When selecting a layer and dragging a corner handle with the shift (or alt-shift) key pressed, the resize proportion isn't constrained. This started with this most recent update.
I just want it back the way it was. This is wasting my time in editing and I have to use this on every photo and graphic I deal with. This was a completely unnecessary change.
I'm not Howard I'm the lead digital artist at his business. I should start by saying that. I've just got to log into our adobe account to post this.
Copy/pasting with a little bit of censorship from my personal facebook account that an adobe rep asked me to post here.
OMFG I hate Adobe's
change to the transform functionality in Photoshop. I've been trying to
get use to it all week and it's absolute garbage and the
PSUserConfig.txt trick isn't undoing it. I had to revert to old versions on of couple of work's computers because some freelancers we have in just wern't having it. I really spent the week trying to adapt and adjust to the change but but I've gone from being accepting of the logic of the change to bitter and angry.
It's such a necessary
thing that's been standardized across the industry, Adobe changing this
is equivalent car company being like, 'Hey, I know you're used to manual
gear placement on our cars and every competitor's car being 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, but, what about we change to 1, 3, 2, 5, 4. Great right!'
And ya, I'm being harsh and
rude but you've ruined a major part of tool that I have to use for my
job every day.
My Daughter, who is the Art Director for a mid-sized printing company outside of Chicago,150+ employees, told me that tech service had updated her PC, not her MAC, to the latest version of Photoshop. They are not supposed to do that without her permission. She said, "Nothing works like it should anymore and I am having it switched back to 2018". Like so many professional of all expertise levels, she is now taking a hard look at Affinity Desktop. So am I and the more I look, the more I like!
I run a group for in-house designers of LinkedIn and Facebook with over 25000 members. I recently asked the question, Did holding the shift key bother anyone? I got the answer I expected, holding the shift key to constrain the aspect ratio when sizing an image bothered no one! Not holding the shift key however, that bothered many people, for various reasons. Most just said it was really slowing them down. I agree with them, it makes you lose time, and time is money. Others felt like it was a step toward making Adobe product work more like Microsoft products, and that sent a shudder through the group. The thing that bothers me more than that it doesn't feel thought out, for a couple reasons, one, the way it flashes and jerks to tell you not to hold the shift key, that feels broken. The other reason is you just did it to Photoshop and nothing else. Granted it isn't a huge thing, but it's one more thing I have to remember that works differently between Illustrator and Photoshop and InDesign. Every update I hope that the tools get more aligned so my job is easier, but this time it feels like the interfaces are moving farther apart for the first time. I can honestly say I have not loved everything ever done on Adobe update, but I got used to it after time, this the first update that's made me want to go back to the last version.
Edited: I was being angry/rude at this at 11 Sunday night working late trough the weekend. Sorry about that, I changed my Facebook post for you guys too. I apologize, but please fix this.
I am close to afraid to comment here based upon the anger in the comments already posted. It may come as a surprise to many but logically to me and many photographers, the default should be constrained because we are generally dealing with image materials and need specific HxW ratios.
That having been said, it seems that adding a checkbox somewhere in the preferences dialog to control whether the default is constrained or unconstrained should be a simple fix for Adobe engineers.
I think the problem here Joel is that logically it does seem like a good idea. In fact, I can see Adobe doing it for that reason. Problem is that people are used to something else for 15+ years. For power users, this is a huge step backward. I'll be surprised if Adobe doesn't implement a Legacy Undo very soon. The fact that people would prefer not to use the software at all because of this is a big thing. At least you can fix this with a text document in the preferences for now, but that new smaller hit area for rotate while transforming is the real deal breaker.
Hi Joel... never be afraid to speak your piece! I didn't like the new transform because of the hundreds of thousands of man hours I got used to the "classic" transform and didn't even have to think about it. Again, never be afraid to speak your mind about this or any problem. That's how we get better.
Well that depends on what genre of photography you’re doing, because I am a photographer too but in what I shoot I don’t always need to constrain proportions.
Plus, if you shoot portraits or school photos you can use Lightroom to batch crop photos to proportion. No need to do that in Photoshop as most other genres like landscapes have odd sizes and don’t need to be resized to proportion in each and every case. I used this tool every single day since 1998 & this has slowed me down considerably. I can’t be slowed down when I have deadlines.
I would not have mind the change if it was consistent. Every kind of layer, especially Smart layers. But also shapes and everything else. Because I don't see the logic in them scaling non uniform and bitmap layers and text scale uniform. Also for those of use that switch between illustrator and photoshop all day long, its a hassle to learn different muscle memory for every program.
But if Adobe had mad a consistent change across everything, I would have been positive to learn the new way. But the way it is right now it's impossible.
I agree with you Joel, I don't think it should just go back to the way it was. Honestly, it probably should never have been set up that you hold a key to not distort something you were sizing in the first place. Now that it has been that way for 20 years just changing it with no easy way to keep it the way we are used to smacks of a monopoly that either is out of touch or doesn't care about its customers. Doing it one program and making the interfaces of their programs differ from one another is really annoying too.
Has anyone given any thought to why they did this? Perhaps it's the iPad. A full version of Photoshop for iPad is due out this year. There is no key to hold down for constraining while sizing on an iPad. If this is the reason I think I'm even a bit more pissed. I already feel like Apple is neglecting the Laptops in favor of IOS devices and pushing me toward needing one to do my job. If Adobe is now onboard with what feels like an Apple agenda, in my opinion only, I am really annoyed.
Using one finger to hold shift to constrain has not once crossed my mind as an issue in 20 years. No finger strain, no pulled muscles, not a thought. I had never heard this ever brought up by anyone I've ever worked with. Using fingers to control a keyboard is something that we all do. Why would this particular command be an issue? Frankly reaching the thumb over to use Ctrl on a PC vs CMD on a Mac didn't even bother me much.
Some people like this feature. It should have been provided as an option for them, rather than to abruptly change this classic behavior that most were accustomed to.
When you drag a marquee selection, if you hold shift, it constrains it to a square. Should the default behavior for that tool be to be constrained and require a modifier key to not constrain?
How about constrained rotate? Or constrained angled lines? Using the pencil tool to draw in a straight line? Should we hold shift to draw freehand? What about shift selecting objects in Illustrator? Should objects automatically multiple select?
I just want to shed a little light on this for people who only use Photoshop. I would consider myself a power user. I use 3 Adobe products daily as part of my job (Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator) for the past 10 + years. Shift has always been used to constrain; whether it be to constrain while resizing, selecting, drawing, or moving... that is the purpose of shift in any Adobe application. By changing the behavior here, they broke their own system. Shift works inconsistently in Photoshop. And resizing works differently across applications. To say this is confusing would be an understatement. It's really thrown a wrench into my workflow.
It's worth noting that the tool Adobe broke is literally named Free Transform. Free, to me, would mean unconstrained.
While I don't think holding the Shift key is a big deal, perhaps a fair solution would be one of two things: Either revert back and give photographers and option to constrain. Or what I believe is a better solution, revert back and introduce a Constrained Transform tool, leaving Free Transform untouched.
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Also, Kenton. I really hope you're not right about the iPad version (though it does seem likely). I don't own an iPad and likely never will. But I'm already considering jumping ship from Adobe.
Kenton Smith I think it might be because of the full Photoshop version for the iPad.
I read an article regarding the full PS version for the iPad but didn't want to post the link in case it went against community standards.
The underlying code is the same as desktop Photoshop, and although the interface has been rethought for the iPad, the same core tools line the edges of the screen.
Quoting from article - "Bringing a program like Photoshop to the iPad is a monumental task. The project started 18 months ago when two Adobe engineers asked to carve out time to bring the Photoshop codebase to the iPad. “There was just a lot of doubt until what we call the “proof of life” moment,” says Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief product officer. Senior director Pam Clark agrees: “We fully admit we were surprised when the engineers showed up, and it was quite powerful and smooth.” That “proof of life” product inspired the design team to start focusing on the app’s user experience, with each new build focusing on a different Photoshop workflow."
They are trying to have the same code for desktop PS and PS for the iPad and I believe this has a big impact on the many bugs found in PS 2019. I find this version so buggy and frustrating and I've gone back to using PS 2018.
Matthew Frederick I totally agree. . . Actually I think they should revert back. Adobe should have never meddled with something that wasn't broken. They might say that they were improving the tool but I think perhaps for the benefit of iPad users.
> There is no key to hold down for constraining while sizing on an iPad. >
While this is very likely the reason to change it (not the reason to dispense with an option for desktop users), don't forget that it's only a convention. iPad apps allow for both constrained and unconstrained transforms. How do they do it? With a gesture. So if you want to be consistent with what iPad apps have tended to do, you favor constrained — no gesture— and unconstrained uses a gesture. Even there, apps have an inconsistency between raster and vector transformations. (I have a new iPad, and I'm still struggling with how many fingers and is it raster or vector, since they require opposite gestures. My ancient iPad didn't have apps on it sophisticated enough to matter.)
It's convention, but convention doesn't mean it can't be optional in desktop apps to follow the convention. Will mobile apps change the way we do things? Almost undoubtedly. But with options, we can make the change gradual if we find ourselves using our touch screens more than our keyboards, so we're thrown off when using desktop apps, or not make the change if we rarely ever use touch screens for art and design. It's more for Adobe to support, though, and they may have decided it's a step too far.
If it’s an improvement great, we’re pros, we can adapt. But change it in the 100s of places it needs to be changed. This embarrassingly sloppy work shows that nobody at Adobe really thought this through, or that the ultimate decision makers simply didn’t care.
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