Rangefinder Magazine
August 2005

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This is one of a series of Adobe® Photoshop® tutorials sponsored by Adobe Systems and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) to be reprinted in Rangefinder. The article is from Photoshop User magazine, the official publication of NAPP (www.photoshopuser.com).

Las Vegas magicians astound us with their spectacular trans-formations: people changing into tigers, motorcycles transforming into… nothing. While the Free Transform command in Photoshop may not draw gasps of awe from an audience, you can do some pretty amazing transformation “tricks” with a drag of the mouse.

If you need to scale, rotate, or stretch some pixels, the Free Transform command (Edit > Free Transform) is the perfect choice—with a couple of provisos. First, don’t use the Free Transform command to make things larger, unless you’re willing to end up with some blurry-looking pixels. The bottom line is that it’s always better to scale pixels down (to make the image smaller) than to scale up.

Second, it’s usually best to select the area you want to transform and copy it to a separate layer by pressing Command-J (PC: Control-J) and then applying the transformation. Here’s an example of the difference between using Free Transform on the Background layer versus creating a separate layer and transforming that layer.

In this example, the leaf was selected and the Free Transform command used to scale, rotate, and move the leaf. Notice how there‘s a “white hole” left behind when the leaf is moved. That’s because, by default, Free Transform edits the pixels.

To avoid this, select and copy the pixels to a layer, as shown here. In this case, the original leaf is untouched as we’re working on the separate layer rather than the original background layer. There are very few (if any) situations in which it’s better to transform the background.

The Basics
With those “rules” out of the way, here are some basics for using Free Transform. Once you’ve copied the item to a separate layer, press Cmd-T (Ctrl-T) to show the transformation box with “handles.” Click on a corner handle to adjust horizontally and vertically at the same time; click on one of the side handles to transform horizontally; or use the top or bottom handles to transform only vertically. Move your mouse outside the transformation box to see the rotate symbol and then click-and-drag to rotate the object. By default, the reference point for the rotation is in the center of the transformation box. To get a different result when rotating, drag the reference point to a new location before using the handles or moving your mouse outside to rotate.

Note: You may have trouble moving the reference point on small objects.

Free Transform has some important keyboard modifiers you can use. Once you’re happy with the transformation, press Enter or Return to finalize the effect. If you want to cancel out of the transformation box, press Escape. To keep the transformation proportional when scaling, hold down the Shift key as you click-and-drag on a corner handle. By default, the transformation will occur from corner to corner; i.e., if you click-and-drag on the bottom right-corner handle, the top left-corner handle will stay in place.

If you want to transform toward the center of the object so that both corner handles will move toward the center at the same time, hold down Option (Alt) as you click-and-drag on a corner handle. Of course, using typical computer logic, hold down Shift and Option (Shift-Alt) to scale proportionally toward the center.

The Free Transform box has its own undo command—one undo, that is. If you’ve rotated, scaled, or skewed—once—you can press Cmd-Z (Ctrl-Z) to undo that one transformation and then continue transforming; otherwise you’ll have to press Escape to undo several transformations by starting over again.

You can also access other transformation options by Ctrl-clicking (Right-clicking) in the transformation box to bring up a menu with various choices, such as Distort, Skew, and Perspective as well as options such as Rotate 90° or 180°, Flip Horizontal, and Flip Vertical.

To distort each corner handle independently, hold down Cmd (Ctrl) as you click on a corner handle. In this example, we dragged a photo into our document, creating a new layer. In the Layers palette, we lowered the Opacity to about 50 percent to distort the new layer to help match it with the underlying image. Then we opened Free Transform (Cmd-T or Ctrl-T), held down Cmd (Ctrl), and positioned two of the corners. In the final version, all four corners were positioned, we put the Opacity back to 100 percent, and then hid portions of the image layer with a Layer Mask so that the clips on the original easel were visible.

If you want to scale to a percentage such as 50 percent, press Cmd-T (Ctrl-T), look in the Options Bar and you’ll see fields that allow you to enter a specific value. To keep the scaling proportional, click on the chain symbol between the width and height fields. This will maintain the aspect ratio, so that whatever value you enter in the width field will be used in the height field (and vice versa). Press Enter or Return.

You may run into a situation where you can’t see the handles when you use Free Transform. This can happen when you drag-and-drop a large image onto a smaller image. Because the new layer is larger than the original background you can’t see the outer edges of the layer. When you press Cmd-T (Ctrl-T) you’ll see the center reference point but not the outer handles. If this happens, after you’ve pressed Cmd-T (Ctrl-T), press Cmd-0 (Ctrl-0) for Fit on Screen. This will scale the window to whatever size is necessary to make the transformation handles visible. Once you’ve transformed the layer you can return to a normal view.

So, why don’t you copy pixels onto their own layer and use Free Transform to create something “magical.” Ta-dah!
 

Dave Cross is senior developer for education and curriculum for NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) and co-author of three books: Photoshop 7 & Illustrator 10: Create Great Advanced Graphics, Photoshop 7 Trade Secret, and Adobe Illustrator Killer Tips. Dave is also one of the lead instructors for NAPP’s Adobe Photoshop Seminar Tour.