Maintain selection when switching layers?

[Blighty]

(12-30-2020, 10:24 AM)squatcobbler Wrote: Oh ok I think I understand- there's two selection boxes at the same time.  One for the entire layer and one for what I've manually selected? There's dotted lines around everything, and also a seperate box of what I've selected.  

A static dotted line is a layer boundary.
View > Show Layer Boundary

A moving dotted line (marching ants) is a selection boundary
View > Show Selection

Quote:OK let me rephrase it like this- if I have a layer that only has a circle in the middle; the rest are transparent pixels, how do I select the circle?  In photoshop I'd draw a selection box around the circle and press the up arrow key and the down arrow key and the selection would constrain itself to a selection of the circle.

Right click the layer in the layers dialogue
Alpha to Selection