Photoshop® CS3 Layers Bible

Chapter 3. Resizing and Transforming Layers

Photoshop gives you a multitude of useful ways to transform layers. When talking about "transforming" in Photoshop, we're referring to stretching, squeezing, flipping, rotating, and generally altering the shape of objects in your images. We're not talking about robots transforming into aircraft or anything like that.

All of Photoshop's layer transform commands are available in the submenu under Edit → Transform. As an alternative, you can use the all-in-one transform command, Edit → Free Transform, which is also available by pressing Ctrl+T (

Another excellent transformation feature is Warp, which really lets you cut loose with your layers. Use Warp to twist and bend your layers into all sorts of interesting shapes. Warp gives you a few useful presets to work with, or you can freely warp your layers to your heart's content.

Finally, if you need to transform layers with a greater level of precision, you can transform numerically by typing values into the transform command's options bar.

This chapter discusses transforming layers in general. Each of the transform commands is explored in turn, and you look at a practical example that shows off some of these handy Photoshop features.

Bitmaps versus Vectors

Chapter 1 discussed the difference between bitmap layers and vector layers. Transforming vector layers generally produces better results than transforming ...