Photoshop Tutorials: Easy Digital Nose Job In Photoshop

Step 4: Resize The Nose With Photoshop's Free Transform Command

With the nose now on its own layer, we can go ahead and resize it, making it shorter, thinner, or both! To do that, we'll use Photoshop's Free Transform command, and we can quickly access it with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+T (Win) / Command+T (Mac), which brings up the Free Transform box and handles around the nose, as shown below:

To make the nose thinner, all we need to do is drag the side handles (the little squares) in towards each other. To drag both sides in at the same time, hold down your Alt (Win) / Option key as you drag one of the handles and the handle on the opposite will drag in as well. The further in towards each other you drag the side handles, the thinner the nose becomes:

To shorten the length of the nose, simply drag the bottom handle up. The further you drag the handle, the shorter the nose becomes. You can also hold down your Alt (Win) / Option key as you drag the bottom handle to have Photoshop drag the top handle in at the same time:

Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) when you're done to accept the transformation and exit out of the Free Transform box.

I've now made her nose a little thinner and a little shorter simply by dragging a couple of Free Transform handles. If we look closely at the image though, we can see that there's some problems. For one thing, the shadow lines under her cheeks no longer match up, especially the one on the left, as I've circled below:

To fix that, I'm going to bring up the Free Transform handles once again with "Ctrl+T" (Win) / "Command+T" (Mac) and this time, I'm going to hold down Shift+Ctrl+Alt (Win) / Shift+Command+Option (Mac) and drag either of the bottom corner handles out to the side. Holding all three keys down at once as I'm dragging the bottom corner handle tells Photoshop to drag the bottom corner handle on the opposite side as well while leaving the top two corner handles locked in place. Technically, this is what Photoshop calls transforming the selection in "perspective", and I'm simply using the keyboard shortcut to access this mode. I could also go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen, choose Transform, and then choose Perspective and then drag either of the bottom corner handles outward, but I find the keyboard shortcut easier so I'm going to hold all three keys down at once and drag the bottom right corner handle outward, which is also going to drag the bottom left corner handle outward as well, and I'll continue dragging until the shadow lines under her cheeks no longer appear broken:

Once again I'll press "Enter" (Win) / "Return" (Mac) to apply the transformation and exit out of the Free Transform command.

There's one problem area left to clean up, and we'll do that next.