Transcripts
1. Curly Frames and Text Boxes in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, curly bracket frames and text boxes in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating curly bracket frames in Photoshop. As we do this, we're going to create our frames as custom shapes that we can re-use anytime we want to in Photoshop. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who, just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating curly frames in Photoshop.
2. Curly Frames - Part 1: To create our curly bracket frame, we'll need a new document. I'm making one 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixel RGB color. I'm actually going to use a white background so we can see it as we work and I'll click Okay. Now, I'm going to use a type character for my curly bracket. This is going to give me a starting point on this shape. I have a class that shows you how to do the same thing in Illustrator. I'm going to give you a link to that in the class project area so that if you're interested in doing this in Illustrator, you can do so. Now I've already scoped out a font called Lucida Fax Regular, I'll give you a download link for that as well, 1,000 points. I'm just going to click here and type a open bracket. We're just going to look at this character and see what makes it a good character to use. Well, it's sort of a good character, it's not the best actually but I want to show you how you could get around this. What we're looking for in a character is, we're looking for this point up here and this point up here to be on the same plane. We don't want an italic character for example. We also want a pointy end. Now this has got a flat end here, but we can use this pointy end. If I use this point end what I'm looking at is my shape is going to be the inside of this font character. When you're looking through your fonts, you're going to find plenty of fonts that you have on your computer that are going to work just like this. This is not a good one, it's too italic. The points here on this one at the top and bottom aren't in the same vertical plane. This one would be fine, we'd use the inside of it. Let's see here. This one, not good, it's got a good pointy inside that we could use but again, it's too italic. Just look through your fonts. This one would be better if it was boxy at the ends. This one is too ragged. Again, better if it was boxy at the end. The inside of this one would be good. The inside of this one will be good except it's a bit plane of a shape. This one, we could use the outside, that would be fine and would actually give us a better shape than the inside. But I'm going to stick with Lucida Fax Regular, and I'm going to go for the inside shape. Now that we've got our bracket here, what we need to do is to turn our type into outline. I'm going to Layers palette, and I'm just going to right-click on this layer. I'm not right-clicking on the thumbnail, just right-clicking on the layer itself. I need to create a work path. What that does is it shows me all the little anchor points that I'm making this shape. We're going to zoom in here a bit. What we want to do is we want to start taking out the points on the outside part of the curve. We want to get rid of the bit we don't want, and we don't want the outside curve, but we do want the inside curve. I'm going to the Direct Selection Tool. It shares a toolbar position with the Path Selection Tool, it's the white arrow key that we're going to be working with. I'm going to start by selecting over the anchor points I want to get rid of, and select over one and delete it. Now I can take a few at a time, provided I select over these anchor points and do not destroy this inside line. But destroy the inside line, all bets are off you're going to have to go back undo what you've done, and go and start over again. I'm just going to continue to delete all the anchor points down the outside of this line because I've determined that it's the inside that I want to keep. Just very carefully doing this. Now I've got the inside line, but I seem to still have my text character. Well, that's because this is on this layer here. I'm just going to delete that layer. I don't need the black shape anymore, that text character anymore. This is what I'm interested in, this is what it's all about. Now, at this point what I want to do is to select the entire path. I'm going to the Path Selection Tool and I'm going to select over the entire path, I want to make a duplicate of it, Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste. It's now selected, so I want to rotate it. Edit and then Transform Path. Now, ideally I want to rotate it 90 degrees clockwise, but Photoshop's not playing nice with me right now. So let's just go to rotate. Because that's going to give me these tools up here, and up here I can rotate it 90 degrees. I'm just going to do that and click the Check Mark. While it's still selected, I'm going to move it up here, so it's right next to the starting version. Now, I'm going to the Paths palette here. If you can't see the Paths palette, choose Window and then Paths to display it. You can see that we've got our two shapes here, both on the work path. This is really important. I'm going back to my Path Selection Tool, making sure that I'm working with this black arrow and I'm going to select over both of these shapes. Now I've got both selected, Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste. I want to rotate these two, Edit, Transform Path. Well again, I can't flip it but I can rotate it. Let's go to Rotate, and again, let's rotate it. But this time we're going to rotate it through 180 degrees because I want it to be down here. I'll click the Check Mark. While I've got these two parts of the path selected and not the other two parts, I'm just going to move it into position. I just want it lined up pretty much like this. There's a very small gap between these two ends. Now, you can close the gap up a little bit if you like, but it might be easier, particularly when you're starting out with the Pen Tool if you leave the gap to be a reasonable size. Next up we're going to just zoom in here. This is what our path is. If we were to create a shape like this, you'd say that it would be filled in funny ways. What we want is a shape that would be filled entirely with color. What we have to do is to join these paths together, and we do that with the Pen Tool. I'm just going to the Pen Tool, just going to click on this point here, and I'm going to click on the end point to this other line. That just joins it together. You'll see in the Paths palette here, that we're getting visual feedback that these shapes have been joined together. I'm going to hold the Space bar down now and just roll across to the next one. I'm going to click here on this path, and I'm going to click here on this path. You'll see a little indicator at the bottom of your mouse pointer that's telling you that you pretty much over the top of the end of that path and that you're going to join up perfectly. You can see that we're joined up perfectly, but in actual fact we know that we haven't joined these up perfectly. You really will want to finish the job and go to the other two points that are still not joined up and just complete those. Now I'm going to zoom back out with Control or Command + 0. What I have here is a path, and this is a really nice path. We've taken a bit of effort to create this path. What we're going to do now is we're going to save it so that we can use it anytime in Photoshop. To do that, we're going to choose Edit, and Define Custom Shape. We're going to call this curly frame and click Okay. Having done that, we can actually delete our work path. We don't need it any longer, because this shape is now a built-in shape in Photoshop. In the next video, we're going to see how we would go and create an element using this shape.
3. Curly Frames - Part 2: The shape that we've just created is going to be available in Photoshop anytime we want to use it. So it's available for any document. While I say that it can actually be lost, it will be lost if you reset your Photoshop preferences, it will be lost if you upgrade your Photoshop, it won't be in the collection. So what you want to do probably having gone to the trouble of creating the shape, is to save it permanently. You do this by choosing edit and then presets and go to your preset manager. The preset manager gives you access to a whole heap of things that you might have added to Photoshop such as brushes or gradients or styles or patterns. In this case, we're concerned with custom shapes. So I'm going to go to the very end of my custom shapes panel. Here is the shape we just created and I have it selected. I'm going to choose save set. I'm going to call this bracket shape and click "save". Now it's saved as a Photoshop shape file, so it's external to Photoshop. It's not being saved inside Photoshop. It's actually being written to an external file from which I could recover it at anytime if I needed to, because it's still in my shapes collection, but now it's also permanently stored. Now to use your shape in a document, you'll go to the custom shapes tool. So I'm going click on the custom shapes tool and I open my custom shape list and I'm going to select the very last shape because that's the one we just created. Now, in all versions of Photoshop, you've got a choice as to what you're going to make. You can make a path as you draw it out, but we don't need to do that. You can make it filled pixels. So it would be a filled shape filled with the current foreground color. We'd need to make a color selection here because white on white wouldn't be a particularly good choice. We'd also probably want to add a new layer so that we put our shape on a layer independent of the background so that we could change the background if we wanted to later on. We can also create it as a shape. In Photoshop CS6 and later creating it as a shape allows us to choose a fill and a stroke. So I'm going to do the Photoshop CS6 version first. I've already got a fill color and stroke color selected, but you just open this up and choose your fill and your stroke color. I've chosen a 10 pixel stroke. I'm just going to hold the shift key as I drag out my shape, holding the shift key can constraint it to its original proportions. If I don't hold the shift key, I can end up with something like this or something like this. If that's the shape you want, that's fine. But if you want it to be a regular shape, nicely presented the way you created it in the first place, hold shift as you draw it. Here is my shape, just centering it up on the airport. Now this is Photoshop CS6 and later you get these advanced tools. Let's just turn this off and let's go and see what we would do to get the same sort of effect in Photoshop CS5 and earlier. I'm going to do is again, go to the shape tool, choose custom shapes, make sure that I have this shape that I want to create. I can create it as a shape, but it won't have a stroke on it. So let's just mimic the Photoshop CS5 version and I'm going to choose a color here. So we're actually going to prove that the foreground color is what it's going to be filled with. You can say that as soon as I change my foreground color, that's what it's going to be filled with. We're just going to drag out holding the shift key we do so. So we get the same shape, but we're not getting the nice stroke edge. Well, we can add a stroke edge using the stroke options on the last on panel. So I'm going click add layer style. I'm going click stroke. Now with the strike, you'll need to select the color that you want to make your stroked edge. So I'm just going to choose a blue color here. I'm going to increase the size. As soon as I do, you can see that we're starting to set in the shape. The downside of this is that Photoshop is rounding off the edges. So we've lost the nice pointy bits, if you like, but that's because the position of this stroke is center. If I add it to the inside, I'm going to enforce these pointy edges. So you'll just want to add your stroke to the inside. I'm going to make it maybe about 30 points. Well, that was a 130, so let's settle for 30. I'll click "okay". So that's the way you would create something similar in Photoshop CS5 and earlier, just create a filled shape and then go and add your stroke using the layer style options in Photoshop, CS6 and later, you can do this all with the one custom shape tool.
4. Curly Frames - Part 3: To finish upper design, you may want to do something such as add some lines. I'm going to the pen tool and I'm going to a new empty layer, so I can add my pen line here. I'm going to click to start my line and I'm going to Shift-click to finish it. If I use click and Shift-click, I'm dragging out a perfectly horizontal line. I'm just going to press the escape key to stop the pen tool from drawing. I'm going to the path selection tool, I'm going to select on my shape. Now I want to apply a stroke to it. In Photoshop CS6 and later, this is how I'm going to do it. Selecting over the line with the path selection tool, I'm going to turn off the fill and I'm going to add a stroke. I'm just going to add my green color back in here. But instead of it being a filled line, I want a dotted line. I'm just going to open up this list here, which gives me options for the stroke. I'm just going to make it a dotted line. Now if I want my dots to be bigger, I'm just going to increase my pixel weight of the stroke. I'm actually going to make this 20. When I tab away, you'll see the dots are bigger. If I wanted the dots to be further apart, I'm going to open up this drop down list, click more options, and I'm going to increase the gap. I'm going to increase the gap here to 10 and you can see it's much, much bigger. Well, I actually think that two was just fine. Just going to leave it at two and click Okay. I'm now going to select just the rectangle marquee tool just so that I can deselect this line. I have this on a shape layer here, so what I'm going to do is select it and choose layer, new, shape layer via Copy. Now I'm going to choose edit and then free transform. What I want to do is I want to move this down. I'm going here to the y-value and I want to move this down a fairway. At the moment is at 538. I'm going to make this 738 because that's going to move it down to a 100 pixels. If you don't want it quite so far, use a different value and you click the checkmark. Now immediately, I'm going to hold Alt, Control Shift. That's Option Command, Shift, on the Mac and press the letter T. I'm going to do that a few times until I repeat transform this shape, so that I have a number of lines in the document. That's a nice and easy way to create the lines in Photoshop CS6 and later. Let's go and see how we do this in Photoshop CS5 and earlier. I've reopened this document here in Photoshop CS5, just so that you can see that I'm working without the tools that I'm familiar with in Photoshop CS6 and later. I have my shape here. I'm just turning off everything that I created in the other video. I'm going to the very top layer here. I'm going to add a new layer that we can work on. We're going to see how we would create the dotted line in this version of Photoshop. I'm going again to the pen tool then click on the pen tool. I'm working on paths here. I've got this middle icon here selected. I'm just going to click once where I want my line to start. I'm going to hold the shift key and click to finish the line. Holding the shift key just make sure I make a line that is perfectly horizontal. I'll press Escape to turn the pen tool off at this point. I'm now going to the past selection tool here there's black arrow. I'm going to select either my path. I'm going to the brushes tool. What I want to do is to select a brush to stroke this line with. What I want is a brush that has a hard edge. This one here, for example, has a very hard edge. I'm just going to click away. Next up I want the brush panel. I'm going to window and then brush. This is going to let me set up my brush. Here is my hard 20 pixel brush. I think 20 pixels is going to be fine. But you can see that it's going to paint along the line as a straight line. I want to increase the spacing to make the spacing for the dots across my line. When I'm happy with that, I can just close up that brushes panel. I'm going now to the paths panel because this is a path. I'm going to click on the path and down here at the very bottom is an option which is stroke path with brush. I've got my green color already selected, but I could just go here and select any color to use. But I'm going to use that green. I'm just going to click once on this icon to stroke the path with my brush. What that does is it just adds the dots to my path. Let's go back to my layer. I'm going to click away from this shape. In the path's palette, I actually just want to get rid of this work path as well. I'm just going to drag and drop that onto the trash can because we don't need it any longer. In the layers palette with this dotted line layer selected, I'm going to choose layer, new, layer via copy. Then I'm going to select the layer contents. I'm going to choose edit, free transform, and up here I can read off the y value. At the moment this line is at 434.50. Well, I'm just going to add 200 to that. I'm going to move this one to 634.50, but you can move it wherever you like. I'm just going to click the checkmark. I did this of course, using the y value because that just pushes it down the document. When I click the checkmark, the very next thing I'm going to do is hold down Control, Alt and shift Command Option Shift on the Mac and just press the letter T. Every time I do that it just duplicates that line. When I'm done, I can just click away. Just choose the circular marquee or the rectangular marquee tool to deselect what you're working with. Here is the resulting shape created this time using the tools in Photoshop CS5 and earlier just in case you don't have access to those CS6 tools. Your project for this class will be to create your own curly bracket frame shapes, save it as a shape, and then go ahead and use it to create an element in Photoshop. Post the finished project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned something about creating shapes in Photoshop and also how to manipulate paths because that's a handy tool to know how to use. As you're working through these videos, you might have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. Recommendations like this help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Photoshop. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
5. Curly Frames - Bonus video: I thought it would be a good idea to add an additional short video to this class because of one of my student's projects. This is Karina's project and what she's done really interestingly is she's filled her shape with a pattern, and I'm going to show you how you might do this. Now to this end, I've downloaded a set of patterns called grandma's flowers. I'm going to give you the download link in case you want to download this and use it. What you're going to do is download these set of patterns and then go to your downloads folder and just extract the contents of that file, and you'll have in there PAT file. With Photoshop open, you can just double-click on this PAT fall to install those patterns inside Photoshop and now let's go and use them to fill a shape. I'm going to create a new document, it's just going to be 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels RGB color mode. For convenience, I'm just going to fill it with a white background, I'll click "Okay". I'm going through the custom shape tool and I'm going to make sure that I have selected the last shape, which has the shape that we've created in this class. I'm going to make sure that of the three options here, I'm using shape and I'm going to set it to have a fill color but no stroke. In earlier versions of Photoshop when you don't have these options, that's fine. Just set a fill color of your choice because all we're going to use right now is the fill, you don't want to stroke. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you can't add a stroke this way anyway. I'm just going to hold "Shift" as I drag out my shape and place that approximately where I wanted and I'll let go. This is giving me a filled shape. Now, I'm going to the last pallet so we can just see what we've got. We've got a white background, and a filled shape. Next we'll choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern. I'm going to click "Okay". The last four patterns are the ones that you just installed from those grandma's flowers, or you can use any pattern of your choice. I'm just choosing this one. We have a pattern on top of a shape. What we can do is we can clip the pattern to the shape below, with the pattern layer selected, we'll choose layer and then create clipping mask. Now we have a pattern clicked to the shape of our curly bracket frame. But this would look better with a dividing edge around it. We're going to select again on shape layer and we're going to the fx icon and click "Stroke". This allows us to apply a stroke to our shape. I've got it set to inside so I get the nice sharper edges. I can define its width by just adjusting the size value here and I can set a color will have already selected the color I want to use, but you could click on the color option here and then just sample a color from your graphic. Here I'm just selecting a color from the pattern, and I'll click "Okay" and then "Okay" again. Of course if we wanted to add text to our graphic, we could just add text to a new layer. But I thought it was such a good idea of Karina's that it was worth creating an extra video just to show you how you might achieve this effect yourself.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
