How to scale proportionally in Adobe Photoshop 2019

photoshop

I recently updated several of my Creative Cloud apps to the new 2019 version and found right away that holding down shift to scale images proportionally in Photoshop no longer works. The new behavior seems to be to scale proportionally by default, and using shift will now warp the image.

This update seems to make no sense at first. However, my guess is this was intentionally added as a way to fight bad design. Too many times I’ve seen people commit the ultimate sin of stretching photos, type, and logos. Maybe this will force users to stop that bad habit?

While they were at it, it looks like Adobe also toned down the intensity of the default drop shadow settings. I always thought it was way over the top. Many designers sadly never changed the settings, resulting in some pretty awful design.

So, while it will take a little while to unlearn years of muscle memory for the scaling feature, this may benefit the design community at large. I don’t mind the change.