Free Transform

This week, I show you how to create what I'm calling a "talk show-style" curtain. In my defense, I admit that many talk shows do not have curtains, and many non-talk shows do have curtains. But this is the kind of curtain that Johnny Carson had, back when JC was king of late-night TV. You know, back when there was such a thing.

I employed this very effect for the background of my recent 3D Pie Chart movies. But the curtain exists entirely independently of its foreground. By way of proof, here's the official description from lynda.com's Colleen Wheeler: Read more » 

As powerful as Photoshop is, there is little about the program that is obvious. Case in point: How do you rotate a layer? Right-click on it and select Rotate? Choose Rotate from the Layer menu? Click on the rotate tool? The answer is no, no, and no. Fortunately, there’s the Free Transform command, which lets you not just rotate but also scale, slant, and distort a layer in one continuous operation. Edt > Free Transform is one of Photoshop's most fundamental commands, with a keyboard shortcut to prove it: Ctrl+T (Cmd-T on the Mac). Read more »