Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Making one photo smaller without
shrinking the whole document:
If you're working with more than one
image in the same document, you'll
resize a bit differently. To scale down
a photo on a layer (like this photo of a
Venice canal, which is on its own layer),
first click on that photo's layer in the
Layers panel, then press
Command-T
(PC: Ctrl-T)
to bring up Free Transform
(it puts little handles around your image
on that layer, kind of like what the Crop
tool does). Press-and-hold the Shift key
(to keep the photo proportional), grab
a corner handle, and drag inward (here,
I've grabbed the top-right corner han-
dle and dragged inward to shrink the
image). When the size looks good, press
Return (PC: Enter)
. If the image looks
softer after resizing it, apply the Unsharp
Mask filter (see Chapter 10 for settings)
to bring that sharpness back.
TIP: Reaching the Free
Transform Handles
If you drag an image from one open
document to another (like I did here,
where I dragged the original Venice
canal photo over onto the old world map
document), there's a pretty good chance
you'll have to resize the dragged image,
so it fits within your other image. And, if
the image is larger (as in this case), when
you bring up Free Transform, you won't
be able to reach the resizing handles
(they'll extend right off the edges of
the document). Luckily, there's a trick
to reaching those handles: just press
Command-0 (PC: Ctrl-0)
, and your
window will automatically resize so you
can reach all the handles—no matter
how far outside your image area they
once were. Two things: (1) This only
works once you have Free Transform
active, and (2) it's Command-0—that's
the number zero, not the letter O.
