Make & Sell a Shapes Collection in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Make and Sell Custom Shapes for Photoshop Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class: make and sell a shapes collection 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 going to look at creating shapes in Photoshop that you can either sell online or give away to your blog readers. Now you're going to learn a number of ways to make these shapes. We're going to start by making our own shapes from scratch. I'll show you how to borrow designs from copyright-free art and photos., and if you have access to it, how to harness the power of Illustrator to help you edit and even create shapes for Photoshop. Even if you've never used Illustrator before, I'm going to show you quickly and easily how you can use it to help with shapes that you're making in Photoshop. Now when we've done looking at the techniques for making shapes, I'm going to show you how to make your own marketing materials and how to assemble your shapes into a file that you can then deliver to your clients or to your blog readers. Now as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class and learning from it, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend this class, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying it. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making shapes in Photoshop to sell or give away. 2. Pt 1 Make shapes from Existing Shapes: We're going to start by making shapes inside Photoshop with Photoshop's own tools. I'm going to click "Create New". I'm just going to create a document that's 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels in size. The color mode doesn't matter because shapes are just paths, they have no color associated with them. I'll click "Create". Now the first shape that I'm going to create is a moon-shape. We're going to open up my layers palette because I have a background layer here. I'm going to create my shape using existing shapes that exist inside Photoshop, so I'm going to the Ellipse tool. I'm going to make sure that I have a fill showing so that my shape can be seen. It's going to be easier to work with, and I'm making sure that I'm working on shape. You've got three options here, shape, path, and pixels. We're going to do shape. In earlier versions of Photoshop there were just indicators there that you could choose from. I'm going to start by holding down the Shift key and just drawing a filled shape, and that goes onto its own layer. I'm going to add another layer to this document, because I want a second shape. I'm going to select a different color for this one, the colors are only here for my own reference right now. Now I'm going to shift drag a second shape. The shape tool to down this end of the panel, so I'm going to select the Path Selection Tool, which is a shape tool for working with paths, and I'm just going to move my shape into position because what I'm interested in, is this orange bit. What it is, is the blue bit taken away from the orange bit. Let's just open up the paths panel here. When I have the blue shape selected, I have this ellipse shape. When I have the oranges shapes selected, I have a different path entirely. What we're going to do, is we're going to do some mathematics over here in the paths panel. I'm going to select my blue shape with the path selection tool, and I'm going to choose edit, cut. Now I'm going to choose my second ellipse, and I'm going to click on it so it is selected. I'm going to make sure that it's targeted here in the paths panel. I'm going to choose edit, paste. Then paste my second shape right on top of my first. The mathematics right now, is that these have been added together. But if without making any changes to what I have selected here, I go up to this indicator here, I have some options for how my shapes are going to interact with each other. At the moment as we saw it, it's on combined, that's what we're seeing here in the path panel. The path panels is going to tell us the truth about really what's going on here. If I click "Subtract front shape", this looks like it's going to give me the moon-shaped that I came to get. But let's have a look what else is available. There's intersect shape areas, which is a bit in the middle of the two shapes. There's exclude overlapping shapes, which excludes where these shapes overlap, and just gives you the area outside that. Now at this stage you don't want to choose merge shape components, because that's actually going to fix in place whatever it is you have selected here. We already decided that we want subtract front shape, so we'll select subtract front shape, check that what we're saying here is what we want, and now we'll go to merge shape components. What that does, is it sets our choice in concrete. I'm going to click "Yes" to turn it from a live shape into a regular path, and this is what we're left with. This is our moon-shape. This is exactly what I want. With my shapes selected, I'm going to make a custom shape out of it, a shape that is stored inside Photoshop in such a way as we can share it with others. We can also use it at anytime in the future, and we do that by choosing edit, define custom shape. I'm going to call this moon. I'll click "Okay". Now we can test that, we can get rid of this layer so we have an empty document. We'll go to the custom shape tool, and I'll go to the fly-out panel here, and the very last shape in this shape collection is going to be the one that we just created. We have a blue fill already selected, so I'm going to hold the shift key, so that I can constrain it to its original proportions, as I draw it out in my document. There's one way of creating shapes here in Photoshop. 3. Pt 2 Make Solid and Hollow Shapes with the pen tool: I'm back here now working in the same document as I was working in before, but you could open a new document. It doesn't really matter what you're working in, but you'll notice that my last panel is empty, there's only the background layer, and there's nothing in my Path palette. Going to bring my Path pellet across here because it really does help when you're making shapes here in Photoshop to be able to see your paths palette. Now another way of making shapes in Photoshop is to actually draw them yourself using a tool such as the Pen tool. I'm going to start with the Pen tool here, and I'm going to draw a heart shape. I'm going to start where the bend is at the top of the heart, and I'm going to head off in the direction that I want my line to go, and I want my line to go up and around here. Now I have what's called Rubber Band turned on, that's an option here in the Path options, turning rubber band on is quite handy because it means that you can see where you're going. Let's head out over here, and I'm going to put an anchor point in about here, I'll click and drag in the direction I'm headed in, which is towards the middle bottom of the document. Now this is going to be a sort of folk art shaped heart, so I'm not concerned with it being symmetrical. I'll click down here to anchor the bottom point, now because this is going to be a point, I don't want to click and drag, I'm just going to click. I'll click and drag up here so I can continue up the curve of my heart, and then I'm going to come all the way back into here, and I'm going to finish off at this point. Now as you can see, my line is about to take off and bend in totally the wrong direction, but that's just fine because I'm just going to click here and then immediately I'll go over here to the direct selection tool, and just target this point. The problem with this point is that it's handles are going through it in a straight line, and that's how handles work in Photoshop. They work as a teeter-totter, well, I don't want them to teeter-totter this point because I want this handle here to be in this direction, but I want this one to be up here. So I have to break the join if you like, the way we break it, is you hover over this handle that you want to break and spin around, and hold down the Alt or Option key, and you'll see this little plus sign when you click on the handle, and that's telling you that the handle is about to come with you. I've still got the Alt or Option key press down, and that's really important because if I let it go, the teeter-totter thing happens again, so I'm holding Alt or Option, swinging my handle around, and when I get it to where I want it to be, then I'm going to let go the left mouse button and then the Alt or Option key, and the teeter-totter effect is in place. Now that I've broken those handles, they're going to be fine, I can move either of them without holding down the Alt or Option key. You can't actually stick them back together again, they're not going to ever stick back together again, these two handles are now broken. Now any one of these other handles, I'm just going to make my folk art shaped heart, It's going to be a little bit, and very deliberately, not symmetrical. Down here in the Paths palette, we're seeing what our heart is going to look like, sometimes you might want to adjust it slightly just given what you're seeing in the Paths palette. Now at any point if you are shape disappears like mine has just disappeared, It should be still in the work path, and if you just target the work path it will come back, if you click away from it, it'll disappear. I now have my Path here, It's a work path, I'm going to select the path with the Path Selection tool, and I can make this a shape in Photoshop. I'll choose Edit, Define Custom Shape, you'll see that it's going to be a filled heart. This shape is exactly the same look as the one in the Path palate, It's just that we're seeing white for the area that's going to be filled in the Paths palette, and in the defined customs shaped area here, we'll see black for the area that's going to be filled, I'm just going to call this heart. But what if I wanted a heart shape that was just lines and not the actual heart that I've got showing here? Well, let's see how we do that. We're going to have to keep this Path because whenever I click away from this path it totally disappears, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag it onto the new icon. We're saving it as a path. I'm also going to make a copy of it, so I'm going to grab it and do edit copy. Now I'm going to add another new path and I'm going to target this new path here, and I'm going to choose Edit Paste. Now I have the same path twice, but this one, I'm going to make a bit smaller. I'm going to target it with the move tool, I'll choose Edit for a transform pass so that I can get the handles to show, and I'm just going to shrink this path size a little bit. So it's a little bit smaller than the one above, and the same process as we did before. We're going to select the path and we're going to choose Edit Cut. We're going to select the path that we want to cut it from, and we're going to choose Edit, Paste. Now we've got two paths here and we need to make sure that the area in white is the area that we're going to be left with later on, and if we need to make alterations to it, now is the time to do it. I might want to make it a slightly different shape, thinking about the white area as being the area that I'm going to make as my custom shape. I'm looking here at the shape I'm creating, and when I'm happy with that, I'll go back to the Path Selection Tool and I'm going to select over everything, because this is going to be my path. I'll click here and say that what we're choosing here is exclude overlapping shapes. So that worked just perfectly, but you might have some other options selected, in which case you just got to work around what's available in these four options here, and choose the one you want to use. Well, the exclude is what I need to use here, so now I'm going to click here on Merge Shape components because that makes that a single shape. This is now a shape that I can save, Edit, Define Custom shape, you can see this time my heart is going to be the area that's in black, and it's going to have a hollow in the middle, I'm going to call this heart too. So we're ready to try it out, we'll delete it, we've got empty paths here, that's just fine, we'll go to the Customs Shape Tool, our path is going to be the last one. Here is the hollow heart, have it targeted, I'll hold the Shift key down as I draw it to constrain it to its original proportions, and it's drawing and working just perfectly here in Photoshop. 4. Pt 3 Curly Bracket Shapes: One of the types of shapes that's really popular for use on invitations, and also for scrapbookers is what I like to call curly brackets shapes. We're going to create one now, and we're going to do that starting with the Type Tool. Now, I already have quite a large font size selected. My document is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, and my font is about 450 points tall. I'm using AvantGarde-Book because I know it has a really good curly bracket shape. But you could use any font that you like. What you want to do is make sure that your curly bracket looks really nice because that's going to form the shape that we're actually going to create. I found AvantGarde-Book a nice sort of upright shape, and I'm looking at the outside. I'm looking at this edge of the font here. That's the area that I'm going to use. Now, it's a little bit small right now, so I'm going to go and grab hold of its corner handle, and I'll just drag down. I'll hold the Shift key then as I do that so that it's constrained to its regular proportions. What I'm going to do is to create a four-sided object that has this sort of curly shape on all four sides. Right now this is a type object, so we need to convert it. Let's go to the last pellets so we can say what's happening here. If I right-click a "Type Object," there is the option to convert it to a shape, or to convert it to a work path. I'm going to convert it to a shape. I've found that with Photoshop sometimes working with shapes rather than paths is a little bit easier. We'll go to the Path Selection Tool. You can see that there's this path here. What we're going to do is start removing the things that we don't want. We can do that using the Delete Anchor Point Tool, but we can also do it using the Direct Selection Tool. What I'm going to do is just select either the inside anchor points. These blue filled ones are selected. I'll just press the Delete key to delete the ones I don't want. Now, in this case, this particular font has a couple of anchor points really close together. I'm going to leave those in place. There's one here that I've left behind, so I'm just going to get rid of it as well. I now have the anchor points that create this outside curly shape, and it's filled, and that's going to help me say how everything's going to work. We'll also keep an eye on the past pallet as we work. Now this is my shape path. What I want to do is to create a duplicate of it. I'm going to drag it onto the new path icon. I've got this one stored away, and I've got the top one selected. I'm going to press Control, or Command T just to show the transform handles. Then I'm going to hold Shift as I rotate this around. Rotates 90 degrees. Now, I'm going to take it, and move it up, so it just overlaps in the bottom corner, this bottom shape. If you create an overlap, it's going to make things join up a whole lot more easily later on. Don't try and get them to join exactly, this is much easy just to create this overlap. I'm going to click the check mark. Now I've got two pieces of my shape. I'm going to take this one, make a duplicate of it. Press Control or Command T to show the transform handles, Shift as I rotate it, so it rotates the full 90 degrees, and then I'm going to go, and place it in position. Right now it's a little hard to see where it's going to go. I'm going to confirm its position. Let's go and select both of these paths. We can just say, if it's overlapping correctly, well, it's not quite overlapping correctly, so let's go and get the Path Selection Tool. Let's go and grab just this path, and move it out just a little bit. I'm looking for this overlap. Everything's good there right now. I need one more shape, so let's go and get this shape, drag it onto the new icon, Control or Command T, hold Shift as we transform it so we can rotate it the right number of degrees, put it in position down here, click the check mark, go and grab all our shapes, and just say that everything is looking pretty good. Now we're going to go and do a cut and paste again. I'm going to select this path to start off with. I'll choose "Edit," "Cut. " I could, of course, press Control or Command X. Let's go to a shape that's adjacent to this, and let's choose "Edit," "Paste." Again, I could press Control or Command V. Here we're saying what our shape looks like, and what we're going to do is we're going to merge the shapes when they look like this. You might need to choose a different option from this drop-down list till you get what it is that you're looking for. What you're looking for is these two areas being white will combine shapes is going to do it for you. Select "Combined Shapes," and then of course you're going to go to "Merge Shape Components." Now what that's done is, it's created this shape with this little anchor point in here, and that's why we overlap them, because this is going to make things so much easier. But what we're going to do is come in here to this anchor point, and we're just going to delete it. That's going to create this really large filled shape, so we're on our way at this point. Back to the Path Selection tool, make sure our path is selected, we're going to cut it. I can do that with Control or Command X. You can also go to,"Edit," "Cut." I'm going to select one of the shapes that are adjacent to what we were just working with, and I'm going to choose Control or Command V or select "Edit," "Paste." Here we've got our filled shape. Everything's looking really good. We're going to go here, and merge the shape components. Again, we've got an anchor point in here, exactly what we wanted, because it's going to be very easy to delete this one. Going back to our Path Selection Tool, make sure our path is selected, cut it with Control or Command X, or "Edit," "Cut." Go to the next shape, select it, "Edit," "Paste," or Control or Command V. Everything's looking perfect, so we'll make sure we select over everything, and let's choose "Merge Shape Components." That gives us this shape. This shape is one of those shapes that is really popular at the moment. Now we've got our shape, we're just going to select over the path so that we've got the anchor point showing, we're ready now to create a shape from it. Edit, "Define Custom Shape," and we can just call this curly brackets, and click "okay." I'm going to press the Delete key, because I don't want any of this any longer. I don't need any of these paths because they're just empty paths, they're not doing anything. Let's go to the Customs Shape Tool. The last shape is going to be the one we just created. Select it. It's going to be filled with blue here. Hold the Shift key as I drag it out, and now we have our shape. These sort of curly bracket shapes, they're extremely popular, and they are relatively easy to create once you get into the flow of them. Consider creating them using a variety of curly bracket shapes. Every font will have a character that potentially you could use. You might put curls on either side, and a plane top. You could experiment with different versions of this, but an entire collection of these shapes would be an extremely popular giveaway, for example, for a blog. 5. Pt 4 Make a Tag Shape: Another type of shape, again popular with scrapbookers is a tag shape. Let's create a tag shape using for a start, the rectangle tool. Just going to drag out a tallish rectangle for my tag. If I want to reposition it as I'm drawing it, I'm just going to hold the space bar down, and so I can place it in position in my document. Because I'm drawing using the shape tools, we're going to end up with a shape layer here, and we're also going to have shape path. Now we're going to put a top on our tag and we can do that using the triangles. I'll go to the Polygon Tool click once in the document, I'm going to make a three-sided object and I'll just click "Okay". It's not going to be the right size, so it's best just to get it in the document and then you can start working with it. I'll press" Control "or "Command T" to bring up the transform handles. I'm going to hold shift as I rotate this around because it needs to be rotated 90 degrees. Now I am going to bring in the sides and just use the alignment tools. There are alignment indicators here in Photoshop that's going to tell you, when you've got things lined up, and it'll bring the top-down. Now, the problem with the top for me is I want it to be rounded and right now it's pointy. There's a tool over here in the Pen Tool area called Convert point Tool. This is going to convert this point from a pointy point to one with handles, so just click on it, and then drag, and you can see the handles are appearing now. If I hold the "Shift key" as I draw them, the handles are going to be perfectly horizontal, because it's going to drag out to the exact same distance from the original points. I am going to get a perfect curve here. Let's go to the path selection tool. Now, there is a possibility that if you just line these two shapes up so that they are bang on, you're going to end up with a line across the middle. To be a 100 percent sure, I'm just going to bring this down one pixel. I just press the down arrow key once, and that should be enough to make sure that they're going to overlap. With the Path selection tool selected, and this shape selected, I'm going to cut it, so I'll choose "Edit, Cut". Now I'm going to this layer here so that I can see the rectangle in the path palette, I'm going to choose "Edit, Paste". Now we've got our two shapes, with the Path selection tool I'll select either both paths, have a look in the past palette, everything's looking pretty good. I'll click here on Merge Shaped Components. I'll click "Yes", and we've ended up with a single shape, that's got a line through it., just undo that and go back and try again by knocking this top path down just a little bit, just enough to get it out of the way. Now you will have ended up probably with two anchor points here. They're just pretty much on top of each other, and honestly, I wouldn't worry about them because trying to get rid of them is probably going to be more trouble than it's worth, and the shape is going to draw really nicely anyway, but a tag should have a hole in it. Let's go and get the ellipse tool. Let's drag out a circle for the hole that goes in our tag. Now I'm going to fill this with a different color because I want to be able to say it. Now we need to cut this once we've got it implies we're going to line it up a bit better in just a minute. We're going to cut it, so I'll press "Control" or "Command X" to cut it or we could choose "Edit, Cut". We'll go and select the rectangle shape, and we're going to paste it in here with Control or Command V. Now we've got our two shapes here. Let's go to the Path selection tool and select either both paths. We want to make sure that this circle is lined up perfectly in the middle of the tag. We'll there are some alignment tools here and what we want to do is to align their horizontal centers. We'll just click " Horizontal Centers", but it's worthwhile choosing "Align To Selection" before you do, because you don't want these aligned necessarily for the Canvas, you just want the two shapes to have their horizontal centers aligned. That moved that one slightly. We'll have a look in the path palette because we want to see a hole in the middle of this shape. What we're probably going to have to do, is choose exclude overlapping shapes. That's going to remove this area from the tag shape. Once we've got that, as soon as we've got what we want to see in the path palette, and here we'll choose " Merge Shaped Components" and click "Yes" to turn it from a live shape into a regular path, and now we have I tag shape. With our path selected, we can now go and create this as a tag shape with edit, define custom shape is going to call this tag, and we'll click "Okay". To test it, just going to remove it from the document. Let's go and get the customs shaped tool, the very last shape is going to be the one we just created here is our tag, and we can just click and drag, to create it in our document. If we hold the "Shift key" as we do it, it's going to be constrained to its original proportions, but of course, there's no reason why you can't make it larger or smaller, wider or taller if you want to. 6. Pt 5 Using Copyright Free Clip Art: Another option for creating shapes is to use copyright free clip art. Now the British Library has made hundreds of thousands of photos available on Flickr. I've gone to the British Library area and I'm going to give you the link to that collection and I've gone to look for food. There are a lot of things in here that aren't food, but this is an image that captured my eye. It looked a little bit different. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a shape from it. I've already clicked on it and I was taken to this page. There's a download link here that you're going to click and you'll want to select the largest possible size probably to work with. I've chosen that and I've opened it up here in Photoshop. The first thing I'm going to do is get rid of anything that doesn't relate to this boat. I can just do that simply by cropping. But otherwise, if there were other things that were encroaching in the area that's taken up by the boat and if cropping didn't work, then I would probably use the Erase tool, something to get rid of everything I don't need. Now I want to make a selection of the boats. I'm going to the Magic Wand tool because the boat is a single color. I've got my tolerance set to 10, that's a reasonable value, I think it will work. I've got contiguous disabled because when I select the boat here, I want to select anything that is also a boat color but is somewhere else. Making a selection on the boat hasn't been a roaring success. This is not a particularly good selection. When you make selections, you really have two choices, I'm just going to undo this with Control or Command D. You can select what you want or you can select what you don't want. Let's like what I don't want, which is this outside area, that's potentially a much better selection. I'm actually going to wind up my tolerance value to 15. I'm just going to press Control or Command D to de-select my selection and let's try again. Well, at 15, I've got a really good selection, but I've selected what I don't want, not what I want. To invert this selection, I'll choose Select and then Inverse. Sometimes it's easier to select what you don't want and invert the selection than do it the other way. Now we're going to have Photoshop make the shape for us, it's going to make the path for us. You can turn a selection into a path by going to the path palette. You'll just with your selection made, you'll click here on this icon, which is make work path from selection. When I click that, Photoshop has now made a work path from my selection. Now we can go and create that as a shape by choosing Edit to find custom shape and we're going to call this boat 1. Let's go and try our boat in a new document. I'm just going to make you document, I'm going to use a 1000 by 1000 pixel document. Let's go to the custom shaped tool. Lets go and select our boat, which is going to be the very last one here and I'll hold Shift key as I drag it out to constrain its proportions. Let me just click away from it and let's have a look at what we've got. Well, there's quite a bit of this boat that's rougher than perhaps it needs to be. I'm thinking of some of these lines here that could be a little smoother. Let's go back and see if we can do something with our image. I'm going to destroy my work paths, I'm just going to delete that for now. I'm going to sample the color from the boats, I'm going to do that using the Eye Dropper tool, and that just selects this brown color. Now I can choose a brush, and I'm going to choose a circular brush with a softish edge, but I'm going to wind up the edge to about 85 percent hardness. It's a small brush, but we can adjust its size by pressing on the open and closed square bracket case. What I'm going to do is try and even out the shape of the boat, but I'm going to do it on a new layer just so that if I make a mess, I can get it back really easily. I'm going to click here with my brush inside the boat, but just over the edge and I'm going to come down here and Shift click. That's not added much, but it has smoothed out that area. I'm looking at these areas that could be pretty straightish if you like and I'm just going to see if I can improve them with a little bit of brushwork. You can always undo a brushstroke if you don't like it, so I'm just clicking and then Shift clicking. I'm going to try and keep being as true as I can to this image, but just trying to smooth out a few little bits that might look a bit better. Well, I think I'm pretty happy with this. This is the original and this is the edited version. I can now go ahead and merge this down. I'll just Right-click and choose merged down. That gives me one layer with my merged and edited image. Let's go back to the Magic Wand tool, let's click again and then let's invert this selection. Select Inverse, that creates the selection that we want. Now we're going to the Path tool and we're going to make a path from our selection. We probably got as many anchor points, but it's a simpler path this time. Let's create that as a shape and let's call this boat 2. Let's go on trial this. We'll need to select our boat, which is going to be the last one in the shapes panel. I'm using a different color this time anyway. I'm going to start dragging it out, hold the Shift key as I do and let's just click away from it and see the result. Well, this one's got a slightly better shape. It's a slightly simpler shape. I like it a bit better. You can with simple elements, now you probably don't want to be much more complex than this one because otherwise you're going to create shapes that have a whole lot of anchor points, but with simple elements like this, it's very easy to create custom shapes from them. You can do that all inside Photoshop. Now if that doesn't work in the next video, we're going to take it to Illustrator to do a clean-up in Illustrator. 7. Pt 6 Using Photos to Make Shapes: Another option for shapes is to use a photograph as a source. You could use photographs, for example, that you download from unspliced.com. Now I've already chosen one that I'm going to use, I've already downloaded it and let's open up Photoshop where I have it already open. Now for this image, I want to create a fish shape. What I'm going to do is go and select the Quick Selection Tool. I've had a look at this image and I think the Quick Selection Tool might be the best tool to use and for this, I'm just going to drag over the fish. Now, if anything gets selected that shouldn't be selected, I can just hold the Alt or Option key as I drag over it to remove it from the selection. I'm going to the Layers palette and what I want to do at this stage is I just want to check my selection. I'm going to make a mask. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you're going to have to unlock the background layer somehow, either you can drag the lock into the trash can, we could double-click on the background layer and click OK to make it a regular layer. In the most recent versions of Photoshop, you can just click on the lock icon and that will turn it into a regular layer. But you in fact don't even have to do that because you can add a mask to a background layer in the later versions of Photoshop. We're just going to add a mask to this. Adding a mask was going to let us have a look at the selection before we commit to it. Now, the place I'm most concerned about is the fish's mouth because it hasn't made a particularly good selection here. I'm going to target the fish's mouth here in the Layers palette and I'm going to use the Magnetic Lasso Tool. I'm just going to drag in here and drag back out to make a selection over the bit of the fish's mouth that was missed. I've gone into some of this transparent area, that's just fine. Now I am going to target the mask itself. The mask is black where we don't want the content and white where we do. Well, this area here is currently white and it should be black, so black is my background color. I'll press Control Backspace, that would be Command Delete on the mark to remove that area by painting it black so it's removed from the selection. Now I can press Control or Command D to deselect my selection. I'll just come around here and just make sure that there's nothing else that I need to fix. I could, if I want to fix this area in here, you can use the Magnetic Lasso tool, you can use any selection tool you like. Just choose the selection tool that makes best sense for whatever it is that you're trying to remove. I'm just using the polygonal lasso tool here and again, making sure that my mask is targeted, Control Backspace, Command Delete, and then deselect the selection. Just quickly check around to make sure that the shape looks pretty good, which it does. Now, at this point, I want to be able to make a selection around the fish, but if I just click in here with the magic wand tool, you'll see that, Photoshop is actually seeing the original image. We really need to get rid of this transparent areas. I'm just going to deselect the selection. What I'll do is Control or Command click on the new icon so it add a layer underneath the working layer. If you add it on top, just drag it underneath, it's not really a big deal. We're going to select the layer that has the mask on it, and we're just going to merge it down, so right-click and choose merge down, or you could choose Control or Command A. What that does in that merged down process is, it actually gets rid of the entire background for the fish and all we're left with is the fish itself. Now, I want my fish to be not pointing in that direction. Let's just go and get the fish with the Move tool and let's just rotate him before we create a shape of that fish. That's a much better direction for my fish. I'm going to go to the magic wand tool. I'm going to select on my layer. I'm going to click in the transparent areas. I'm making a selection of everything except the fish, so I can now invert it and select inverse. Now let's go and make our path. We'll just click here on make path from selection. Now, you can see the problem as soon as you get a complex shaped like this, is that Photoshop just wants to put anchor points absolutely everywhere. Let's think about how we might do this a little bit differently. I'm just going to click away from the work pass so you don't see it. There are a couple of options, one option is to make our own paths. If we went to the pen tool and if we were pretty nifty with the pen tool, we could actually draw around this fish, it's actually a pretty simple shape. It would be a really nice exercise for anybody who wanted to practice the Pen tool. But if you've got Illustrator, you could alter harness the power of Illustrator. Let's see how we do that. I'm going to select the work path here and I'm going to the past selection, tool, this one to make sure that I have the entire work past selected and I'm going to copy it, with edit copy. Now let's go to Illustrator. We're going to create a new document, doesn't really matter how big it is, although it would be helpful if this document in Illustrator were pretty much the size of the document we had in Photoshop. Well, I have no clue what the document size in Photoshop was. Let's go back to Photoshop quickly and have a look. Down in the bottom corner here, we can see that it's about 3,300 pixels by 2,200 pixels. Let's go back to Illustrator and let's make a document about that same size. That just means we won't have to size down our path by the time we get here, so I'll click create. Now how to use edit paste? I want to paste this as a compound shape fully editable, I'll click okay. Inside Illustrator, if you're not familiar with Illustrator, that's just fine. I'm going to show you exactly what to do. We've got this path inside Illustrator, you're going to come up here to the black arrow tool, it's called the Selection tool and you're going to select over this fish. You might say the fish probably at this point because it doesn't have a fill or a stroke. But you could click here on the stroke. You make sure that this little boxes at the front and you do that by just clicking on it and you could make it a color. Just go and get a color from the color picker, you could use the Swatches palette here. If you don't see either of them, you just going to choose Window color or Windows swatches and that will show you these panels here, then you can go ahead and just select the color. Doesn't matter what, but you just want to be able to see your fish and maybe increase the stroke to a couple of points. This is what our fish looks like and we can say that it's a bit bumpy. Let's select over it again with the selection tool, we're going to choose object path, and we're going to choose simplify. Now simplify it as a tool in Illustrator that allows you to simplify paths. It removes anchor points that are not necessary, but you have to make that choice. First of all, you're going to click on preview and then you've got to read this off. At the moment, the original has 1,890 anchor points, way too many. Currently, the way it looks right now because of the adjustments I've got selected here, it's down to 41 points. Now that's a pretty good result, but we may want to click on Show Original so we can say how much of a change has been made. When we click Show Original, you can see it's been reshaped here and here. It's been reshaped here and a little bit in its mouth. Now if that's too much of a reshaping, then you can start adjusting these values. You'll see that increasing the curve precision is going to increase the number of points. If you take it all the way up, you can actually end up with more points and you started off with, which is not what we came here to do. We want to end up with less points than we started off with, but we want a pretty accurate selection. I'm going to turn Show Original off. This is what my fish shape is going to look like if I click okay, so I'll click okay. Now, if we go and select over it with the direct selection tool, we can see where the anchor points are. You can say that there are quite a few anchor points, but nothing like the thousands that we started off with. If we're happy with that, we're going to go and select over the shape again with the black arrow key, the selection tool, we'll choose edit, copy to the Windows clipboard. Let's go back to Photoshop. Let's click away from the existing path and let's choose edit paste. Here we need to make a choice as to how that shape is pasted from Illustrator into Photoshop. Well, we want a path or a shape place, it doesn't really matter. I'm going to choose path and I'll click okay. This is now my fish shapes, so it's a work path. I've got it selected. All I need to do is choose edit, define custom shape, and here's my fish. I'll type fish and click okay. Here we've used Photoshop to prepare our image. We've taken the path that Photoshop gave is, dumped it into Illustrator, used Illustrator strength which is that simplify path option to simplify the path and then we bought it back to Photoshop where we actually wanted it to end up. Let's click away from this, let's go to the Layers palette. I can get rid of my fish at this stage, but to do that, I'm going to have to add a new layer because Photoshop won't have a document without anything in it. Let's go to the customs shaped tool. Lets go and select the last shape, which is the fish we just created and let's drag in holding the shift key so that's constrained to the original proportions. There's the fish shape that we just created. 8. Pt 7 Working with a more complex shape: The last element that we're going to look specifically at is this element here, again from the British Library site. I've already downloaded it and opened it in Photoshop. Now I'm going to enlarge this because it's a really small documents, only 500 pixels by a 131. I'm going to choose Image and then image size. I'm going to look at increasing it by a certain percent. I'm going to set percent as my value and I'm going to increase it by 400 percent. Now at this point we need to select a re-sample option and we're going to experiment to say which is going to give us the best results on this image. What we want is the blackest image that we can with the least problems in the background. You might find that reduction gives you the best value, so don't just think that because you're making an image larger, than you have to choose a larger option right now it's all about the result. Nearest neighbor is not going to be the best choice. That's probably one that you could eliminate straight away, but the others are all possible choices. Thinking that by cubic sharper the reduction one might actually be best. I'm going to select that. I'm going to click, "Okay". Back here in Photoshop, I'm going to make a duplicate of this background, drop it onto the new icon, and I'm going to set the blend mode of the top layer to multiply because that's going to make everything darker. You can say that the blacks will become much blacker. Now, what's also happening is that here we're seeing some blade through, this image was most likely scanned and at the back of the page has something on it and we're starting to see it appear. I'm a little bit concerned about that. Let's just merge these two layers down with merge down. We're working with a single layer. Let's go and get a levels adjustments, we'll choose ''Image adjustments'' and then ''Levels.'' Now where the multiply blend mode allowed us to create a darkening effect. The levels adjustment will allow us to affect both the dark areas and the light. These are the light areas, these are the dark areas, not very many dark areas. We're going to start pulling the scene to make the darker areas darker. We're going to pull in the other end to make the lighter areas lighter and we can probably almost get that to white. The midtone slider, we can adjust in either direction to go light or dark. Now I'm thinking there is a way I can kill yellow in a minute. Maybe what I'm going to do is wind this up so we get yellow, black, and white because I think I can get rid of the yellow. Let's just go with that. I'll click "Okay". This is an adjustment that we've applied to the entire image. It's not an adjustment layer which just whacked in on top of the entire image. Let's go to image adjustments and let's go to black and white. Because black and white is going to allow us to get rid of the yellow. With the yellow, we're going to take the yellow areas all the way out to white. This black and white adjustment is quite handy when you have something like yellow in an image because you can just totally get rid of it. I'm pretty happy with that. Let's click "Okay". Now at this point we may want to darken the image so we can go back to our multiply blend mode. Let's just go and make a second copy of this layer and let's set the top version to multiply blend mode. Again, that will darken things up. If you're happy with it, you can just merge them together. But if you want too, you can actually do this a second time. Let's go and do that. Let's take the topmost layer, dump it on top of the new icon and see if that helped. Well, it didn't actually, so I think we've got as much value out of the multiply blend mode that we're going to get. I'm just going to select all three layers and I'm going to right-click and choose ''Merge layers.'' Now before we do anything further with this, we need perhaps to clean it up. I can see that there's an element here that we don't need. It's come in from the scan. I'm going to select the eye dropper tool and just sample the background color and I'm going to a brush, a small round hard brush will be just fine. I'm just going to paint over this area carefully. A hard brush will allow me to paint over very accurately. Anything else that you can see in here that might need fixing, you can fix now. What you might want to do is to fix this because this is actually content missing. Again, I'll go and select the dark color now, and I'll go back to the brush, size it down a little bit and just join this area up. Now at this stage, everything is on a single layer, which is really important because there is a tool that we can use to thicken and thin lines. We choose filter and then other, and we can choose minimum. Minimum allows us to set a minimum value for these lines. Here is the minimum dialogue. This is the one pixel minimum. You can see that it's improved these line somewhat. Let's turn the preview off and turn it on again. These lines are a little bit thicker, perhaps a little bit smoother as well. Now you may want to use that value. You might experiment between roundness and squareness as options here and if you like the result and think it's an improvement, you can click "Okay". If you don't like it, just click "Cancel". Now that we've prepared our image, we can go into exact the same thing as we did with the fish. I'm going to make a selection on the background, I'm making sure that contiguous is not selected. I'm just going to click to select everything I don't want. I'll choose, select inverse. I'm going to create a path by going through the path palette and I'll click here on ''Create work path'' from selection. Of course the path is extremely detailed. Let's go to the past selection tool so we make sure that the path is selected and the work path is selected over here. We'll choose edit copy. I'm going to take this to illustrate as well. I'm just going to make a note that the image started off being 2,000 pixels by about 500 pixels because that's going to make things a little bit easier when we get to Illustrator. Created a new document in Illustrator, I'll choose ''Edit, paste.'' I want a compound shape fully editable. This is my shape. Now if I want to give it an outside color, I'm going to target the stroke. I'm going to give it a color that will allow me to set a bit more clearly. I'm going to choose ''Object path simplify.'' Now this one started off with 6,644 points. That's a lot of points. I'm going to click on "Show original", and I'm down to 690 points. I can probably get it down even further by just adjusting this curve precision. But you want to experiment between angle threshold and curve precision that gives you some result that looks good to you. You can say with show original, how much of the path you've lost. I think I've lost a bit too much. I'm going to increase this to about 557, it's up to you to make a choice that works best for you. I'll click "Okay". We've got the past still in place. I'm going to choose ''Edit copy.'' We've finished in Illustrator I'll go back to Photoshop. I don't want this work path any longer, so I'll click away from it and I'll choose ''Edit,'' Paste.'' Again, we want to paste it as a pass, so I'll click "Okay". Here is our path and since the path is now created, we can turn it straight away into a custom shape. I'm just going to call this floral click "Okay". Let's go to the layers palette. I'm going to add a new layer and that allows me to turn off or simply to remove the original piece of art. Now in the past palette, I'm going to click away so that I don't have the pass like this. I can go and get the one, the shape that I just created go to custom shape again, it's going to be the last shape. Click on it. Let's turn the fill into something that we can see quite clearly. I'll hold Shift as I drag my shape out to constrain it to its original proportions. Then I'll just click away from it. There's the shape that we worked on and prepared in Photoshop and then we're able to take to Illustrator to make some edits to it just to simplify the path so that now we can come back to Photoshop and save it. This again is a shape that we could use and share with others. 9. Pt 8 Create the Marketing Materials: Once you've created the shapes that you want to put in your collection, I would suggest that you create probably more than you actually want to use so that you can curate them at the time you put them together, you need the marketing materials. For my website, I use a document that is 405 pixels wide by 260 pixels tall. Now I'm not going to create my document at that physical size because that's pretty small. It would give me more flexibility with the document and how I use it in future, if I create it at a larger size and then size it down. I'm going to choose File and then New. I'm going to create a document that is three times the size of that starter document. I'm making one, one-to-one, 5 pixels wide, 780 pixels tall, RGB color mode. You can make yours whatever you need to make it. If it's going on a website or it's going on to Etsy for example, then make it whatever size it needs to be or you think it's going to work best for that site. Now in the last palette, I'm going to build this up layer by layer so that we could eventually sandwich something in between layers if we needed to. I've added a new layer. I'm going to create a black swash down the side here. You'll say that black is my background color. I'll press control backspace that would be Command Delete on the Mac to fill that area with black. They select the selection with Control or Command D. I'm going to type my text. I'm using Myriad Pro bold at about 70 points. I'm going to type my website name. I'm going to select the text and I'm going to rotate it. I'll hold the Shift key as I do. It's rotated around 90 degrees. Then I'll put it into a position. At this point, I want to change the color of the text so I'm going to make it white. I'll go back to the type tool that text layer selected. I can just click in here and change the type color to RGB 255-255-255, which is white, and I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to bring in my shapes. I'll go to the customs shape tool and I'm going to curate the shapes as I bring them in. I'm going to make a decision as to which of the shapes that I've created I'm actually going to use for this shapes collection. As I draw the shapes, I'm going to hold down the Shift key so they are constrained to the proportions that they originally designed in. Now as you're drawing the shapes you want H-shape on a new layer. Just start a new layer before you select the next shape to make sure that they're all on separate layers. I went ahead after we finished the last set of shapes and created some additional ones that I could use. Just to make a homogenous collection. Although I am adding one creative element in here, because I think it'll go nicely with this collection. Once I've got all the shapes into the document that I want to use, I'm going to adjust the colors for any of them. To do that, I'm going to re-select on a shape tool. It doesn't matter which shape tool. That gives me access to the fill so that I can change the color of the shape. Going back to a shape tool and then select the color to use. If I press the letter V, I'm able to get back to the move to all nice and quickly and a is LE. Now you may or may not want to add some descriptive text. If you do want to add descriptive texts, leave yourself a little bit of room to do so. At this point I'm going to add a texture underneath or my shapes. I already have a texture here that I downloaded from skillet or mass, which is a flicker stream for some really interesting text to images. I'll give you a link to that in the class project area. I'm just going to select this with Select All and just do edit copy. I'll go to my document. I'm going to place this underneath the strip here and just above the background layer. Choose Edit, Paste, and that adds a texture. I think that texture helps bring the whole document together. Now having added the texture, I'm now thinking that they shouts might look a little bit better if they had a drop shadow. I'm going to be careful with shape I used to create the drop shadow. Because if I add two bigger drop shadow to shapes like this, it's not going to work with this one here. I'm going to use this one or this one would be the best place to start. I'll select that. I've got that shape selected now, I'll go to the drop shadow option here. I want to add a very small drop shadow. I might want to decrease the opacity here. I've just got it set to a distance of seven, spread and size are six. I've also selected a purple as the colleagues. I'm trying to work in keeping with the colors that I've selected here. I'm not actually using a black shadow, I'm using a very slightly colored shadow. That's a fairly simple shadow. It shouldn't be sufficient to lift these elements off the backdrop. Once I've got a shadow on one layer, let me just stretch my layers palette here so we can say what's going on. Right-click this layer and choose Copy Layer Style. Now I can select all the layers that have shapes on them. Click on the top one Shift, click on the bottom one, right-click and choose Paste Layer Style. That just pastes the same BLAST style into or on top of all of the shapes so they look nice and even. There's a consistency amongst the shadows that I've used. Now I've created the image for my marketing materials. I'm going to go ahead and save this two ways. Firstly, I'm going to save as a JPEG image. I'm also going to save the original pair stay image because that would allow me to come in here and make some changes to it later on, should I wish to do so. I don't have to re-create the image every time. I might also want to at this point, scale this JPEG down to the size that I need for my website. Let's just assume that we've done the PSD save and we've done a large size JPEG save. To re-size it, I'll choose Image, Image Size, and I'm going to set it to pixels because I know exactly how many pixels I need. I need 405 pixels by 260. I'll select that. Click "Okay". Now I could save this smaller size version that I would then use on my website. 10. Pt 9 Save the Shapes File: Now that I've got my marketing materials, it's time to package up the shapes themselves so that we can actually give them away. I'll choose Edit and then I'm going to choose Presets, and I am going to choose Preset Manager. The Preset Manager dialog is where we're going to find the shapes themselves. I'm going to Custom Shapes. What I need to do at this point is to go and select the shapes that represent these images here. They're going to be at the very end of the shapes collection. I am going to target the first one and I'm going to control click on each subsequent shape that I am going to add to my shapes collection. I just need to make sure that I get the right ones. Then I get all of them. Now when I've done that, I'm going to click here on Save Set, Now at this point, I could save them in my custom shapes collection and that's probably not a bad idea, but I will also want to save them somewhere where I can find them just a little bit more easily. I'm also going to save them to a folder on my hard drive, which is where I'm going to assemble all the pieces for my website or for sale on Etsy. I'm going to create a folder specially for them. Just go ahead and do that. What you're going to do is save them as a CSH file. Photoshop's already giving you the name. You'll type the name of your file and save it as a custom shapes file. That's what your purchaser or your blog reader is going to need to be able to install the shapes in their version of Photoshop. I would save them in my custom shapes collection, but I'm also going to save a separate version ready for distribution. Once the shapes are saved, we're pretty much done with Photoshop. You'll need to then go and package everything for the web and we'll see how to do that in the next video. 11. Pt 10 Assemble the file for distribution: To get everything ready to distribute on the web, you'll see that I've got my shapes fall here. I've also got a large size image and are generally include a large size image in the file that I give to my blog readers, for example. I also have a README.txt file and we're just going to have a look at the contents of this. I'm going to give you this in the class project area just so that you can get an idea as to what I include in mine. In the [inaudible] file, I have details about where the shapes can be found and what the license information is. It's important to me that nobody thinks that they can take my files or my shapes and put them on their own website and distribute them that way. I make it very clear here that these images are my copyright and what can and cannot be done with them. I make sure that that file is packaged up with the shape. I'll give you a copy of that, that you can use to model yours on should you wish to. I'll go and collect the README.txt file. I'll take the full size image and I'll take the shapes themselves, and I'm going to package those into a file. On the PC, you'll just right-click and choose send to compressed or zipped folder, and that creates a zip file of your collections so inside this are these three files. At this point, you could rename it should you wish to do so. You can now upload it to wherever it is that you're going to distribute it from. I've smaller version of the shapes image that I would put up on my website and link to this file for download. I've also got my Photoshop file just in case I need to redo my marketing materials for any reason. I like to keep things pretty neat when I'm creating collections like this. Generally make one folder for an entire single shapes collection. Everything that belongs to that shape's collection is in that folder. Just makes it easy for me to find things later on should I need them for some different purpose, for example. Once you've done all that, then you're pretty much done with your shapes collection. 12. Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class is going to be to create your own small shapes collection. You can put as many elements in it, but I think that you should probably try for at least, say four as a minimum. Create your shapes, create your shape file, create your marketing materials, zip everything up and have it all ready to go so that you can give it away to your blog readers or go and sell it. As your class project, show us a copy of your marketing materials. Show us what your shapes are looking like, show us how you're going to market the collection that you've just created. I hope that you've learned things about working in Photoshop and indeed in Illustrator of which you were previously unaware. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which asks if you would recommend this class to others, please, if you enjoy the class, would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend this class to others, and secondly, write in even just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is 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.