How do I lock rotation view in Photoshop?

[josiahm29169243]

How do I lock rotation view in Photoshop? It is annoying when the canvas rotates accidentally. I don't understand why Adobe allows the Rotation View to work without even having the tool selected.

[Sahil.Chawla]

Hi Josiahm,

I'm not sure if locking is possible, however, you can disable the rotate view feature. Please check this forum thread to know more: how do i disable the rotate view tool?

Regards,
Sahil

[josiahm29169243]

That forum is outdated. And it doesn't apply to the newer version of Photoshop CC 2019. Please try again.

Also it seems stupid. Why would I need to download something in order to disable rotate?

[Sahil.Chawla]

You could turn off OpenGL in Preferences > Performance > Advanced Settings, then relaunch Photoshop. That should disable the rotate view feature.

[Jeff Arola · Accepted solution]

See if going to Photoshop (Edit)>Preferences>Tools and unchecking Enable Gestures works.

[Trevor.Dennis]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Jeff+Arola  wrote

See if going to Photoshop (Edit)>Preferences>Tools and unchecking Enable Gestures works.

A good call Jeff. 

[gener7]

Seems there are no downsides. Disable Gestures, Rotate, switch to another tool and it will stay in place until you press the Escape key to reset it.

[Daniel311603986ena]

Its a horrible call. This does not work at all. Besides I dont want all gestures disabled, I want to be able to zoom using my touchscreen without accidentally rotating the image.

[cliffclof]

This does not work.  Only for those with devices that gestures would normally work on.. There is still a bug with standard PCs that randomly rotates the view clockwise when using alt+scroll wheel.   It's random when the rotation happens and sometimes happens with only pressing "alt"   very strange bug.

[A Jono Niko Studio]

This answer is incorrect, using Photoshop CC 2019 (20.0.4) on Windows 10 Pro with a Wacom Cintiq Pro tablet, disabling gestures doesn't do anything. I honestly can't understand why the canvas can't have a rotation lock by itself.

[Akebia]

I am having the same issue with CC 2019, disabling gestures doesn't prevent the canvas from rotating with a Cintiq. Particularly annoying when I'm just trying to zoom or pan, and have to manually re-orient the canvas every time. Is there a fix for this? (edit: I just found out esc resets it (derp) but it's still irritating)

[paule77934122]

Hey there. I find a way. It is not in Photoshop. You need to go to the Tablet settings and go to "standart-gestures" and there you can disabele rotation for the tablet. Hope that helps.

[baykala30960471]

Super annoying! super annoying. They have to make it easy to disable and able...

[danielb76572558]

Word! This is by far one of the worst features ever initiated by adobe.....who has ever wanted this feature?

[Conrad_C]

Word! This is by far one of the worst features ever initiated by adobe.....who has ever wanted this feature?

By @danielb76572558

It all becomes clear when you look at things from the point of view of people who use Photoshop for drawing and painting. They’re the ones who want this feature.

Imagine you’re drawing with a pencil on paper (no computer). It’s a natural, intuitive thing to rotate the paper with your other hand when that makes it easier to draw a line or curve at a certain angle, or paint brush strokes at a certain angle. Being able to rotate the drawing/painting surface with your other hand has been something we humans have done for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. We expect to be able to do it.

In the first few decades of digital graphics, that intuitive historical ability was not available when all we had was a mouse or other input device with no way to input canvas rotation. When multi-touch trackpads became a thing, we finally had that traditional ability restored.

The post that started this thread asked:

I don't understand why Adobe allows the Rotation View to work without even having the tool selected.

Because that is the only way this feature makes sense. You are drawing or painting with a Brush tool, and you need to rotate the canvas. If this feature couldn’t work without the Rotate View tool selected, you would have switch to the Rotate View tool or call up a command to rotate the canvas, and then switch back to the tool you were using. With this feature, you simply use your other hand to rotate the canvas with a gesture on your trackpad…exactly how you would do it in the real world, without the clumsy extra steps of having to switch tools and back just to rotate the canvas.

For those who don’t want any multi-touch gestures to work in Photoshop, it can be disabled as shown in the picture below…

…or, if you’re using a Mac and want two-finger rotation disabled in all apps, do it in macOS System Settings > Trackpad as shown in the picture below. 

But there are people who want it to work exactly as it does.

[Farah24]

Thank you so much