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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects How to avoid selecting the whole mask?

  • How to avoid selecting the whole mask?

    Posted by Tuukka Kassala on April 18, 2019 at 3:07 pm

    Sometimes when I’m masking something with the pen tool, I accidentally select the whole mask and my tool changes to the default selection tool.

    I’d like to have a shortcut to quickly deselect the mask and go back to handling single anchors. Usually I switch back to the pen tool and end up either moving the whole mask or creating a copy of it because I’m used to pressing ctrl + d to deselect. (which duplicates it)

    Currently my best solution is to press F2 to deselect all layers but then I have to go back and select the layer I was working on

    And if there is no shortcut to deselect the mask I’d like to know what causes it to select the whole mask so I can not do that.

    Example of me selecting the whole mask:

    Oleg Pirogov replied 7 years, 1 month ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Davide Dante

    April 18, 2019 at 3:17 pm

    What I do is pressing shift on the keyboard and click on one of the points. This deselect it and allows me to select then the ones I want.

  • Tuukka Kassala

    April 18, 2019 at 3:23 pm

    I’ve tried that before with no results. Tried it now, nothing.

    But still if it works for you it must have some value right?

    Turns out if I shift double click on one of the anchors it removes the white box around it and deselect the mask. Still has all of the anchors selected. And then if I shift click once on an anchor it selects only that one. Go figure.

    Guess this is solved now, thanks for the quick reply.

  • Oleg Pirogov

    April 19, 2019 at 1:33 am

    If I got it right, the last action in our case is completing the path, so Ctrl-Z will bring you back to drawing mode with just one anchor selected. You may continue drawing with the Pen Tool, or a single anchor with Selection Tool.

    In general, you may select the shape a.k.a “switch from rectangles to dots”. This effectively deselects the path (selecting it’s containing group instead) which is kinda like F2 but keeps the shape selected. Anyway, it’s Ctrl-LMB with Selection Tool or just choosing the containing shape in Timeline Panel.

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