Editing and Transforming Shapes

Editing and Transforming Shapes

These techniques will show you how to change the size, rotation, and perspective of your shapes. 

When to use

This will be useful any time that you need to alter the appearance of one of your shapes in Photoshop.

Instructions

• Click and hold on the Shape Tools in the toolbar to reveal the nested shapes, and choose the Custom Shape Tool from the list.
• Change your shape preset to one of the shapes inside of the 'Flowers' preset folder.
• Click and drag while holding the Shift Key to add the flower shape to your canvas.
• Press Command/Ctrl + T on the keyboard to initiate a Free Transform and notice that a blue bounding box with handles appears around the shape.
• Move your cursor over any of the edges of the bounding box and drag outwards to scale the shape up and down proportionally.
• If you hold the Shift Key while clicking and dragging any of the sides of the bounding box you will be able to squash and stretch your shapes.
• If you instead hold the Command/Ctrl Key while clicking and dragging along the sides of your bounding box you can skew the shape.
• Doing this while hovering over any of the four corners of the bounding box will allow you to change the perspective of the shape.
• Dragging any of the four corners while holding Command/Ctrl + Shift at the same time will allow you to change the perspective of a shape, while also constraining the proportions.
• If you want to go back to your default shape you can Undo by pressing Command/Ctrl + Z or hitting the Escape Key before applying a transformation.
• Another way to see more transform options is by pressing Command/Ctrl + T on the keyboard to initiate a Free Transform, and then right clicking, or holding the Control Key and clicking to reveal a dropdown menu.
• From here you can Rotate, Scale, Skew, Distort, Warp, and change the perspective of your shapes.
• You will also have the option to Flip Horizontally or Flip Vertically.
• Try a few of these options such as 'Perspective' and 'Warp' to see how you can modify and alter your shapes. 

Hints & tips

• Pressing Command/Ctrl + T will initiate a Free Transform, and from there, you have the ability to rotate, scale, skew, distort, and warp your shapes.
• Holding the Shift Key while clicking and dragging in or out from the bounding box will squash and stretch your shapes.
• Holding the Command/Ctrl Key and the Shift Key and dragging outwards from any of the four corners of your bounding box will allow you to modify the perspective of a shape while also retaining the proportions.