Week 5 (Part 11: Transformations)
Transformations
When you use transformations, you are basically grabbing a group of pixels, whether it be in a selection or an entire layer and modifying the shape of them. Transformations basically consist of these modifications:
Scale
This will scale your item vertically or horizontally. If you hold shift, it will scale it proportionately.
Rotate
Allows you to rotate your area. You can drag the transform center point to a different location to rotate around that axis.
Skew
This does just that. Skews vertically or horizontailly.
Distort
Distorting pretty much lets you grab any one of the control points and lets you drag it to wherever you desire.
Perspective
Perspective makes your transformation into a funnel shaped area. Such as you would expect in viewing perspective.
Warp
Warp is a little more tricky. It provides you with points and bezier curve handles that can be adjusted so that your area morphs into straight and/or curved shapes.
Horizontal Flip - Horizontally flips the area
Vertical Flip - Vertically flips the area.
Most of these pretty much are self explanatory, but when to use them is the trick. Transform is most commonly used to apply one of these modifications to layers or certain elements on a layer.
You can find the Transform function under the edit menu. Don't forget, whatever you currently have selected is going to be transformed.
Edit > Transform > specific function
Note: There is a Free Transform function in the menu, but until you become comfortable with performing them, I would stay away from that mode as it speeds things up, but it's also a little bit more complicated as it uses a fair amount of keyboard shortcuts.
Once you have chosen your pixels to be transformed, you will notice a dotted line box around the transformation area with small control points at the corners and center points of the area. By grabbing these points and pushing or pulling them you can start to see the modifications you can make. You can press [Enter] on the keyboard to accept your modification or click the check mark in the top options bar or just select another tool and Photoshop will ask you if you want to apply the current transformation. If you have further transformations to make on the same area, just go right back to the edit > transform menu and select a different transformation to apply immediately thereafter.
This is the menu you use when transforming pixels.
What do I use if I want to transform a selection?
The same way you transform areas of pixels, you can also transform an actual selection. To do this, go to
Select > Transform Selection
You might notice that you can't do as many transformations as you could modifying pixels. Well now that you have the selection in Transform mode, right click on the image and you will have access to all the same variations as we had in the pixel transform mode. Once you have modified your selection the way you want it, press ENTER or click the check mark in the options bar.