After enabling the Proportional Editing, you must choose a falloff type
from the options right next to the icon where you trigger the Proportional
Editing tools (Figure 4.33).
Figure 4.33 - Fallout types
By enabling a Proportional Editing and using as fallout type the
smoothing option, you can select a single vertex from a plane with
multiple subdivisions. Start a move transformation in the Z-axis with the
G key and Z key. As a result, you will get the surrounding vertices also
moving up (Figure 4.34).