How to Rotate and Flip a Photo in Photoshop Elements 2019
Watch the Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 video training tutorial below. Learn the different ways of rotating and flipping an image. We will demonstrate custom rotation, rotating and flipping shapes and selections, and rotating an image from a reference point.
Welcome back to course on PSE 2019. In this section, we’re going to look at rotating and flipping. We’ll also be looking in more general terms at transforms in the Expert Editor.
First of all, I’m going to give you an introduction to rotating and flipping. Then, we’ll do some straightforward rotating and flipping of a whole image. We’ll look at rotating and flipping layers and selections. Finally, we’ll look at transforms in general.
I mentioned in the preceding section that cropping is a very common operation when you’re working with PSE. Well, so are rotating and flipping.
Apart from operating on whole images, there may be occasions when you want to operate on part of an image. This might be a selection in an image or as we’ll increasingly see during the course on layers within an image.
I am going to demonstrate the rotating and flipping of both selections and layers in this section. Although, we won’t really be looking at that in detail until later on.
I just think it’s important now to get an idea of the differences between these before we go too much farther with our use of the Expert Editor.
Let’s start with rotating and flipping a whole image. There are a number of ways of doing this. There are a pair of buttons or I should say one button with a pair of options on the taskbar for rotation.
We have a Rotate anticlockwise button there. I can do that as many times as I like. I eventually finish up where I started from. And then, of course, I also have a Rotate clockwise option as well.
Another way that you can do rotation is to use the photo bin. If I right click on a thumbnail in the photo bin, I have Rotate 90o left, Rotate 90o right.
If I go up to the menu and click on Image, Rotate, (apart from the options) you’ve just seen there is a Custom Rotation as well.
And with a custom rotation, I can choose a custom angle. So for instance, if I wanted to rotate for 42.1o I could type in 42.1 and click OK.
One thing that may surprise you there is that black background. Notice, that our selected background color is black. That’s why that has come out black. Effectively, what we’re looking at there is the canvas on which this particular image is drawn.
The image has not itself changed size but the canvas that it’s on has increased in size to accommodate the whole partly rotated image.
We’re going to be looking at canvases and so on later on in the course. But it’s important to be aware that the canvas that you can’t usually see does appear from time to time to accommodate things like partial rotations.
Let me undo that and let’s have a quick look at flipping. Again up to the Image menu, Rotate, Flip Horizontal, and the seafront now face the opposite way. Of course, Flip Vertical turns the picture upside down.
Let’s take a look at rotating and flipping a layer. We haven’t really done anything with layers so far and I’m not going to go into this in detail. I just want to give you the general idea.
If I show the Layers panel, you will see that this image has just a single layer on the right there. The one that’s called a background.
That’s the whole of the image that you can see at the moment. If I draw something onto the image; that something that I draw on there will have its own layer. I’m going to go over here in the Draw group to the Custom Shape tool and that’s very convenient. That’s a dog there.
Let’s draw a dog. I’m going to select a dog and I’m going to draw a dog on the beach. There we are! It gets the foreground color which is black. It looks like a black Labrador to me. So, that’s fine!
That the dog is on what’s called Shape 1. If I do a rotate using the button on the taskbar again it rotates the whole image. If I go up to the Image Rotate menu it’s in three parts.
The top part relates to the whole image. The middle part only applies to the selected layer. Now there’s a third part to do with straightening, which I’ll come back to later on.
In this middle part, if I select Rotate Layer 90o left, only the dog is rotated. So, when I build up an image in layers, as you can see, I can operate on individual layers. And that can be very beneficial. Very useful later on as you will see. Let me just put the dog back. That’s how you rotate with layers.
Now, I’m going to delete that layer. What I’m going to do now is to make a selection. I’m going to select the whole of that headland. So, I’m going to take the Quick Selection tool. And I’m going to see if I can select just the headland.
This doesn’t have to be very accurate for the purposes of this exercise. Now, having made a selection once again if I use the Rotate buttons down here, it’ll rotate the whole image.
If I go up to the Image menu, Rotate, the top part relates to the whole image, the middle part relates to the selection. If I say, Rotate Selection 90o right watch what happens. Now, just the selected part rotates and it leaves a gap.
You may well look at that and think: “Well that’s pretty useless really. What on earth is that going to be able to help me with?”
Surprisingly, the facility to rotate and otherwise transform selections is probably going to be much more useful than you think it’s going to be.
The reason you leave that gap there, the white background, is because we’re working on the only layer in that picture. And all there is behind that is white.
If you were working on a multilayer picture and you were rotating a selection on one layer with something else behind it; that may well be a very useful thing to be able to do. But more on that later.
Once again let me put that back where it was. I’m going to leave that selection as it is. And finally, I want to look at Transform because there are various transforms that you can apply to a selection.
Let’s take an example. Let’s go into Free Transform here. We get a Transform tool options panel at the bottom. You can do things like rotate a selection. This little matrix here with the circles in it, this determines the point about which rotation occurs.
If I click on that bottom left-hand corner, circle any rotation I perform will be around that bottom left-hand corner. I’m just hovering near one corner of the selection there. If I rotate, I’m rotating around that selected corner. Let’s Cancel that.
Let me go back into Free Transform again. Let me change the point about which it’s going to rotate. Let’s say, I make it the top right-hand corner, hold that down here. This time, I’m rotating about the top right-hand corner. So, that gives you a lot of flexibility in what you do.
In addition, you can also do things like skewing a selection. I’ve now clicked on the Skew option. I’m going to grab that corner. Then, I’m going to skew it up like that, as well as rotating it. As you’ll see, we can do all sorts of interesting transforms on parts of an image using these tools. But more on that later.
That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Adam Lacey
Adam Lacey is an Excel enthusiast and online learning expert. He combines these two passions at Simon Sez IT where he wears a number of different hats. When Adam isn't fretting about site traffic or Pivot Tables, you'll find him on the tennis court or in the kitchen cooking up a storm.
