How To Bring The “Shift-Key” Back To Free Transform

There have been many cheers that in the most-recent Photoshop CC update, you no longer have to hold the Shift key to keeps things proportional when using Free Transform to resize an object or type. You can just grab a corner and drag. We’ve been waiting for this for 20+ years, and it’s finally here (Photoshop is one of the only applications on the planet that requires you to hold Shift to resize an object proportionally — in fact, it’s just about InDesign and Illustrator left on earth that still make you do that, but they too are scheduled to lose the extra key needed to resize proportionally).

This seems like it would be good news — but there are some folks out there who are mightily pi$›%#!

So, Adobe has released a way for those folks to create a simple one-line script; which you place in Photoshop’s scripts folder, and it makes you hold the Shift key again to resize proportionally.

Now, it would have been awesome if Adobe simply had added a preference setting with a checkbox for “Use legacy Free Transform proportional resize shortcut” (or some other hard-t0-decipher Adobe-like phase), but this is, at least, the next best thing — you get your shift key back without a lot of hassle.

Here’s how to “go back in time” and add the Shift Key back into your workflow (these are the official steps, according to Adobe):

Use Notepad (Windows) or a text editor on Mac OS to create a plain text file (.txt).

Type the text below in the text file:

TransformProportionalScale 0

Save the file as “PSUserConfig.txt” to your Photoshop settings folder:

Windows: [Installation Drive]:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2019\Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 Settings\

macOS: //Users/[User Name]/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 Settings/

OK, that’s all there is to it, and your Shift-key holding days are back. :)

Hope you found that helpful. :)

Best,

-Scott

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