"How do I make an object rotate counterclockwise in Photoshop?"
For a better reading experience, I would recommend going to Quora for my original answer.
I don’t use the Video Timeline a lot, but I went in to check and I was able to rotate a simple layer in the counterclockwise direction, albeit with some tricks and a lingering sense of confusion.
But if you want the hack job version, here’s what I did:
Create or select the layer and open up the timeline and have the layer in the animation timeline .
Click on the drop down arrow next to the layer on the timeline window and reveal the Transform property. Hit the stopwatch at the beginning of the clip to get a keyframe in.
With the current keyframe still selected, Cmd/Ctrl-T and set the rotation to 0 degree.
Move the cursor to the mid-point of the timeline and hit the stopwatch again to add another keyframe. In my case with a 5 second clip at 30fps, I’m looking at 2 seconds and 15 frames in.
Cmd/Ctrl-T again and rotate it counterclockwise. You should notice a few things in the angle box near the top. A) It’s a negative number. B) It stops at -/+180. So we can’t do a full circle as Photoshop doesn’t seem to recognize the direction of the rotation.
Here’s the fun part. I set the rotation degree to -179.99, and the rotation still seems to go counterclockwise at this point.
Move the cursor to the end of the clip and add another keyframe. You can then hit Cmd/Ctrl-T and set the angle down to 0.02 degrees (via the numeric box) , but any further than that and the rotation resets itself to clockwise from the mid-point mark until the end.
But if you were to freehand it, you could go lower than 0.02 (but not to 0). Beats me.
But there you have it.
At this point you animation should have three keyframes— the first one at 0 deg, the second at -179.99, and the third at 0.02. You will end up missing a small fraction of the animation, but I think it’s pretty negligible.
You can also control the rotation via the numeric box, which allows for a higher level of precision, just keep in mind that Photoshop can’t really tell the which way it’s supposed to rotate under some circumstances.
I also noticed you could hover over the layer in the timeline and Rightclick > Motion > Rotate > Set to Counterclockwise and you’d also get a rotation started, it might be the quicker way to do, but I seemed to have trouble adjusting the angles and direction via that method.
