How to Use the Flash Free Transform Tool

Flash's Free Transform tool allows you to easily scale, rotate, skew, and distort your drawings. Use the tool to manipulate photos for family and friends or for a design project.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. To transform an object, first select it by either clicking on it or by clicking and dragging a bounding box around the area you want to transform. You can select irregular areas by using the Lasso Tool.
2. Click the Free Transform Tool icon in the Tools bar to the left of the working area. You should see a black bounding box around your shape now, with white-outlined black anchor points at corners and midpoints and a white registration point in the center.
3. By default, the Free Transform Tool combines all possible transformations in a single tool; the position of your mouse on the bounding box determines which transformation will occur when you click and drag. Hovering over the midpoints allows you to scale width or height individually; hovering over the corner anchor points allows you to scale width and height simultaneously. You'll be able to tell the scale tools by the arrow cursors. If you hover near but not over the corner points, the cursor will change to a circular arrow, meaning that now clicking and dragging will cause it to rotate. Hovering over the lines between anchor points will cause the cursor to change to two parallel lines with opposing arrows, indicating that you can now skew the shape to one direction or another.
4. You can also lock the Free Transform Tool so that it will only perform one type of transformation. To do this, look at the Options section at the very bottom of the Tools panel. You should see four buttons
5. The first button, to the top left, locks the tool so that it scales only without rotating or skewing.
6. The second button on the top right locks the tool so that it only rotates.
7. The third button on the bottom left locks the tool so that it only skews, and allows expansion of the skewing functionality; you can scale just one side up or down to create perspective or other distortions.
8. The last button on the bottom right offers a function that isn't available on the regular transformations: the Envelope. This changes the bounding box around the shape being transformed, with more anchor points. These anchor points act like vector points and allow you to move them or drag their handles to warp shapes, adding or adjusting curves and more precisely controlling distortions.

Tips & Warnings

• To make your shape rotate around a pivot point other than the absolute center, click and drag on the white registration point in the center. The shape will rotate with the new location of the registration point as its center.
• To scale proportionally, hold down the shift key while dragging one of the corner anchor points.
• You can also type in precise measurements in pixels or degrees for transformations in the Transform Panel.

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