Canvas tools — layer groups and perspective

Two hands-on tools that shape what you have already drawn: groups, which let several layers behave as one thing, and perspective, which tilts a doodle so it lies down into the scene — and the outline and buttons a selected item shows, and where each of its special controls is opened.

Group layers so they move together

When you've built something out of several pieces — a label made of a shape, some text and an emoji — a group lets you treat all of it as one thing. Move the group and every piece moves with it, keeping the arrangement you set up.

Groups work the same way in Images and in Documents.

Make a group

Open the Layers menu at the top of the editor — it is in the same place in an Image and in a Document. The strip shows one card per layer, front on the left. Then:

1. Click the layer you want to start from. Its buttons appear along the top of the card.
2. Click the chain button.
3. Click the layer you want to join it to. The layers you can pick highlight while you choose.

Those two layers become a group, and the strip replaces them with a single group card. To add another layer later, click its chain button and then click the group — joining an existing group adds to it rather than nesting one group inside another. You can pick either the group card itself or any layer already inside it; both do the same thing.

To take a layer back out, select it and click the broken-chain button. It leaves the group and lands directly in front of it. A group is always at least two layers, so when only one is left the group ends and that layer is a loose layer again.

If the group itself carries something you put on it — a look, a border, a shape, a Depth look or a fade — you're asked first. Move effects to layer puts that work on the layer that's left, so the picture doesn't change; Remove effects lets it go with the group; Cancel leaves everything as it was. Anything a single layer can't hold — a shape cut on a drawn mark, for example — is named in the question and removed either way. Deleting a layer from a group, or moving it into a different group, asks the same question when it would leave a group with one layer. The one exception is a video group carrying a Timewarp: only a group can hold one, so it stays a group even around a single clip.

What a group looks like

A closed group is one card with a small stack of cards peeking out behind it on the right — one for each extra layer it holds, up to three, so a group of two shows one card behind it. Each card behind is a little darker than the one in front of it, so the stack reads as a pile going back — that stack is what marks it as a group. The card shows a picture of the layers it holds, in an Image and in a Document alike.

A group is open exactly while it, or one of the layers inside it, is selected. Click a closed group and it widens into a row: its layers slide out of the stack and settle side by side along its top as smaller cards, one each, while the cards beside the group glide over to make room. Select anything outside the group — or nothing at all — and each layer slides back onto its own place in the stack as the row closes up.

For as long as a group is open, its own buttons sit in one row beneath its layers, where they cover none of them, whether the group itself or a layer inside it is selected: arrows on the left that move the whole group forward and back in the stack, so everything inside keeps its order relative to everything else, then break apart, duplicate and delete for the whole group. Moving past another group jumps the whole of that group in one step, so neither a group nor a single layer ever lands in the middle of another group's layers. An arrow that would not move anything is dimmed.

A layer inside a group keeps its own buttons hidden until you select it, so an open group reads as its contents rather than a row of toolbars. With a layer selected, its buttons show over that layer and the group's stay in their row beneath.

Move, turn, flip and resize a group

Select the group and a box appears around everything in it. The box turns with the group and stays fitted tightly around its layers at that angle.

• Move — drag anywhere inside the box.
• Turn — press the rotate button, always the first button in the row above the box, and drag it round; a tap on its own does nothing. While you turn, the box's handles and the buttons around it step aside, the pointer becomes a curved turning arrow, the status at the bottom centre of the display reads the group's angle (for example "Rotate · 37°"), and the group settles on 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees as you pass near them. Hold Shift to snap to 15-degree steps instead.
• Resize — drag any corner. A group only resizes from its corners, and always keeps its proportions. That's deliberate: stretching a group that contains a turned layer would skew it, so the corners keep everything true.
• Flip — open the group's Transform menu along the bottom and press one of its two flip buttons, to flip the group across or down.
• Type it — the same Transform menu has Position, Size and Rotation fields for the whole group. A value applies only when you press Enter or leave the field, never while you are still typing it. The Up and Down arrow keys step it, ten at a time with Shift. Each value you type is one step of Undo, and a run of arrow presses in one field is one step too.

Every change is written straight into the layers themselves, so the settings for any single layer always show its real current values, and Undo steps back through group changes exactly like any other edit.

Work on one layer inside a group

Tapping any layer of a group on the canvas selects the whole group first. With the group selected, tap a layer inside the group's box to step into it — the layer under your finger takes over the handles and you can edit it on its own. Once you're inside, tapping another layer of the same group selects that layer directly. Press Escape once to step back out to the group, and again to deselect entirely.

You can also expand the group card in the layers strip and click the layer you want there.

Ungroup

To undo a whole group at once, select it and press Ungroup all on its first menu (the Layers menu's group card has the same button): every layer becomes a loose layer again, and anything applied to the group itself (a look, a border, a Depth look) goes with it. To take out just one layer, click the broken-chain button on that layer's card. A group left with only one layer ends on its own, asking first what to do with any work of its own, as above. Either way nothing moves: the layers stay exactly where they are, because every group change was already applied to them. Grouping and ungrouping is free — use it whenever it's convenient and undo it when it isn't.

Looks on a group, and looks on one layer

A look — a filter, a warp or a weather — is a setting on the thing it treats, and what it treats is decided by what you have selected rather than by a separate choice:

• Select one layer and its Effects menu treats that layer's own pixels, leaving everything around it untouched.
• Select a group and the same menu treats the one picture its members make together. There is no whole-picture look on the top bar — a look always belongs to the layer or group you picked.

A group in an Image or a Document holds looks of its own, over the one picture its members make together. Select it and its bar reads its name, Effects, Border and Transform. The first menu is the Group menu — the same one a Video and a Document give a group: one card per member, each a picture of that member exactly as the Layers menu draws it, with the member's leave-the-group and copy buttons when you select it; and at the right end the same container every effects menu keeps there — Ungroup all and Consolidate as its rows, then, under a thin line, a delete button and the forward and backward arrows, which act on the member you picked or, with none picked, on the whole group. With none picked a star leads that row: it stars the group whole, so you can place it again from Add → Browse → Starred and community. Consolidate draws the members, with the group's own looks, cut and edge, into one picture that takes their place — while it works, its progress shows over the group itself, and one undo brings the group back; a group whose look depends on the picture behind it (a Depth look, a blur or a privacy cover, an edge that darkens or tints what is behind it), a locked layer, or a layer a mask outside the group follows shows the reason in the button's place instead. Consolidating a group of very large pictures — the pieces of a 48-megapixel photo — works on a phone too: the picture is drawn and saved a strip at a time. Effects is the strip a single picture has without Beauty, whose looks read one face — Adjust, Filters, Styles, Distort, Light, Weather, Depth and Form, then, once you have starred any, one Starred section for each kind of setting a group can take back: its looks (a tuned weather among them), its blends, its marks and its copies. A Depth look fades and tints the members by how far away each one is set, and the first thing in its Recipe is every member on one Near-to-Far line: drag a member along it and nearer members cover farther ones while the Depth look treats them by those same distances, so there is no separate Depth menu and no separate stacking control to disagree with it. Border holds two sections after its search: Shape cuts the group's whole picture to a silhouette, and Edge draws a treatment along that outline; its search finds the cut shapes and edges you have starred and the ones the community has posted.

Good to know

• A group in a Document keeps to one page. Layers on different pages can't be grouped, because a page is its own space. If you drag one layer of a group onto another page, you're asked what you meant: Remove from group leaves it where you dropped it as a loose layer, Move whole group brings the rest of the group onto that page around it, and Cancel puts it back.
• Groups are one level — you can't put a group inside another group.
• The corner-tilt effect isn't offered on a group. Every group change is written into the layers themselves, and a tilt can't be written into some kinds of layer at all — so on a mixed group it would apply to part of it and quietly skip the rest. Tilt the individual layers instead.

The outline and buttons on a selected item

Select something on the picture or the page — in an Image, a Video or a Document alike — and a blue outline goes round it, with white dots on its corners and white handles in the middle of its sides. Drag a corner dot to resize it and keep its shape, or a side handle to stretch it one way. An item shows only the handles it can use: text and a group have just the corner dots, a table has its corners and the handles on its left and right sides, a video caption has only the handles on its left and right sides — they set its width, and its height follows its words — and a locked item shows only its outline.

Above the item sits one row of buttons, and nothing sits under it:

• The rotate button, a curved arrow, comes first. Drag it round to turn the item — a tap on its own does nothing. While you hold it, the item's handles and the other buttons step aside, and the status at the bottom centre of the screen reads the angle, for example "Rotate · 37°".
• Duplicate puts a copy of the item beside it.
• Delete removes it.
• ⋯ (More) holds the rest. First the items with words: Lock (or Unlock); Fit display on every image, video and document item that can move, which makes it as big as fits whole inside the picture shown now (in a Document, the page), at its own shape and centred, so whichever side reaches an edge first sets its size — only its size and place change, so a turn or a perspective tilt stays and the box you see around it is what fits (a table or a caption takes the picture's full width instead, since its height follows its rows or its words; its flip, crop, opacity and looks stay, and one Undo puts it back); and anything that kind of item has besides — on a video clip, drawing or caption Expand and, while the layout view is on, Show mid, Show end and Show start, each moving it to that moment of its own life. In a Document, a row of three text-wrap pictures comes next — how the page's text flows around the item, the current one lit. Last, on every item, a row of four layer moves: bring to front, bring forward, send backward and send to back, in the Layers menu's own arrows; a move that would change nothing is dimmed. Pressing a picture in a row keeps the menu open, so you can step back several layers in a row.

A locked item's row is Duplicate and More, with Unlock in More. When the item fills the screen and there is no room above it, the row sits just inside its top edge instead.

Open an item's special controls

Some things you do to an item happen inside it rather than to its box — typing its words, drawing into it, tilting it. None of them has a button on the item: each is opened from the place it belongs, in Images, Videos and Documents alike.

• Type into text — tap the selected text box again, or press Enter.
• Type into a table — tap the cell you want in the selected table; Enter starts in its first cell. While you type in a cell, a − and a + stand beside the end of its row and another pair under its column: − removes that row or column, and + adds a row below it or a column to its right. One that can't act — on the last row or column, or a table already at its largest — is dimmed.
• Draw more strokes — press a brush in the drawing's Freeform menu, Draw at its right end, or Enter. A new drawing from Add starts in Draw by itself.
• Move a connector's points — click the connector on the selected drawing and its points appear; a drawing that is just one connector shows them as soon as it is selected.
• Tilt in perspective — press Perspective on the item's Transform menu, and press it again to put the controls away.
• Crop — the crop button that leads the Transform menu of a picture, an emoji, a shape, a drawing, a group, a 3D object or a video clip, beside its flip buttons; text, captions, tables, masks and blurs have none. The whole Image's crop, and Straighten, are on the Canvas menu.
• Move or resize the shape a picture or clip is cut to — press a card in the Shape section of its Border menu.

Leaving the menu that opened one of these ends it, and so do Escape and a tap somewhere else. Drawing is the exception: every press is a stroke, so a tap elsewhere can't end it, and the drawing's box and buttons are hidden while you draw. The right end of the Freeform menu reads Drawing, with an Exit you tap when you're done; leaving the Freeform menu ends it too.

A second click on a selected item selects whatever is underneath it at that spot — except on a text box or a table, where it types into the item instead, wherever nothing else is drawn over that spot.

Controls that sit right on the item

A few controls need no opening at all: they sit on the selected item as blue rings, beside its white handles, whenever the item is big enough on screen.

• Small rings — a shape's or an arrow's reshape points, which change how the shape itself is drawn, and a speech bubble's tail.
• Larger rings, at the centre — a mask's aim, which turns its prop to face another way, and a 3D object's turn, which turns the model inside its box.

On a small item the rings are hidden, so dragging it always moves it; pinch to zoom in and they come back. While you hold a ring, the row above the item and its handles step aside until you let go. A locked item shows no rings.

The buttons a mode needs

When a mode has buttons, they stand in one small container just under the item — or above it, when the menu along the bottom would cover it. They are icons only, and the one that finishes is highlighted:

• Crop — Cancel (✕) and Done (✓).
• Straighten — Reset, Cancel and Done; the angle dial stays at the bottom of the screen.
• Splice, and pointing at something to track — Add (+) and Subtract (−), with a hint beside them saying what your next tap does — Tap to add or Tap to remove — then Undo, Cancel and Done. When you are tracking, Done is Track. A face or a body takes a single tap, so there is no Add or Subtract.
• A connector's selected point — a plus to add a point past that end and an arrow to put an arrowhead on it (both on an end point only), and a bin to delete the point.

Crop, Straighten, Splice and pointing at something to track each finish with Done, so the rest of your work stays as it is until then. In Splice or while pointing, Undo — this one, the one at the top, your keyboard or a two-finger tap — steps back your last tap. In Crop and Straighten, Undo and Redo at the top step aside, and Cancel is the way back.

Perspective, typing, Draw, a cut shape's handles, Smart Edit's area, an effect's region box and a motion path need no buttons, so they show no container. The status at the bottom centre of the screen appears for only two things: the angle while you hold the rotate button and, in a Video, Moving this caption only while you drag one caption you have picked by its card or its cell, which moves that caption alone.

Lock an item so it stays put

Lock, in the ⋯ (More) menu of the row above a selected item, locks it, in Images, Videos and Documents alike — a video clip, caption or group included. A locked item can still be selected and its settings changed, but it can't be moved, resized, turned, nudged with the arrow keys or deleted: it shows just its outline, and the row above it is Duplicate and More. Choose Unlock in More to unlock it.

If you try to move a locked item, a lock appears over it for a moment and fades away, so you know why it isn't moving. In the Layers menu, a locked item's card shows a small lock at its left edge whether or not it's selected.

A group with a locked layer in it is locked as a whole: moving, turning or deleting the group is refused, because doing it to only some of its layers would pull the group apart. Lock in a group locks or unlocks all of its layers at once.

What a click selects

A click selects an item wherever its own shape is drawn — even where that shape reaches outside the item's box. Click anywhere inside a text's speech or thought bubble, on the bubble's tail or a thought bubble's dots, on a line's full thickness, on a connector's arrowheads and point markers, or on a spray or charcoal stroke's scatter, and you select that item. Effects drawn around an item, such as a glow, a shadow or a blur's soft edge, are not part of its shape, so a click there selects whatever is underneath. The reverse holds too: an outline-only shape, such as an empty circle, is selected on its outline and not in its empty middle, an oval blur inside its oval and not in the box's corners, and a drawing on its strokes and not in the gaps between them. A few pixels around every item still count, so thin lines are easy to hit, and an item too small to aim at is selected anywhere in a finger-sized area around it. In a video, a caption is selected on its words, their outline and highlight box and any emoji — never on its glow — and a clip cut to a shape is selected only inside the shape it keeps, which stays put on the clip's box even while a reframed clip's camera pans underneath it.

The box around a selected item takes in those same parts, so it shows everything a click on that item can reach. A speech bubble's box includes its tail, and dragging the box's handles resizes the text and its bubble together. A group's box does the same for its members, so a grouped caption's outline sits inside its group's box.

Tilt a doodle in perspective

Perspective makes a doodle lie down into the scene instead of floating flat on top of it. Use it to lay text on a road, wrap a picture onto a wall, or angle a shape so it matches the surface behind it. It works the same way on Images, Videos and Documents.

Any look on the doodle — a filter such as Sketch or Halftone, or a warp — lies down with it, its pattern receding with the surface rather than standing flat on the screen, and it stays exactly as it is when you move, turn or re-tilt the doodle.

Perspective is done right on the picture, with the doodle you're adjusting.

1. Select the doodle you want to tilt.
2. Open its Transform menu along the bottom and press Perspective. A video clip's Transform menu has the same control, and tilts exactly the same way.
3. A blue ring appears in the middle of the doodle and an L-shaped corner bracket on each of its four corners. The doodle's resize handles and the buttons above it step aside while these are showing, and Perspective stays lit, reading On screen.

Lean a doodle with the ring

Drag the ring in the middle — or anywhere on the doodle — toward an edge, and that edge leans away from you. Push right and the right side recedes; push down and the bottom recedes; drag diagonally to lean both ways at once. A line from the middle of the doodle follows the ring, so you can see at a glance which way and how far it leans. Near the middle the ring settles back to flat, and double-clicking it sets it flat again.

On a very small doodle the ring is hidden to leave room for the corners; dragging the doodle itself still leans it.

From the keyboard: press Tab to focus the doodle, then use the arrow keys to lean it, with Shift for bigger steps.

Move one corner of a doodle

When a lean can't match the surface you're aiming at, drag any of the four corner brackets to exactly where you want it, and the doodle reshapes to follow. A corner stops moving once it would fold the doodle into an impossible shape, so it settles at the edge of what can be drawn instead of snapping flat. Double-click a corner bracket to put that corner back.

Finish tilting and keep working

Press Perspective again, press Esc, tap somewhere else or leave the Transform menu to put the controls away; press Perspective to bring them back. That same Perspective control in the doodle's Transform menu shows how far it leans on each axis — Flat when it doesn't, Pinned when only its corners have moved — and while it is tilted, the reset button beside it removes every lean and corner change at once.

On a doodle, Undo treats a run of the same adjustment as one change. Every lean you make in a row, whether by dragging, with the arrow keys or by double-clicking the ring, is one change, and every corner move in a row is another, until you make some other kind of change. So one Undo can take back several drags at once. On a video clip, each drag is its own change, and arrow-key presses or double-clicks in a row count as one.

Once the handles are away, the doodle's selection box wraps the tilted shape, with a faint outline of the shape inside it. Resizing keeps the opposite side where it is, and clicking anywhere on the tilted shape selects it.

Animate a clip's tilt

On a video clip, the lean can change over time: open the clip's Animate menu, press the Automate card, and pick Tilt X or Tilt Y. Corner handles don't animate — four corners moving on their own can pass through a folded shape partway between two points — so animate the lean and set the corners once.

While a clip's lean is animated, its Transform menu shows Auto in place of its Perspective values, the same sign any animated setting shows. Press Auto to open the curve that is setting the lean.

What can and can't be tilted

Every kind of doodle takes perspective — text, shapes, tables, emoji, placed pictures, brush strokes of every kind, and anything you've cut out of the picture — with three exceptions:

• Blur doodles get no perspective controls. A blur softens whatever is behind it by a fixed amount, and a tilted blur would show an outline that recedes convincingly over softness that stays flat. It would read as wrong, so it isn't offered.
• 3D objects get no perspective controls. How a 3D object faces you is set on the model itself — turn it with the ring at its centre — so a flat tilt on top would be a second, disagreeing answer.
• Masks get no perspective controls. Which way a mask faces is set by the aim ring at its centre, so a flat tilt on top would disagree with it in the same way.

One deliberate detail on text: while a text doodle is tilted, tapping it again to change the words gives you a straight, un-tilted edit box over the angled text. That keeps the cursor, your selection, and your keyboard where you expect them. Your text stays tilted on the canvas — only the editing box is straight.

A locked doodle offers no Perspective control either. Tilting changes a doodle's shape rather than just moving it around, so it counts as the kind of edit locking is there to prevent. Unlock the doodle to tilt it.