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It was a dark and stormy night. She wanted to find the
center of a deformed roof to put in a dormer window, and she was frantic.
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Clues |
Investigation was necessary. |
| Starting with a new image the same size as the original roof (or loading a selection that she'd saved to disk), she drew a gray rectangle with red lines in the middle both up and down. |
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| She duplicated the image (the lighter image above).. She gasped as she deformed the new layer. As you can see, the vertical middle moved when the image was deformed, but the two halves aren't equally wide. |
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Hmmm. . .Idea |
Before you deform a shape, put a small, bright, Magic Dot
of color using the paint brush square shape in the middle and one near the
bottom. Make it large enough to see, but small enough so you can paint
over it easily later if necessary. Jaddell suggests that you use a scrap layer for dots or lines. Much smarter because you can just delete it after you don't need it anymore. |
"But where is the center of a rectangle?" she wondered, looking at her original undeformed wall. |
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| The easiest way to find it, no matter where you have
drawn it on the layer, is to turn on the Deformation Tool. You don't need to deform anything, but you can place a horizontal and/or vertical guide using the middle handle of the deformation. When you cancel the deformation, the guides show you the middle. Whew. |
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"So where should I put my dormer window?" she cried. |
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Solution |
It was the same dark and stormy night. She had copied the shape of a sample gray image the same size as her roof and resized it by 33% to get the footprint of her dormer window. |
| Since the side angles of the dormer window footprint are
parallel to the sides of the roof, she could move the footprint down to
where it should be (the white footprint). (She had obviously put the Magic Dots on her original roof before she deformed it.) |
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She smiled. |
Now, aaargh, go back to your original wall and put the dots on it and deform it again. Suddenly you understand why you made all those duplicates, don't you? |
| All right, you don't feel like redoing the roof. In that case, create a scrap layer and draw lines (green diagonals) from the upper left corner to the bottom right corner and from the upper right corner to the lower left corner. |
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| On another layer draw a line (yellow in the picture) down
the angled side of the roof. Then move it so that it's on the intersection
of the first two lines.
Now you have the right coordinates for Magic Dots or placing a dormer window. You can delete the scrap layer now unless you want to place anything else on the roof. |
Mystery solved. The missing middle has been found! |
