From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Using the shape tools - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

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Using the shape tools

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- [Narrator] The shape tools in Photoshop can create shapes that are either pixel-based or vector-based. And 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, because they're really bezier paths, you can transform them as large or as small as you'd like as many times as you'd like, and they'll always maintain their quality. In this video, we're going to discover the large variety of different shapes that Photoshop has to offer and learn how to modify them. I'll tap the U key in order to select the shape tool. If we click and hold, you can see there are a number of different tools. We'll start with the rectangle tool ,and in the options bar, I want to make sure that I'm going to draw a shape and not just a path or pixels. Then I can choose my fill and my stroke options. Both the fill and stroke enable you to add a color swatch or fill with a gradient or fill with a pattern. If you wanted to select a color, you can click on the color icon here, and that will bring up the color picker. When I click on the stroke, you can see we get those same options, and to the right of the stroke, I can change the size of the stroke as well as the type of stroke and their options. So I can select from any of these presets or I can click More Options in order to create my own dashed line. I can change alignment, the caps and the corners here, or in this dialogue, and I can save a preset if I want to. For now, I'll click Cancel, and it'll just return to that plain-looking stroke. I'll take off the stroke for now by just assigning the no stroke option. All right. If I know the exact size of the shape that I want, I can enter in the width and height, or I can just click in the image area and then define the size of the rectangle that I want. We can see in the layers panel that Photoshop has created a shape layer and placed this shape on it. On screen, we can see we have a number of different controls. I can resize this as well as rotate it. Now, as I position my cursor outside of this shape, it's going to rotate from the center, and you can see the reference point because in a previous video I chose Photoshop and then Preferences and then Tools. And I showed the reference point when using Free Transform. If I want to transform or rotate around a different point in the image, I can just drag this. And now when I rotate, it's going to rotate around that point instead. We also have the on-canvas corner radius controls. So if I want to change this to have nice round corners, I can just click and drag. Now by default, they're all linked, but if I hold down the Option key on the Mac or the Alt key on Windows and drag, then I can separate that link and change each one independently. On the Properties panel, we have many of these same options, so I can change the width and height as well as the angle. In fact, here, I'll just remove it. We can also flip our shapes, change different appearance options, including those rounded rectangles. One thing to point out is that this is a live shape. And as long as I just scale it or rotate it, it will remain a live shape. But if I do go to Free Transform, because I want to scale or skew or distort it, then I will lose those live shape properties such as the corner radius. All right, I'm going to switch to the ellipse shape tool and I'm going to actually drag it out in the image area. So as I click and drag, you'll notice that it behaves very similar to the marquee tool. And many of the keyboard shortcuts are the same. If I wanted to constrain it to a circle, I would hold down the Shift key, and it drags from the upper left corner by default. But if I wanted to hold down the Option key, now I can drag it out from the center. If I need to reposition it, I can hold down the space bar and then reposition that point of origin. And now I'll just drag it a little larger and release the cursor. And we can see that the layers panel has a new layer for the second shape. All right, let's move to the new triangle tool. Here, I can click and drag out a triangle and I can use those same onscreen controls if I want to resize the shape or if I wanted to rotate the shape. However, the triangle is limited to one corner radius. So if I repositioned this to round the corners, they're all going to be linked, and you can't just unlink one of them. All right, let's hide these three layers in the layers panel by just toggling off the visibility by clicking on the eye icon. And now I'll shift to the polygon tool. So by default, when I click and drag out, it will have five different sides. However, I can control all sorts of options again using the properties panel. So I'll scroll down and we can increase the number of sides. We can also change the corner radius. In this case, I'm going to increase a large value of maybe 120, and I'll change these star attributes by lowering this down to about 60%. And then if I wanted to have smooth star indents, I can enable that. Now you might not be seeing that by default, you'll have to click the three dots icon here in order to show it. All right, I'm going to hide this layer as well as layer one. So this document has a number of different shape layers that I've already created using that polygon tool. And each one of them has the settings that I used to create it. So be sure to check those out. 'Cause as you can see, the polygon tool can make a lot of different shapes. All right, let's take a look at the line tool. I'll select it from the shapes. And the line tool doesn't have a fill. It's actually two points with a stroke in between. So I'll click on the stroke option, and let's give it a stroke of purple and then I'll enter in maybe 50 points and then click and drag in the image area. If I hold down the Shift key, that'll constrain it to a horizontal line. We can also add arrowheads if we want to by selecting the gear icon, adding them either at the start or at the end. I'll go ahead and increase the width to maybe 20 pixels. And now when I click and drag out, we'll see that arrowhead. We can use Command + H at any time or Control + H on windows to hide the paths when we're using the shape tools. All right, finally, let's take a look at the custom shape tool. Now, also like the tool, but this line is targeted in the layers panel. So if I were to make any changes to the fill or the stroke, it's going to change this one, because even though it's hidden, it's still the active layer. So I'll choose the Select menu and then Deselect Layers. Now I can set up my custom shape tool. I want it to have that blue fill and no stroke. And then from the shape preset picker, I can select from any number of shapes and click and drag in the image area in order to add the shape to the document. If you're looking for additional shapes, then be sure to show the shape panel, use the flyout menu, and choose Legacy Shapes and More. Use the disclosure triangle in order to view all of the different folders and all of the different options inside of them. Now, if you're looking for a specific shape, for example, you might be looking for a flower, go ahead and type that in the search area. And when you find what you're looking for, you can drag and drop it into the image area. I'll reposition that and tap Enter to apply the transformation. So as you can see, the shape tool is very flexible when you want to create re-editable, scalable vector shapes in Photoshop. The next time you need to work with shapes in Photoshop, be sure to check out the re-editable, scalable vector shape tools.

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