Photoshop Tip: Copy & Transform At The Same Time

Mar 20, 2009 by Jennifer Farley    1 Comment     Posted under: Blog, Photoshop Tutorials

Most of the time when you transform an object in Photoshop (scale, rotate, perspective, distort), you apply the transformation to the object itself, but did you know that you can also make a duplicate of your object and transform it at the same time? Here’s how;

1. Select your object in the layers palette, or make a selection around an object on any layer, then press Alt+Ctrl+T (pc) or Option+Cmd+T (mac) on the keyboard.

It will look like the bounding box is appearing around your original object but once you start to transform you’ll see your original is untouched and a new copy is transformed.

2. In this example, I simply did a rotate transformation on the copy. Before I rotated the copy though, I moved the object reference point so that it was at the the feet of the leprechaun. This means the object rotates around his feet rather than the centre.

3. Rinse and repeat. I repeated this a few more times, each time changing the object reference point to be at the leprechaun’s feet.

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