From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

Introducing the Free Transform command - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

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Introducing the Free Transform command

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll introduce you to the Free Transform command, which is one of the most powerful features inside of Photoshop. It allows you to take any kind of layer, whether it's an image or a text layer or what have you, and you can apply one of six varieties of transformations, which include Scale, Rotate, Flip, Skew, Distort and Warp. And we're going to see examples of all of these transformations multiple times over the course of this chapter. And we're going to start things off by applying the Free Transform command to this bat in order to set it against this paper moon composition to create this bat-faced moon. All right, so the first thing I'm going to do is move the bat into the moon composition by right-clicking on it with the rectangular Marquee tool and then choosing Duplicate Layer. And I'll go ahead and change the Destination Document to Paper moon, and click OK. All right, now I'll switch over to that document, as we're seeing here, and just so that we can see the moon in the background, I'll go ahead and change the Blend mode in the upper left corner of the Layers panel, from Normal, as by default, to Multiply in order to drop out that white background. All right, now let's say we want to Scale, Rotate, or Flip the bat, all of which are very simple transformations. Why then, you can go up to the Edit menu, choose Transform, and then choose the specific variety of transformation you want to apply, but generally speaking, that's counterproductive because you can always access these functions later, as I'll show you in a moment. Your better option is to choose this command right here, Free Transform, which also has a handy keyboard shortcut that I urge you to remember, of Control + T for Transform, of course, or Command + T on the Mac, at which point, you enter the Free Transform mode, and you also see this transformation boundary. Now, notice these handles that surround the boundary. If you drag any one of them, then you are going to Scale the active layer. And so if you drag a corner handle, you're going to Scale the image both horizontally and vertically. If you drag a top or a bottom handle, you're going to Scale the layer only vertically. And if you drag a side handle, you'll Scale it only horizontally. You also have the option of scaling proportionally by pressing and holding the Shift key, as you drag a corner handle. Another option is to press the Alt key, or the Option key on a Mac, in which case you're going to Scale with respect to this center point right there, which is known as the transformation origin. And you can move that point to anywhere you like. So for example, let's say you want to move it to the bat's nose, then if you press the Alt key, or the Option key on a Mac, as you drag a corner handle, you will Scale with respect to that target. Another option for moving the target around, is to Alt or Option click, like so, which will send it to yet another location, and then you've got to Alt or Option drag in order to Scale the bat with respect to that point. And so the idea is, if you don't press Alt or Option and you drag a corner handle, then you're going to Scale with respect to the opposite handle, as we're seeing here. So in other words, the transformation origin isn't going to make any difference at that point. All right, and I'm going to go ahead and make this guy bigger. And incidentally, you can always reset the size at any point you like, by going up here, to the Options bar, turning on the link between the Width and Height values, which are constantly tracking your modifications, and then changing either one of those values to 100%. And that will restore your original bat in this case. All right, now let's say you want to Rotate the layer. Well, in that case, you move your cursor out of the transformation boundary, at which point, you'll see your cursor change to a little Rotate cursor, and then you drag. And notice, as I'm dragging, I am rotating with respect to that origin point right there. And so if I want to Rotate with respect to a different point, for example, let's say the bottom of his feet, then I'd go ahead and Alt or Option click at that location and then drag outside the transformation boundary, like so. You can also move the image, just by dragging inside the transformation boundary. And then finally, you can right-click anywhere inside the image window in order to select a specific variety of transformation, and we'll see how that works in a next movie. Or, you can choose from these preset options. For example, you could Rotate the image 180 degrees, and again, you're going to Rotate around that origin point, which happens to be below the bat right now. And so I'll drag him back up, and then just Alt or Option click in the approximate center. And if I want to make the bat upright again, I could right-click inside the image window and choose Rotate 180 degrees again. You also have these 90-degree options that are available to you, and you can Flip the image. So we could Flip the image horizontally, or, what I want to do after having moved him upside down, I want to Flip him vertically in order to create this effect here. All right, now before we apply our transformation, I want to bring your attention to a technical but very important option, up here, in the Options bar. Notice the word Interpolation, and many of you may recall that we discussed the Interpolation options way back in chapter three of the Fundamentals course, when we were discussing the Image Size command. For the best results, you want the Interpolation to be set to just straight ahead Bicubic. You don't want any of these other options, and the only time you might want to veer from Bicubic is to choose Bilinear, when you're making images very, very small and you intend to send them to the Web. But for most modifications, you want Bicubic. You do not, by the way, want Bicubic Automatic, which is going to select Bicubic Sharper every time you reduce the size of the image because that is going to produce halos around your edges. So Bicubic is the way to go. Now then, you have one of two options. One is to cancel out, which you can do by clicking on this little no icon right here, or you can just press the Escape key. And the other option is to confirm your modification by clicking on this check mark, or you can just press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, in order to apply that change. And then finally, I want you to go to the Edit menu. Then, choose the Preferences command, which is located much higher in the menu on the Mac. And finally, choose General, which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + K, or Command + K on a Mac. And then, inside the Preferences dialog box, make sure that your Image Interpolation is set to Bicubic, best for smooth gradients. In fact, it's best for all photographic images. And as long as you have this option selected, you will get the best results when applying your transformations inside of 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 on this movie, at the very least, allows you to Scale, Rotate, and Flip here inside Photoshop.

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