection. Then, move the content for the active layer, change layers, reload your saved selection, and repeat.
If the other concern is that the move you perform is rather arbitrary, such as you’re just experimenting with moving the selection do various areas, then another approach may be in order. For this, you could make the selection for each layer and then copy or cut that selection to a new layer. If you’re truly wanting to move data in a given layer, then you’d want to do a cut to new layer. Once all new layers are created, link only those new laysers together and then do your move, which will now act as a layer move but will move the linked layers all at the same time.
If satisfied with your move and wanting the cut selections to each be returned to their original layers, unlink them and merge each layer one by one back into its original layer.
Of course, you may realize how to do all this, and were just looking for a simpler solution. I can’t think of any.
Hope that helps,
Daryl
Thank you all. Very helpful. It sounds like what I want to do cannot be done.
I have tried to selected each individule layer but I run into another problem. I need the rectangle to stay a rectangle so I can know how far to move the layer over to match the others. However, when I make a selection, then try and move it, on some layers the marquee changes to ONLY surround the actual data within the rectangle. Now I have no reference point. Is there a way to keep the rectangular marquee in this situation?
Perhaps try moving the multilayer selection using Transform (Ctrl+T). I haven’t tried this using a multilayer selection, so I don’t know if it will work. However, when using a single layer selection, this will show the rectangle; drag with the cursor inside the box to move. When it’s where you want, click the commit checkbox or hit Enter.
You can’t edit more than one layer at the time (except for moving whole layers) so what Daryl recommends is the way to go.
the marquee changes to ONLY surround the actual data within the rectangle
To avoid this use Transform (what Michael suggested)
Now I have no reference point
What I would add to the mix is to use guides to keep track of a reference point.
Ronald
