From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Modify, duplicate, and use custom shapes - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Modify, duplicate, and use custom shapes

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- [Instructor] Now that we have our shapes, let's arrange them to create our design. I'm going to change the stacking order of the shapes so that the polygon is at the bottom and then the ellipse and then the rectangle is at the top. I'm going to select all of my shape layers, tap the V key to select the move tool, and then I'm going to center align them both horizontally as well as vertically. To make it easier to see, I'm going to double click on the thumbnail for the ellipse layer, and let's just change that color. Next, we need to talk about changing shape attributes. So another way besides the options bar or the properties panel, or by double clicking on a shape to change color is by using the different presets panels, which I find much more productive when working with a lot of shapes. I'm going to select the polygon shape, and from the swatches panel, I can just drag and drop a color onto the shape layer, or if it's easier and you don't want to find the shape layer in the layers panel, you can drag and drop directly on the shape in the image area. Here, I want to apply white to the ellipse, but it's not targeted in the layers panel. However, you don't need to target it if you're dragging and dropping onto a layer. And this isn't limited to the swatches, I can drag any of my gradients onto a layer, either in the layers panel or in the image area. All right, that's a bit much, so I'm going to return to my swatches and just drag out this purple. If you're working with a lot of shapes, you can also right click on any shape layer and copy the shape attributes. Then select any number of additional layers and paste those shape attributes. Photoshop also ships with a number of custom shapes. If I select the custom shape tool, we can either select the shape from the properties panel or from the shapes preset panel. Now, I have a lot of shapes here because I've loaded the legacy shapes by using the fly out menu and choosing legacy shapes and more. If you're looking for a specific shape and you know the name of the shape, you could always type that in, like if you were looking for a flower. In this case, the flower that I'm actually looking for doesn't seem to have a flower tag, so I'm going to remove that, and then under the default flowers, I'm going to use this shape right here. If I drag and drop the shape into the white area, you'll notice that my rectangle one layer is targeted, but when I release the cursor, it drops it above the patterned canvas. It then wants me to resize it, and I can click done, but I'm going to delete that because I want the flower to appear above the rectangle one layer. So I'll return to shapes and drag and drop it here on top of this shape, and Photoshop will automatically add it above that layer. All right, let's make this a little bit smaller. I'm going to need to hold down the shift key to constrain the proportions and then resize that. I'll also just zoom in, and then we can click done to place that, but it has the same fill, so I'll click and change that to white. Then in order to make sure that the shape is also centered, let's just select all of our shape layers, and with the move tool targeted, I'll click to align them both center aligned. All right, I'm going to group all of these shapes into a single group. I can use the keyboard shortcut, command G on Mac, control G on Windows, or just drag them down to the folder icon in order to group them. Then I'll zoom out using command zero, and with the move tool targeted, I'll reposition the group. I want this a little bit larger, so I'll choose edit, and then free transform. Because I have the group selected, all of the layers will be transformed as one and because they're vectors, it doesn't matter how many times I transform these, they're not going to lose any quality. All right, to create a duplicate of the group, I'll use command J Mac, control J on Windows, and then use the move tool in order to reposition that. Then I can select both of the groups in a layers panel and use command J again to duplicate them and then move them down. If I want to reposition all four of the groups, I'll select them all and then reposition them in the image area. Finally, I want to flip two of the rectangles, but I don't really want to hunt through my layers panel in order to find them. So I'll tap the V key to select the move tool, and we can either turn on auto select layer, or I can just right click and choose rectangle one in order to select it, then use command T to free transform it and use the contextual task bar in order to flip it. I'll choose done, and then right click down here, select rectangle one, use command T or Control T in order to transform that and flip that as well. Excellent, let's choose file and then save as. I'll append this with an 02, saving it into the Shape Layers folder as a layered Photoshop document.

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