From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

Introducing the Free Transform command - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Advanced

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Introducing the Free Transform command

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll take a first look at the free transform command, which allows you to take any kind of layer whether it's an image or a text layer or anything else for that matter and apply up to six varieties of transformations, which may include scale, rotate, flip, skew, distort, and warp, or some combination. And we're going to see examples of all these transformations multiple times over the course of this chapter, and along the way, we're going to take this lone cloud from the Dreamstime image library about what you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deek.php. And we're going to combine it with his glittering solar eclipse in order to create this cloud face sun. All right, with this bottom layer the one called smile cloud selected here inside the layers panel, go ahead and make sure your rectangular marquee tool is active up here at the top of the toolbox and right click inside the image and then choose duplicate layer. And I'm going to go ahead and set the destination document to solar eclipse on glitter and then click OK. And now switch over to that image, and I'm going to grab that URL layer right there, which is indicating by the way that the glitter layer comes from the Dreamstime image library, I shot the solar eclipse, and I'll go ahead and press the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. And then I'll select that smile cloud layer and I'll change it to the brightest blend mode that there is, which is linear dodge in parentheses ad, so that we can see the other layers in the background. And now I'll go up to the edit menu. You can, if you like choose transform, followed by a specific variety of transformation, but then it's going to lock you into a single transformation mode, which generally speaking, it's not going to be something you want. Instead, you want to be able to combine as many transformations as you like and you can do that by choosing free transform or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + T here on a PC or Command - T on the Mac. All right, I'm going to drag the cloud in order to move it to a different location so that we can see the rectangular transformation boundary right here with eight handles. So four corner handles one at the top bottom and the right and left side. Notice if I drag any of these handles when I'm working with a pixel based image layer that I ended up scaling the image proportionally that's even true if I drag something like the bottom handle or the right handle, if you want to scale non proportionally you do what you used to do in order to scale proportionally inside Photoshop and that's press the Shift key. And so notice if I Shift-drag a corner handle, I'm going to scale the image non proportionally, which means I'm either going to stretch it vertically or horizontally like so. And after that point the next time you drag a handle without pressing the Shift key, Photoshop we'll go ahead and maintain whatever aspect ratio you've come up with. If you want to change that aspect ratio, in other words, the relationship between the width and the height of the image, then you to go ahead and once again Shift-drag any one of these handles. And I notice as I drag this corner handle here, I'm scaling with respect to the opposite corner. So in other words, if I drag the bottom right corner handle then the top left corner handle remained stationary. If you would prefer to scale with respect to the center then you press the Alt key here on the PC, that's the Option key on the Mac. And if you add the Shift key along with, then you can scale non proportionally with respect to the center. All right, now let's say you want to restore the scale to 100%. Then you would go up here to the options bar and notice that we have these width and height values right here, go ahead and click on the link icon in order to link them together and then click on the W to select the width value and change it to 100% like so, and you're going to restore that original image. Now notice if you move your cursor slightly outside the transform boundary, it appears as a rotate cursor, meaning that if you decide to drag, you're going to rotate the image length like so, notice that heads up display is telling me that I've rotated the image to 24.7 degrees, at least in my case, that value is also tracked up here in the options bar with the rotate value, meaning that you can dial in your own value if you like. You also have the option of pressing the Shift key. And so notice if I have the Shift key down, while I drag outside that transformation boundary, I am rotating in 15 degree increments. So the reason it appears is 25 degrees is because I just entered 10 degrees. So 10 plus 15 gives you 25, plus 15 more it gives you 40 degrees and so forth. If you want to go back to a freeform rotation, then just go ahead and release that Shift key. Also notice if you right-click inside the image then you can switch to one of the specific modes if you like. You also have the option of rotating to a predefined increment, such as 180 degrees, which is going to spin that cloud upside down. If you want to make it upright again, then you'd right-click inside the image and choose either flip horizontal, which isn't going to do what we want or a flip vertical which is going to make it right side up again. All right now, finally, I want to direct your attention to a kind of technical detail, which is this interpolation option over on the right side of the options bar. By default it's going to be set to bicubic automatic which means if you reduce the size of the image, Photoshop is going to go with bicubic sharper which produces halos by the way, and if you increase the size of the image, it's going to go with by cubic smoother, which is going to soften the image. And as I said back when we discussed the image size command back near the beginning of the fundamentals course, the more desirable setting is this guy right here by cubic. And so I'll go ahead and choose that. And then assuming I'm done transforming my artwork, I would either click on this little cancel icon in order to cancel the operation, or I could press the Escape key, or if you want to accept your changes, then you would click on the check mark, or just press the Enter key here and the PC or the Return key on the Mac. And depending on whether a value is active in the options bar, you may have to press Enter or Return a couple of times in a row. All right, now, finally, I'd like you to go up to the edit menu that's going to be the Photoshop menu on the Mac and then choose the Preferences command which is located much higher in the menu on the Mac and finally choose general, which as you can see has a keyboard shortcut of Control + K or Command - K on the Mac. And then inside the preferences dialog box, make sure that your image interpolation option right here is set to by cubic best for smooth gradients. In fact, it's best for all photographic images and as long as you have this option selected you'll get the best results possible when applying your transformations inside Photoshop. At which point, go ahead and click OK to accept that modification. And that is my introduction to the very powerful, very capable, free transform command, which as we saw in this movie at the very least allows you to scale, rotate and flip any kind of layer you like here inside Photoshop.

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