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Normally I would do these steps to achieve the image above:
1) Click 'A' from the Layers window.
2) Find 'B' from the Layers window, but not click it.
3) Cmd+Click 'B' from the Layers window to make a selection of ‘B’.
But once you accumulate 100+ layers, 2) & 3) becomes inconvenient because you have to relocate 'A' and click in the Layers window.
Is there a way to perform 3) straight from the Canvas with 'A' clicked in the Layers window?
AFAIK you can't. But you can optimise your workflow:
I don't think you can but I have some suggestions:
You can save an active selection as a channel with Select > Save Selection. You can then either keep the Channels panel open and Cmd + left-click the channel or you can load the selection using Select > Load Selection.
Of course I haven't seen what you work with, but it seems a bit strange that you need to reuse the same selection over and over. Why not just make a group with the selection as mask, place the different fills inside the group and toggle them as needed?
If you are making lots of similar elements it might be easier to do in a vector based application like Illustrator (or even InDesign). Then you can spread out your buttons (or whatever) in X/Y instead of stacking them in Z. Asset export can be automatized.
Cmd+Alt+Right-click, 2. run the script, 3. select layer A in the canvas withCmd+Alt+Right-click. And the non script version of this is to do step 2 from a PS Action or by manually doing it in the Layers panel. – Joonas Feb 19 at 13:27