Almost a year ago we posted an article reporting on an issue concerning the 2019 version of Photoshop CC. The issue in question was the update of the application’s free-transform functionality. In short, traditional Photoshop users are accustomed to holding the Shift key while dragging an element’s resize handles for the purpose of constraining the proportions of that element while scaling. The original release of the 2019 version of Photoshop changed that behavior in that the free-transform functionality was now constrained by default. In fact, holding the Shift key while scaling caused the element to scale in an unconstrained manner. The original release of Photoshop CC 2019 didn’t appear to provide settings to revert this updated behavior so a more manual approach was required to restore legacy behavior.
A recent update to Photoshop suggests that legacy free-transform functionality is now available as a convenient application preference setting. The configuration setting can be found under the “General” tab in the the “Preferences” window. Look for and check the box next to the setting labeled “Use Legacy Free Transform”. This will restore the legacy functionality for free-transform should you prefer this behavior.