Tutorial 1

Easily adjust a whole host of parameters with Free Transform

Photography is all about picking the right tool for the job; macro lens for a macro photo; ND filter for a long exposure shot; beauty dish for a beauty portrait. So you should pick the right tool in post-production when you want to tweak or edit a photograph, right?

Well it’s true. The rotate tool will enable you to rotate an image, just as the scale tool will let you resize it, and the perspective tool will enable you to fix a wonky angle. However, what if you have to rotate an image and resize it and fix a wonky angle? If you pick the right tool for the job, that’s three separate tools for three separate jobs. What if there was a magic way of doing all those jobs with the same tool?

Thankfully, there is. The Free Transform tool is an all-in-one solution that enables you to manipulate a number of image properties at once, including rotation, scale, skew, distort and perspective. When you make it part of your workflow, it will speed up your editing considerably – especially if you incorporate the associated keyboard shortcuts.

Free Transform is a semiadvanced tool that Elements has incorporated from Photoshop, and works in much the same way as the individual editing tools. It’s one of those functions that, once your brain is used to using it, you wonder how you ever did without it before.