From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Using the Shape tools - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Using the Shape tools

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- [Instructor] By default, the shape tools in Photoshop are vector-based. The benefit of creating vector-based shapes is that they're resolution independent, so you don't have to worry about their size. After you draw a shape, you can transform the shape as large or as small as you'd like, as many times as you'd like, and they'll always maintain their quality. From the toolbar, I'm going to select the rectangle tool. We have a number of different shape tools. You can also tap the U key to select the shape tools. Then I'm going to right click and choose to reset the tools because I want to make sure that we're all creating shapes, but you can also create paths or pixels. In order to set up the attributes for the next shape that I draw, I'll want to choose my fill and my stroke. I'll click in the color swatch where we can choose from, no fill, our swatches, our gradients, our patterns, and even choose from the color picker. For now, I want to select this orange color, and then let's take a look at the stroke. So the options here are all the same except that I can increase the size of the stroke, as well as change different attributes of the stroke. So it can be a solid stroke or a dashed stroke or a dotted stroke. There's additional options that you can customize. You can change the align caps and corner options as well as create a dashed line. Then as soon as you enter in any of your own values, you can save these as presets and they'll appear in the list. For now, I'm going to click Cancel and make sure that I've got the solid stroke selected. And I don't actually want a stroke on my shape, so I'm going to click and choose None. Now both the rectangle and the ellipse shapes drag from the corner. If I hold down the Shift key, it's going to constrain it to a square or a circle, and if I hold down the Option key or the Alt key and drag out, it will drag from the center. If I keep my mouse down, I can hold down the Spacebar and then reposition the point of origin. I can then let go of the Spacebar and then continue dragging. When I release the cursor, Photoshop will automatically create a shape layer and display the on canvas transform handles for resizing and rotating the shape. Now in the center point is a reference point. If yours isn't showing, you can use the Settings or the Preferences, come to Tools and enable show reference point when using transform. Now if I transform this or I want to rotate it around a point that's not in the center, we can move this reference point and then rotate or transform. It will automatically snap back to the center after you make your transformation. All of these shape transformation options also appear on the properties panel so that we can change any of these options after we draw the shape. This is considered to be a live shape, and these are live shape properties. If I needed to use the edit menu and transform my path, if I select the skew, distort or perspective and then I make a change, when I apply that change, Photoshop is going to warn me that it's going to convert it into a regular path. We can go ahead and do that, but then we no longer have all of those options in the Properties panel, and I can't change the corner radius, for example. Let me undo that using Command + Z. The corner radius is this little dot right here, and if I click and drag on that, we can change the shape of all the corners at once or we could unlock it in the Appearance panel and change them independently here. Alright, let me delete that shape and I want to create a shape of a specific size. So I can either use the options bar to enter in a width or height, or I can simply click in the image area and enter in the values. So I want this to be 500 by 500 pixels and I want to unlink the corner radius and enter 180 for the upper right and 180 for the lower left, and then create the shape. Now let's modify the fill color. I'm going to use the fill swatch on the Appearance panel where I can select another color, although we could also double click on the thumbnail for the rectangle and then select another color. And now I want to draw another shape, but the attributes that get assigned to the next shape that you draw can be a little tricky. If I have a shape layer targeted and I drag out another shape, I'm going to get the fill and stroke and all of the attributes from the options bar. If however, I select a non-shape layer, you'll notice that in the options bar, the values are going to change back to the last time I set them in the options bar. So now when I drag out a shape, I'll get the orange that we chose before. So it can be a little confusing. You just have to know what kind of layer you're on, or look at the options bar to see the attributes that you're going to get. Alright, I'm going to delete those two rectangles, so we're just left with the one. And let's switch to the ellipse tool. Here, I'll start dragging out an ellipse and then hold down the Shift key so that I get a circle and I want it at a specific size. So I'll use the properties panel and just type in 850 by 850. Then I'll use the fill to just select a different color. Now, there's also a triangle shape tool that we can use, but if I want a little more flexibility, I might want to choose the polygon tool. If I set the polygon tool to have three sides, then certainly we can drag out a triangle, but we can also change the number of sides after the fact. Now I can't change it using the options bar. If I change it up here, that's just going to set the options for the next shape that I draw. Instead, I would want to use the properties panel and increase the number of sides to four. Alright, I want to distort this polygon, but I also want to make sure that it is a specific size. So I'm going to type in 1100 for the width, making sure that it is unlinked from the height, and then type in 1100 for the height as well. So now we have a square, but I want to round the sides of the squares, so I'm going to enter in 70 as my corner radius, and then I'll enter in 75% for the star attribute. But I get a corner point here and I want to round this as well. So I'm going to choose the smooth star indents. Now if that's not showing, you'll want to click on the three dots there and then enable smooth star indents. Now, when we made those changes, it did slightly change the size, so let's type in 1100 again for both the width and the height. So let's make sure that those are set to 1100 for the width and 1100 for the height. At the bottom of the layers panel, I have a layer group one. If we show the disclosure triangle to reveal the other layers and then Option + click on the eye icon next to the shape examples, you can see that I've created a number of additional shapes using the polygon tool that you can use as a reference. So it'll tell you how many sides there are, and then whether or not I have rounded corners or an indent and whether or not I have smoothed those. So hopefully that will be helpful. I'm going to Option + click again on the eye icon or Alt + click on Windows in order to hide that layer, and then just close that group for now. There's also a line tool, so we can select that from the shape tools. Again, we want to set up our attributes using the options bar. So here if I wanted to increase the weight, I would enter a value. Then we can drag out our line, and again, if I want to make changes to it, I'm not going to use the options bar, but instead, I'll come over to the properties panel and then we can enter in say 45 instead. We can also add arrowheads to our lines. We can use the gear icon and then check to enable them at the start or at the end. But again, this would be setting up the arrowheads for the next time that you draw a line. They won't appear on the line that you've already drawn. If we ever want to hide the interface, we can use Command + H on Mac, Control + H on Windows, sometimes that lets us see the shape better. I'll go ahead and use Command + H again in order to show the interface, and we don't really need this line, so I'm going to tap the Delete key in order to delete it. For now, I'll choose File and then Save As. I'm going to append this with an _01, saving it into the Shape Layers folder as a layered Photoshop document.

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