In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke discusses the Flip Horizontal View mode in Photoshop CC 2019. He points out it’s a great way to get a fresh perspective: it only flips the view of your work, not the work itself.

Then he once again exposes us to this self portrait. But, you can see up top that it does in fact give us a new way of looking at this (ahem) artwork we’ve seen for three weeks now.

And, flipping the view allows him to see that his signature smile needs a bit of balancing with the Liquify tool.

Note that this command is listed in the View menu as Flip Horizontal, named just like the Flip Horizontal command you’ll find under the Edit > Transform menu. So be aware of which one you’re using because one actually flips the pixels and the other basically flips only your experience of them. I’m trying to think of other commands that are named the same and behave differently based on their menu context. Seems like it could cause confusion (or at least the need for a bit of editorial flexibility like my adding the word “View” to the command name in the first paragraph.)

I can see that this fresh perspective could be very useful for fine-tuning bits of art that have required hours of work, where your eyes can barely stand the sight of the same old scene. Perhaps it’s analogous to reading your written work out loud or printing it on paper to find the bits that don’t make any sense.

Next week, new art! Talk about fresh perspective. (Sorry, Deke!)

Deke’s Techniques, revealing new ways of seeing old(ish) artwork!