Scaling Images with shift no longer works after update (20.0)

You asked for an “easy toggle on or off in preferences please.” Adobe gave us not one, but two of those. You might have missed them because this is a very long thread to read through, but after the initial complaints Adobe addressed it in later updates.

The first preference is, of course, in Preferences (Settings in later versions of macOS). Use Legacy Free Transform lets you do it the old way.

The other is a setting in the options bar, so you don’t even have to open a dialog box. Clicking the link icon (it links horizontal and vertical scaling) toggles between scaling proportionally and not proportionally.

Inconsistent with other apps, ignores decades of precedent…

By @kdnon

That is becoming less true by the day, and that is why Adobe had to act.

Many new graphics apps no longer require holding down Shift to scale proportionally. Yes, holding Shift is a historical precedent that goes back around 40 years or more…but people increasingly realized that although it’s a tradition, it’s kind of a weird tradition when you stop and think about it: Why do we have to press a modifier key for the way we want to use it most of the time, which is proportional? The less frequent exception — non-proportional scaling — is what should require the extra step of a modifier key. So, many newer apps do it that way: You just drag a handle and you get normal proportional scaling without also having to hold down a key.

And there is one more thing. The most popular computing device is now the smartphone and smartphones don’t have a Shift key you can press while editing graphics with a touch interface, so forcing people to hold Shift to proportionally scale made no more sense for the device that most people use. So mobile graphics apps are designed to scale proportionally by default.

These widespread and cross-platform changes mean it now makes more sense for an app developer to proportionally scale by default, and override with a modifier, especially for desktop and mobile versions of the same app to be consistent. Photoshop now follows that, but you do still have the option to do it the old way.

Because this is an industry-wide change, if for example someone said “This is dumb, I’m abandoning Photoshop out of protest” they would find it difficult to switch to something “better” because many of the popular competing image editing apps also scale proportionally without the Shift key…and some of them made the move before Photoshop did.

There is one big problem: Although Photoshop is now more consistent with other modern image editing programs, other older Adobe desktop apps have not yet adapted, such as Illustrator and InDesign. They still require the Shift key to scale proportionally, and this is very annoying for anyone who frequently switches among those apps and Photoshop.

Because it is not “universal throughout all applications.”

There’s been a change in philosophy recently where developers are asking: If what we mostly want when scaling is to preserve proportions, why do we need to hold down a modifier to do what we want most of the time? This reasoning has caused many developers to swap the default so that proportional scaling is the default. They’re basically saying, do we need to maintain a precedent when it’s probably not the right thing to do? Should the way it was done in 1990 be unchangeable for any reason?

For example, let’s suppose someone gets so angry about this change that they decide to leave Photoshop and put their financial support behind a competitor instead. They delete Photoshop and pay just $50 for Affinity Photo, one of the most powerful and widely praised Photoshop competitors. The second they decide to scale something by dragging, they will find out that…Affinity Photo scales proportionally by default too! Pressing Shift scales non-proportionally. Just like Photoshop does now.

In exasperation, let’s suppose they try Pixelmator, another popular Photoshop competitor. Guess what, it scales proportionally by default too. Those are just two of the examples. These days, the applications that require the Shift key are mostly older ones such as GIMP.

Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are some of the most modern code bases out there, with the most current UI thinking. They represent where photo editing software design is going, when the big picture is considered.

Part of the big picture is that not using the Shift key is also more consistent for applications that have versions that need to work on touchscreens, because modifiers are more of a hassle on touchscreens, especially when no keyboard is attached. If no Shift key is required to scale proportionally, the same uniform gesture works across all platforms. This wasn’t an issue in 1992, 2005, 2010…but today, with Photoshop on Surface tablets and on the iPad…

I’m not saying the situation is perfect. It’s actually a big hassle if you use multiple Adobe applications, because the others still use the old way of scaling. You can easily get mixed up when switching between Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc. I guess that’s part of the reason they provide a preference that lets you turn off the new behavior in Photoshop.

It seems you people often don't read latest posts: Re: Scaling Images with shift no longer works after update (20.0)

You mean undo new changes or using new scaling for the rest of your life?

With the most recent update they have made that fix a checkbox—the way it should have been from the beginning. Go to Preferences>General and check the box for "Use Legacy Free Transform."

If you've got version 20.0.5 complay with linked content in my post No. 143:

Re: Scaling Images with shift no longer works after update (20.0)

For what purpose? To use Photoshop with even less screen real estate and no keyboard commands whatsoever?