Photoshop transformation - rotating a selection

[chipzoller]

Please move this if it's not in the right forum.


I need to do some simple transformations on portions of black and white 1-bit images and I've read the manual. What it says does work, my selection box gets rotated, but what I've selected in that box does not, only the box gets rotated, and applying that transformation doesn't change anything.

I'm not a big PS user so I'm not sure if there is something here I'm missing, but what I'm after is something really simply so I'm sure it can be done.

thanks for any help

[foxyshadis]

You have to right click your selection and choose "free transform", then when you rotate it everything inside will move with it. Hit enter when done. (Also note that crop will rotate+crop a rotated selection without any further ado.)

[chipzoller]

Ok, yes that works, but only if I change the image mode from bitmap to greyscale. Otherwise, if I make a selection around an object and right-click, the 'free transform' option is not available.

Does this mean I have to save all my images as greyscales? BTW, these are scanned images saved in B&W 1-bit as compressed TIFFs.

[foxyshadis]

You can convert back to bitmap after rotating. You might need to run threshold first if the standard 128 cutoff isn't good enough, but for a hi-res scan it shouldn't matter. If it's not high-res, the rotation will probably introduce distortion.

[chipzoller]

Ok, I got it. I'm trying to rotate some of my sheet music that I've scanned, so when going back to Bitmap from Greyscale I just chose the diffusion dither. You can only tell a difference if it's at 100% zoom, which since it was scanned at 300 dpi, it'll never be at 100%.

thanks!

Chip