Rotating a Layer or Selection

Rotating a Layer or Selection

Earlier, you may have used the Free Transform command to resize layers and

selections, and thought it was pretty swell. What you probably weren’t aware of

at the time is that the very same command can also be used to rotate layers and

selections!

Giving Text a Motion Effect

Giving Text a Motion Effect

Solution

Create your text layer. Use an italic font to enhance the motion effect. Duplicate the

text layer using Ctrl-J (Command-J on a Mac). Right-click (hold Ctrl and click on a Mac)

on the original layer, and select Rasterize from the menu that appears.

Now we’re going to apply a filter to make the text look like it’s moving. Filters can

only be applied to raster layers, which is why we’ve rasterized our original layer.

Select Filter > Blur > Motion Blur to bring up the Motion Blur dialog. To make your text

look like it’s moving horizontally, set the Angle to 0°. Adjust the Distance to a value

that works with your text.

The Basics 1

In the finished example below, I’ve adjusted the

Opacity of the motion layer in the Layers palette to fade

it out slightly, and used a layer mask to hide the righthand

side of the blur effect so that the text looks like

it’s moving towards the right. (If you need a refresher

on creating layer masks, see the solutions for “Fading

an Image into the Background” in Chapter 2.)

WARNING Raster Right!

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