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.
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