Explore related tutorials & articles
10
Replies
How much do you want to reduce its width? Tell us with reference to the original width i.e by half.
Right now the only way I can think to do it would be to rebuild (illustrate) one frame, and use transform step and repeat to make the circle. A bit of work, but good practice. I will be very interested to see someone has a way to do it to the existing graphic.
if anybody knows a faster way to do this please let me know
By zuhayr_8726
If this image is vector and created in Adobe Illustrator, this would be easy. There would be one circle with three appearances, one for each of the three strokes. Enable "Scale Strokes" and resize the circle. Done.
Photoshop only sees pixels, so there is no easy way. Use Trevor's solution to rebuild it in Photoshop. If you have Illustrator, rebuild it there so future edits will be easy.
Jane
As I got into recreating this, I decided that it was not as straight forward as I first thought as making the strip more narrow made the aspect ratio look completely wrong. So I made arbitary decisions based as much as I could on making it half as wide. It's made from multiple stroked elliptical shapes, but with guides intersecting the canvas center, and grid zero zero point moved to that intersection. That let me keep everything concentric as I could reference the 0,0 location to rotate around using Transform Step & Repeat.
PNG file is attached.
You can make it thinner with Distort > Polar Coordinates, first Polar to Rectangular, scaling the result, and then Rectangular to Polar. Unfortunately, the spacing of the sprocket holes starts looking weird —
I’m not sure if this is exactly how you want it thinner, but my approach shown in the demo below uses these steps:
1. With the Ellipse tool in Path mode, draw an ellipse that tracks the center of the current filmstrip ring. You can also use the Elliptical Marquee tool, but I think paths are easier to adjust precisely.
2. Duplicate the original layer.
3. With the layer duplicate selected, convert the path to a vector mask for the duplicate layer. This masks off everything outside the elliptical vector mask. I used the shortcut of Ctrl-clicking (or on macOS, Command-clicking) the Add Mask icon with a path selected; that’s a shortcut for the command Layer > Vector Mask > Current Path.
4. Use Edit > Free Transform to proportionally scale the layer duplicate from the center until the overall graphic appears as thin as you want.
In my example the sprocket holes are not proportional at the bottom, only because I did it too quickly. If you take more time to scale the layer copy more precisely, you can get that part right.
With this method the frame sizes don’t change so frames appear longer. If you want more control over how it scales, maybe redraw the whole thing in Adobe Illustrator, for example, by creating a custom brush for an ellipse stroke, so that you can easily update it to make adjustments of any kind. You would draw just one frame, and use either of those features to repeat the frame around the circle.
Because there are still some challenges getting this done in Photoshop without distorting it in an unwanted way, below is a demo of why you might want to do this in Illustrator instead. If a film frame is set up as a Pattern brush, it distorts to fit the circle, and its overall proportions are maintained as you adjust the thickness using the Stroke value alone. No math required.
AdChoices
