In this lesson you're going to learn about the Transform tool and you might be
thinking, why do we need a transform tool to resize shapes? Can't I just draw out for
example a rectangle here and then use one of the arrows up at the top, selection
tools, and click and drag the corner. And a lot of our different shapes have this, just make
sure you have View and then Show Bounding Box. But the Free Transform tool
provides a couple more options and ways to transform shapes.
So go ahead and draw some kind of shape out. I just have a rectangle here for
this example and then select the Free Transform tool and you'll notice this little
dialogue comes up here, and you can click and drag and move it around,
just clicking, dragging on the top right there. Now this first part you might have
seen either in Photoshop or Illustrator. It's Constrain Proportions, so if I have that
selected and I click and drag the corner here, it's going to maintain the same
aspect ratio of height to width from the original. So if I have that unchecked,
then I can more freely transform it. This one is selected by default, Free Transform.
What that does is, well you can resize, you can hold SHIFT on the keyboard and then
resize things with that same constraint proportion. You can also hover off the
corner and click and drag and rotate and so on. And a quick tip. If you hold down
ALT and click and drag the side here it's going to also resize on the right.
And if you hold down ALT and click and drag the top, it will bring the bottom up as well.
And if you hold ALT or OPTION on the MAC, you can click and drag the corner here and it
will bring all four corners in, and if you hold SHIFT, it will maintain the original.
So if you're drawing some kind of a a logo and you want a picture frame look, you can create one,
copy and paste it and then adjust the next one to be something like that.
So the next one is Perspective Distort. What that is is if you click and drag the
corner here, it's going to change either the bottom part or the side and give it some
perspective. You click and drag it and move it around like so, and then the bottom
one is Free Distort so this one, really you can distort a shape and just
really customize it depending on what kind of shape we want to create.
So I'll give you one more example. If we go to Ellipse tool, click and drag the circle out here and select
the Free Transform tool and it's the same thing. You click and drag that
inward. If you hold SHIFT, it will maintain the original proportion or if
you have that selected and again, if you hold ALT on the PC or OPTION on the MAC,
it's going to resize it on all the sides instead of just the top and bottom. Hold SHIFT to
maintain that proportion and then Perspective Distort looks a little bit
different with a Ellipse and then Free Transform. You can also rotate this
on the side. You'll notice the rotation po ints in the middle
Just select the Rotate tool. If I click and drag that and move that over here, and rotate it,
that's going to rotate around that rotation point instead.
So that's the Free transform Tool. It can be pretty useful when we're wanting to really
customize shapes that we've drawn. I'll see you in the next lesson.