As you work on an Easel composition, the work you do will apply in one of four different ways:
To the composition as a whole. By their nature, some actions -- setting up the page, changing spacing, configuring the grid, for example -- always affect the composition as a whole.
To one item in the composition. When you right click on an image, frame, or caption and get, respectively, the image menu, frame menu, or caption menu, any changes you command will affect only the item that was right clicked. The only exception is when you select Edit All.. (see next).
To all items in the composition of the same type. If the composition contains more than 1 caption, the caption menu contains an Edit All Captions entry. Edits made after selecting this entry -- changing the font, for example -- will be applied to ALL captions. The same is true for frames.
To a group of selected items in the composition, usually but not always of the same type. This is what will happen when you select at least 1 item, then command changes via the selection menu (more below).
To select a single item, right click it and then left click Select on the item menu that pops up.
To select multiple items, hold down the Shift key, press and hold the left mouse button, drag a rectangle over the items to be selected, and release the mouse button.
To select all items of a given type, click Selection/Select all X on the main menu, where X is the type of items to select.
To select all items, click Selection/Select All on the main menu.
Selection is a toggle, which means that performing the identical steps just described on selected items will deselect them.
You can tell when an item is selected because it is surrounded by a bright yellow box.
The selection menu, accessed by clicking Selection on the main menu, is highly dynamic, changing constantly with composition's collection of items and these items' selected/not selected status. I'm not going to explain how it works in exhaustive detail, but the idea is to anticipate what you might want to do, given the situation. The following principles apply:
If any item of any type is not selected, there will be a Select All entry.
If any item of any type is selected, there will be a Deselect All entry and a Remove All Selected entry.
For each item type, if any item of that type is not selected, there will be a Select All X entry for the type, where X is the type (image, caption, or frame).
For each item type, if any item of that type is selected, there will be a Deselect All X entry and a Remove Selected X entry for the type.
If more than one caption or frame is selected, there will be an Edit Selected X entry, where X is Caption or Frame.
If more than one image is selected, there will be several image editing commands; some imported from the image menu, others uniquely suited for working with multiple images at once -- alignment and sizing, for example.
When you move or resize a selected item of any type, ALL selected items of all types will be affected, though, in the case of resizing, not necessarily in the way you expect. The best way to anticipate what will happen is to envision the smallest possible rectangle that can surround the selected items:
When you move a selected item, the rectangle moves with it, so all selected items move the same amount in the same direction.
When you resize a selected item, the rectangle resizes proportionately. What this means is that the selected items move as well as resize as the rectangle is scaled up or down.
Note: If you want all items to automatically deselect after a move or resize operation, hold down the Shift key when you release the mouse button.
When you use the selection menu (or the caption or frame menu) to tell Easel that you wish to Edit Selected Captions or Frames, the same editors that you use to edit single captions and frames pop up, though with a small indicator that you are working on more than one. When you accept the edit by clicking OK, your changes will be applied to all selected items.
Editing more than one image at a time is different enough from editing one image to to merit its own topic: see Working with Multiple Images for full information.