Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to use
the Rotate View tool in Adobe Photoshop. Now when this came out a few years ago,
it absolutely drove me nuts because I was always accidentally hitting the letter R on my keyboard
and then rotating my canvas without meaning to, and then I was struggling on how to get it back,
straight up and down. So if that happens to you, all you have to do is hit your Escape key,
and it'll bring it back to its normal way. So in this video, I'm going to go over how to use
the tool, the nuts and bolts and how it all works, why you might want to use this and then we'll just
do a couple examples of the ways that I use this tool in Photoshop. All right, let's get started.
So first, we'll go over how this tool works. I'm going to go to File>Open,
and then I'll open an image that I found on Pexels.com. Now I'll hit R on my keyboard,
and that will bring me to the Rotate View tool, which is right down here. Now to use the tool,
all I have to do is just click and drag on my canvas. It'll rotate the view around,
and you'll see this compass in the middle of your canvas. And that will go away when you
let off your mouse. So if I decide I like this angle, I'm going to let off my mouse,
and the compass goes away. But if I decide I want to rotate it a little back the other way,
the compass will show back up when I click. So the reason you might want to use this is if you're
doing a painting and using your brushes. So you can rotate your view around so that your hand is
more comfortable using the brush or drawing or painting. Let's say I want to add a little more
of this gray shadow to this bottle. I'm going to zoom in by hitting Z on my keyboard and then just
dragging to the right. I'm going to grab that gray color by hitting I on my keyboard. I'm just
going to click and drag. And the problem is going downward like this is not very easy for my hand.
So instead of having it at this angle, I'm going to hit R on my keyboard to get
back to my Rotate View tool. And I'm going to rotate a little more like this. And now I'll
get my Brush tool again, by hitting B. Now I can more comfortably draw along that edge.
And obviously I'm not matching the same style of paint scratches, but this is just a tutorial,
and I wanted to show you how this works. If you're using a Wacom tablet, this is especially handy,
because it can be a lot easier to use the pen in a way that's comfortable for your hand. Ok,
so let's look at some of these other options up here. You have the option of rotating the canvas
an exact number of degrees if you want. We can type in 45, and I'll get an exact 45 degree angle.
We can also put a negative number in front to get it to go back the opposite way.
Now if for whatever reason, you don't want to click and drag right on your canvas,
you can also use this little wheel to rotate the canvas around too. And I mentioned using
Escape earlier to get back to your normal view. But you can use Reset View up here too.
Now this Rotate All Windows...if this is checked, and you have a lot of different documents open,
it will rotate all of the art in all of those documents the same amount. Now I mentioned you
can put an exact angle here. But if you wanted to manually snap to various angles, you can do that
too holding SHIFT. If you hold SHIFT and drag now, it will snap 15 degrees as you go around.
If you don't have Shift held down, it'll just be a smooth rotation. Now another thing to know is that
you're not actually rotating the image itself, you're just rotating the view. So if you were
to save the file like this, when you come out here to your Finder, it's still going to end up
like this straight up and down. So it's just the view. It's not the actual file that is
getting rotated. If you actually want to rotate the image, we can come up here to
Image>Image Rotation, and then we can rotate it 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise,
or choose Arbitrary to do 45 or some other number. So let's just rotate this 90 degrees
clockwise. Now if we saved it like this, it will actually look like this the next time we open it.
I'll just undo to get back. Now one strange thing I noticed when I'm using the Rotate View tool,
I'm just going to zoom in here, and I'll hit R on my keyboard to get to the rotate view.
I'll rotate it a little bit. If I want to draw a rectangle marquee, I'll hit M to get to my
Rectangular Marquee tool, and when I draw, it actually draws...I don't know how well you can
see that, but it doesn't draw straight up and down like it does with a normal view.
It's actually following the angle of the rotation. So I find this to be a little bit annoying. I wish
it would you know give me a straight up and down rectangle when I use the Rectangle Marquee tool.
Ok, onward to the examples. I'm going to close this file,
and now I'll open up a different file. Let's say I wanted to draw right along this line that's part
of the petal. I'm going to make a new layer for my brush. I'm going to hit R to get to my Rotate
View tool. And I'll rotate this around until it looks pretty straight up and down. It's hard to
get it exact. So I'm going to bring it right over here to line up with this line along my toolbar.
And you can see it's not quite perfectly straight, so I'm going to move it just a little bit more,
to get it to be parallel to my toolbar. Ok, that looks pretty good. Now I can move it back over.
I'm going to hit B on my keyboard to get to my Brush tool, which is right over here.
And let's say I wanted to do maybe like an orange on top of that. I'm going to
zoom in really close. I'll make my brush a little bit smaller by holding CTRL and OPT,
and dragging to the left that's on a Mac. It's a different keystroke on a PC. I can't remember
exactly what it is. But now I can hold SHIFT and click and drag and it'll draw a straight line
right along that area. I'm going to just hit E and remove some of this, maybe remove that down there.
Then we can change to Color Burn or another layer style. That looks pretty nice. So I could do that
with each one of these. And the Rotate View can help me with that. Now I like to go from
left to right when I'm drawing. So, for this part since it's not straight, I can just rotate
it around to do whatever is most comfortable for my hand. And I'll just draw this right along here.
Maybe erase this little bit out here. That's the normal way of using the tool with brushes
and erasers. But you can also do it with like the quick mask for a selection. So to show you what I
mean, I'm going to click back on my background layer. And I'm going to hit W to get to my Wand
tool, which will give me these options up here. I want to Select Subject. So it takes it a second,
but we do now have a selected subject, except it didn't quite get these pieces. So I'm going to
go ahead and do a quick mask for this. So to do that, I'm going to hit Q. It's the same thing as
selecting this button right down here on the toolbar. I'm going to hit R for Rotate Canvas.
I'm going to rotate this around. And then I'm just going to erase
this part in here that it didn't get very well. This is so much easier because of the angle that
I'm able to use with the Rotate View tool. And we can also do the same thing, lining parts of this
up with the edge so that we can make a straight line, like this is pretty much a straight line
here. So I'm going to hit R to get my Rotate View. I'm going to line that up with the edge
so it's almost perfectly straight and right about there. And then I'll get back on my Brush tool.
I'll make sure I have black here. And I'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger and a little bit
softer... maybe even more soft. Then I'll click here and just hold SHIFT to make a straight line.
Then I'll hit Escape to get back to my normal view. You can also go to reset right up here at
the top. So now my selection is these two flowers, and this straight line piece right here. And if I
hit Q again, it turns back into a selection. And now I can hit CMD J or CTRL J to get those pieces
onto a new layer. And I'll hit OPT and click on the eyeball to see only that layer. That is ALT
and clicking on the eyeball for Windows system. So those are the ways that I generally use this tool.
I will rotate it to feel more comfortable to my hand when I'm using Quick Mask or the paintbrush.
And then I'm also using it to hold SHIFT with a brush and lining an area up with the edge
of my toolbar so it is straight up and down before I hit SHIFT to make a straight line up
and down. All right, if you liked this video and you want to see more videos like this,
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time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!