Photoshop Shape Secrets - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Intro to Photoshop Shape Secrets: Hello and welcome to this class, Photoshop Shape Secrets: A Graphic Design for Lunch class. My name's Helen Bradley and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 270 courses here on Skillshare and over 170,000 student enrollments. In this class, we'll deep dive into shapes in Photoshop. I'll show you how shapes work, how to recognize and work around some pretty weird behavior that they can have, how to make custom shapes by drawing and turning images into vectors right inside Photoshop. We'll also look at how to save shapes ready for sale, import shapes, share shapes between Photoshop and Illustrator, find and use the legacy shapes and so much more. Along the way, you'll also build your photoshop knowledge with lots of handy tips and tricks. Without further ado, let's get started working with shapes in Adobe Photoshop. 2. 1 Shapes as pixels shapes and paths: Whenever you're working with shapes in Photoshop, you'll be selecting some sort of a shape tool. So I have the ellipse tool here. It is a shape tool. But there are three ways that I can use this shape tool in my document. One of them is as a shape from this little selector drop-down here, I have shape selected and this is what we're going to be using in this particular class. I'm just going to drag out my shape and it's got its fill and its stroke from these options up here. Let's go to the last palette. I'm going to this time draw this out as a pixel shape. I'm going to hold down the shift key just to constrain it to a regular shape. Now, I'm using the word shape because a circle is a shape but this is actually a pixel object. In this case, it's got its fill from the foreground color here. It doesn't have a background color, it doesn't have a stroke around it because it's not a shapeless, stroke is a property of a shape. It doesn't happen in pixel-based objects. Then we have what's called a path. So I still have my shape tool selected here, but let's choose path. I'm going to drag out a path here. Now the path is a nothing. It doesn't have a fill, it doesn't have a stroke, it's just a path. We're going to see it here in the paths palette. Now, I can save it so that I can get access to it at any time. So if I go back now into the layers and for example, have a look at our pixel layer, you're seeing that the path is still visible in a document. If I click away from it, the path has been de-selected, so we could continue to work on our document, but we still have a path available to us. At any time, we can just come to the paths palette and click on that path and do something with it. Most of the time when you're dealing with shapes in Photoshop, you'll probably want to be selecting shape as the option. Be aware that if you're following along with a video or following along with a blog post and something seems to be not working, chances are you needed to make a choice up here and shape is probably the choice that you needed to make. You won't be able to progress further with the work that you're doing until you redraw that object as a shape. Simply because shapes have very different properties to pixel-filled layers and to paths. 3. 2 Basic Shape Creation: There are a number of regular shape tools in Photoshop, and they are over here in the Shapes panel. You'll generally see rectangle selected, but there are other shapes. The ellipse tool, which helps you draw circles, the triangle tool, which is new-ish to Photoshop, the polygon tool, the line tool, and the custom shape tool, which we're going to get to a little bit later. Let's have a look at the rectangle tool. To draw out a rectangle, you can just click and drag. Again my rectangle is getting its fill and a stroke from these colors up here. When you're drawing out a shape, typically the properties panel will appear here and that has options that you can use to for example change the appearance of your shape. But it's also possible to get access to the options up here on the toolbar if you choose a shape tool. The shape tools are tools like this, the Path Selection Tool and the Direct Selection Tool. You can also get to these options up here by selecting any one of these shape tools. As soon as you click on it, even if you don't want to draw whatever is under the cursor, these things appear, and because you are working on a shape you can now go ahead and for example, change the fill on that shape or the stroke. Now rectangles are a special case because they have this little corner widgets. You can drag in on those corner widgets to round the corners. Now you could also do that using the options here in the Properties panel. Here are your corners and every one of these corners is being rounded to the same amount. I could just set a different value in here, 40, and they'll all be rounded to 40 because this option here is locked. If you want to do individual corners, then you can unlock it and just set a different corner to a different value. I've rounded this one a whole lot more. It's also possible to come in here and select your shape obviously so Photoshop knows what you're working with. If you hold down the Alt or Option key and hover over this widget, you'll see that you get a slightly different looking symbol. What this is allowing me to do is to adjust just this corner in isolation from the other corners. Alt or Option, and I could push this corner in or out. There are other ways that you can draw shapes in Photoshop. Let's go back to the rectangle tool. This time I'm just going to click once in the document, because that gives me a create rectangle dialog. Here, I can determine how big I want my rectangle to be. For example, one that's 500 pixels wide and 250 pixels tall. I have the ability to pre-build with my rectangle, these corners if I want to, and I can have it drawn from the center. I'm just going to click, "Okay" just to apply that and just have a regular 500 by 250 pixel rectangle drawn for me. Now if I want a square, not only could I click in the document and set the width and height to the same value. But it's also possible to add the Shift key as you draw the object. When you add the Shift key, it constrains the proportions of that object so a rectangle becomes a square. Let's go and have a look at the Ellipse tool. Without the shift key being pressed, I can create ellipses. I can click in the document and I can specify the width and height of my ellipse as well. But I can also hold down the Shift key and just drag out a perfect circle. Let's have a look at the triangle tool. With the triangle tool, I can just click and drag to create a triangle. A triangle has one of these corner widgets, but the corner widget operates on all the corners at once and you can't separately adjust the corners. You'll see over here that there's only one corner setting, and so it's going to set the corners on all three corners of the triangle. You can't deal independently with those corners. 4. 3 Polygons and Stars: The Polygon tool in Photoshop is used to create shapes that have multiple sides. We can already draw a triangle and a rectangle, three and four-sided figures. But for five-sided figures all the way up to 100-sided figures, we would use the Polygon tool. I'm going to target the Polygon tool. Of course, I'm drawing a shape, these are going to be my fill and stroke colors. I'm looking up here and the number of sides is going to be six. I'm going to just drag out a polygon and you can see that my polygon is not being constrained to a fixed size. If I hold down the Shift key, then it is going to be constrained. If you want a regular polygon, a polygon that has all of its sides equal, open up this gear icon here and set it to symmetric. In that case, you're going to get a polygon where every single one of these sides is the exact same length as every other side. For some purposes that's really necessary, for example, for creating some three-dimensional boxes, some isometric boxes, you do need a six-sided figure that has sides that are all the exact same length, so that would be necessary in those circumstances. Right now let's just note that every one of these shapes is going on a separate layer. Let's go and create another six-sided shape. But let's open up this panel here and have a look at this option called star ratio. Right now it's set to 100 and that drew this last shape. From that, we can assume that star ratio of 100 percent is no star at all. Let's drop it down to 75 percent and see what happens. I'm going to drag this out. Extensively this is still reading as a six-sided shape. That's what we asked for, was a six-sided shape. In actual fact, as soon as it becomes a star, it becomes a six-pointed star with 12 sides. Let's go and see what these other settings look like. Let's take the star ratio to 50 percent this time and draw out our star. Well, it has a much deeper set of points. It's looking more star shape if you like. Then let's go and select 25 percent. While we're here, let's note that because I'm changing this to 25 percent, even though I have this shape selected, the change is not having any impact at all on the shape that's already drawn. These settings up here on the toolbar are not affecting the current shape. It's really important to know that or notice that because some settings are going to affect it. I can change the fill color, I can change the stroke color here. But changing the star ratio to 50 percent, for example, is having no effect on this shape. Some of these options are going to affect the current shape. Some of them will only affect the next shape that you draw. However, as far as the star ratio is concerned in the Properties panel, there is a star ratio setting here of 25 percent, so we can adjust that. We can make it really, really small or we can make it really, really big in this Properties panel that is going to change the properties of the currently selected object. Notice here that I'm using what's called a scrubby slider. In many of the Photoshop dialogues, if you have a word opposite something that you enter numbers into, or if there's an icon, click and drag on the icon or on the word. Typically these scrubby sliders will allow you to adjust this value without having to type your value in there. Just a really handy way of operating. This is a scrubby slider for the number of slides, although this is not updating in real-time, I would need to let go the mouse button to actually have the change impact. Some of those scrubby sliders work differently to others. Right now if I'm looking really carefully inside this star shape, I can not see a widget. I'm going to click the "Path Selection" tool. Again, I can't see a corner widget here. Let's zoom in because it's there, we just can't see it. Going back to the Past Selection tool now, I can see the widget up here. Like the triangle, the polygon only has one corner widget. It's going to impact the outside points on this star. We can drag it in, and we can drag it out. When it's dragged in, you'll see that we've got rounded points, but we still got angular, little indents in here. Well, we can smooth out those indents by clicking here on smooth star indents. You can even have pointy ends, but smooth indents. There are a lot of things here that you can do in the Properties panel to change the look of your polygon. Of course, your polygon itself can be increased if it's just a regular polygon, you can increase the number of sides. Let's just take that back to six. If it's a star, then you can increase the number of points on the star. You might notice here that as I'm clicking on these individual shapes, they're being selected. The reason for this is that I have the Path Selection tool selected. Up here it says select all layers. By default, there's a really good chance that yours just read the active layer. With that, you can't select any shape that's not on the current active layer. For this, of course, you'd need to look at the layers palette to say which layer is active, and then go make active the layer that has the shape that you want to work on. I find it a lot easier to work with all layers because then I can just click on a shape and automatically the layer that that shape is on is targeted. 5. 4 Lines and Arrows: Let's look now at drawing lines in Photoshop with the line tool. So I'm going over here to the shapes collection, selecting the line tool. I have shape selected, I have fill set to none because a line on the face of it doesn't have a fill. That's a word of warning for what we're about to encounter here. We have a stroke color of blue and a 30 pixel stroke. So I'm going to just draw a line. I'm just clicking and dragging to draw my line. If I add the Shift key as I drag in a horizontal direction, I'll get a perfectly horizontal line. If I hold the Shift key as I drag in a vertical direction, then I'll get a perfectly vertical line. What we're seeing here is this constrained behavior which is typical of Photoshop, where things will be constrained to regular settings when you add the Shift key. If I add the Shift key as I drag diagonally downwards, then I'll get a line that is on 45 degrees. So none of that is probably particularly surprising to you. Let's go and get some surprising things going. Let me just increase the weight of this line, so we can talk about it. I'm going to drag out a horizontal line that has a stroke width of 60 pixels. Now if I want rounded ends on this line, I can come up here to the stroke options, and there is an option here for caps. So I'm going to click here and click on Rounded Caps. You can see that things have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Now you might say to me that the reason why that hasn't been successful is that, that's not an option that you can change after you draw in the shape using these tools up here, but probably it's going to be changeable down here. Well the answer to that is no as well because you can see they're rounded cap selected here in the properties panel and we still don't have rounded caps on our shape. So all of this is begging the question of why does the line not have rounded caps when we ask for rounded caps? Well, let's have a look and see how we can get rounded caps. If we go to corners here, we have an option for rounded corners. When I click on that, I get rounded caps. That's telling us something about lines in Photoshop in the sense that they are shapes that have width and length, rather than doing lines per se as they would, for example in Illustrator. Now it looks like this is just a line, but it's not. Let's see how we're going to investigate that. I'm going to this add anchor point tool, because this will allow me to add an anchor point to a line. So let's just go and select the line. I'm going to click here once, to add an anchor point. Now, what would happen in other vector applications is, if I pull this down, I would either get a V-shape or I would get a curve, one or the other depending on what this anchor point was being read as. But if I do this in Photoshop, let me just go and locate this one, something strange is going to happen. This is what's going to happen. So this is telling us that a line in Photoshop is not just something that starts here and ends here, it actually starts here, goes all the way out to here and comes back again to its starting point. So it's actually a dimensional shape. If I go to the fill option here, you'll see that lines have fills. So that brings me to something that happened in, I believe it was Photoshop CC 2019. That was that, Adobe set the default property for a line in Photoshop to have a stroke on the inside. Now, there is no inside on the face of it to align when a line is made up as something that goes out and comes back along the same route. When people were drawing lines, they were just disappearing because you couldn't see the inside stroke because there was technically no inside. So if you're drawing lines in Photoshop and you're finding that they're disappearing, that's probably the issue. You would be well advised to upgrade your version of Photoshop to a more recent version, where that problem was sorted out. That was no longer the default behavior for lines in Photoshop. They have a line weight and you have the stroke on the outside and so everything makes better sense. Now, while we're here, let's have a look at the issue of arrowheads on lines. Because we've got a heads up as to some things that might be happening here. Let's again go and get the line tool. I'm going to use 60 pixels for my line. Over here are the arrowhead options, so we can add them to the start and or the end and we have these settings for width and length and concactivity. So let's just draw out this arrowhead, because you won't know ahead of time exactly what these settings mean. There is a got you here because even if you make change this to this, it's not going to be reflected on the line that you're creating here. It's going to be created on the next line. If you only want one at the end, then you have to leave your settings as they are and then draw it again because that's what you're going to get this time. Once the arrowheads are in place on the face of it, they can't be changed. Let me just go and set this to 50 percent, because I really want something to happen that's not happening right now. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I draw it and we get some peculiar behaviors in some instances. Now you're not always going to say this, but you will quite often say it. The reason for this is, this line is a rectangle concept. We've got anchor points here that are controlling the arrowhead on the line. The problem is that the distance here is too short that we're getting pointy ends. Nothing you can do in terms of caps or in terms of corners, is going to bail you out of this. So you can see that the corners aren't helping here. Obviously we already know that caps aren't going to work, because we don't actually have a single line. We don't have something that starts over here and ends over here, this is actually a rectangle. So if we want to get out of this issue, I'm going to the direct selection tool and say, we basically like this arrow, but we want to solve this problem. Well I'm going in here to isolate this particular anchor point. Because it's filled in, it's telling us that it is being selected and the white ones are not. So if I add the Shift key as I drag on this, I'll be able to drag this top point over far enough to resolve that being the end. In the process, of course, my live shape has been converted into a regular shape. So just be aware that there is some really weird behaviors happening here with lines in Photoshop. Also be aware that these settings are sticky, so when I go and create another line, I'm going to inherit the settings that I had for the last line I made. If that is in two weeks time, my lines are going to have arrowheads. So on the forums are full of people who go, I'm drawing lines in Photoshop and all my lines have arrowheads. The reason for that is that you or the last person who used your version of Photoshop, set the lines to have arrowheads and you're just inheriting that behavior. So if you want to control arrowheads, you'll need to come in here. You'll need to set up whatever it is that you want and then draw your line because that's the only way you're going to get what you want, because you can't edit these lines later on. So just be aware of these behaviors going forward in Photoshop because the more you understand these behaviors, the easier it is to problem solve things when they go wrong. 6. 5 Lines with Dots and Dashes: Let's look now at creating lines that have dashes and dots. So I'm selecting my line tool. I'm going to make sure that I don't have any arrowheads because we know we can't get rid of them later on. I have a 60 pixel-wide line, no fill. I'm going to drag out a perfectly horizontal line. Now, I want it to be a series of dots. I'm going to select on this option here and click on the dots option. Now, because of what we know about lines in Photoshop in the sense that there's something that starts here, go out to here, and come back, this is very self-explanatory because what we're seeing here is actually two lines with dots on them. When I adjust the gap value, these dots are moving along these two lines that are running on top of each other in parallel. So this is not going to be a usable process for creating dotted lines in Photoshop. So let me just get rid of that because that's not helping us at all. What will help us is the pen tool. Now, I know a lot of people really hate the pen tool, but this is simplicity itself because all you're going to do is click at one end and then go across to where you want the line to finish. I'm holding down the shift key so I can make a perfectly horizontal line and I'm going to click a second time. I'm going to press Escape to stop this from happening because right now, I'm still in line drawing mode or pen drawing mode. So if I press Escape, then everything stops. Let's go and select the line, and let's go and choose that exact same option as we used previously. Now, a line drawn with the pen tool is a true line. It has an end over here and an end over here and nothing else. So that's exactly what we're seeing here. We can now make adjustments to our dots. So a dot is something that has a dash length of zero. As soon as we start increasing the dash length, we're getting things that are more dash-like and less like dots. So if you want dashes, you're going to add a dash value of whatever. If you want dots, you're going to set your dash to zero. If you want a gap, that's a spacing between these dots, you can get. I'm just trying to increase this at a reasonable rate so you can see what's happening. We're increasing the gap value. Now, if I take the gap value down to one, what I get is circles on my line that are butting up against each other. The question is, is this going to be the case just because I have a width of 60 pixels, or is that going to be the same regardless of the width of the lines? So let's just see how that's working. The wider the line is, the more the stroke weight is heavy. It's not affecting the dots. The dots are growing, they're much bigger, but there's still butting up against each other. So this value for the gap that we have set here, this value of one is giving us dots that are butted up against each other. If we reduce that, for example, to zero, we're going to get dots that are over the top of each other. So we virtually just have a line. If I make it 0.5, then I've got dots that are over the top of each other partially. So I've got this sort of scalloped edge look. As soon as I get to one, then I've got them side-by-side. The soon as I increase it beyond one, then the dots are getting further apart. We also have options up here for a dash line, so you can select the dash line. In this case, you can see that the caps are blind-ended. If you want rounded caps, well, a rounded caps are working here because we're working with a true line. If I do a gap of one, then the dashes are aligned to each other. If I do a larger gap, then there's more space between our dashes. This is the length of the dash. So we can make our dashes shorter or longer. Of course, what's controlling the width of the dash is the stroke weight. You have to come out of here to be able to adjust your stroke weight. But as you do, you get more dashes, thinner dashes, same basic elements between them, but you're just getting a final set of dashes along your line. So when you're wanting lines that are dots and dashes, avoid using the line tool in Photoshop because it's not a true line, as we've seen, it's actually two lines on top of each other, and instead just go for the Pen tool. Of course, if you're handy with the pen tool, you can also make it bend. I'm going to click and drag here and click and drag here to make a bendy line. I'll press Escape so that I've finished drawing it. You'll see that the same dots and dashes can be applied to bendy lines, with all exact same settings as we were doing with straight lines. So there's our options. Therefore, the lines that you might want with dots and dashes. 7. 6 Copy and Paste Shape Appearance: Let's look now at some behaviors in terms of the look of shapes. I have three shapes here, each one of them is different and each one is on a separate layer. What I'm going to do is turn off these top two layers so that they're not impacting us right now, so we can't see them. I'm going to target this ellipse layer. What happens if the ellipse itself is selected, and you can see that they fill and stroke up here are those of the ellipse. Now if I go up here to combine shapes, I'm going to this option here. Instead of new layer, it's going to be combined shapes. I can now select a second ellipse and just drag it out and add it, and you can see that it's being added to this layer. I can add other shapes. I could for example add a triangle. I'm just going to make sure that I have this ellipse layer selected and I'll drag out my triangle. I've provided this layer is selected each time. I can just add shapes to it. All of the shapes on this layer must by definition have the same fill and stroke. We've got them looking all the same right now. Right now, only the rectangle or the square is actually showing, but let's go and change the fill. You'll see that when I do the fill of every single, one of these shapes is altered. That's the way that shapes behave when they're on the exact same layer. Now if you don't want that to be the case for example, imagine if you wanted the triangle here to be a different color. Let's just go over and select the triangle, and I'm going up here to layer new, and I'll choose shape layer via cut. What that does is it puts a triangle on it's own layer. It's on a layer and all the rest of these shapes are on their layer. That means I can change the fill of this triangle, or the stroke, or whatever property because it's on a separate layer. Now it's also possible to copy and paste these properties, these colors if you like. Let me just move everything so it's separate. Let's target this particular layer with the pink border and the green fill. I'm going to right-click it and I'm going to choose here copy shape attributes. Now I can go to another layer for example, the layer that has these three shapes on it. Right-click again and choose paste shape attributes, and the attributes of the fill and stroke in this case are now pasted onto the shapes on this layer. Now you will want to make sure that this option here, that you keep an eye on it, that when you go to create a new shape, if you want it to be on a new layer, you want to make sure that this says new layer. If you're not able to target new layer, I'm able to target it here, you might be better off to actually add a new layer to the document, and then go and draw your shapes so that you're making sure that your shape is going on a new layer. 8. 7 Append the Legacy Shapes: The current version of Photoshop includes a range of what are called custom shapes. These are shapes that are shipped with Photoshop. Let's go down here now and select the custom shape tool. I have the shape option selected. Now there is a range of custom shapes here. There are wild animals, leaves and trees, boats, and flowers. Now if you are a new Photoshop user, you'll be going, okay there's a few sets of shapes that are interesting here. If you're a long-time Photoshop user, you're probably looking at this and going where did all my shapes go? Because there used to be a lot more shapes on this and a whole heap of variety. So let's go and see what happened and how we can solve the problem. The custom shapes option is accessible here. When you have custom shapes selected, you can get to the list of shapes using this drop-down here. The drop-down will show whatever shape is currently selected. But there is another shapes option. So we're going to Window and we're going to select the shapes panel. This has got the same sets of shapes, but it operates a little bit differently because on the fly-out menu here, there is an option for append default shapes and also legacy shapes, and more. Now what you don't want to do is to append default shapes because what Photoshop means these days by default shapes is wild animals lives and trace boats and flowers. We've already got those, so we don't need to append them again because they're already there. What we're looking for if you're somebody who's been using Photoshop for a long time is the legacy shapes and more. If you're a new Photoshop user, you'll probably want these too because there's a much bigger selection. So I'm just going to click here on legacy shapes and more, and they're added to the Shapes panel. Now you'll see that this Shapes panel here also has this case a gear icon in the corner, but there is no option for appending those legacy shapes. You can append the default ones, but as I said, we've already got those. These are the defaults. So just be aware that you'll need to be using the panel which is accessible from Window and then shapes. This gives you the legacy shapes. Now the way that the legacy shapes are organized these days is very different to the way that they used to be organized. There's a set of 2019 shapes and you can see that there's individual groups of shapes in here. Then there are the all legacy default shapes. So again, they're all grouped by name. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can get to reorganizing these if you don't like the way that they're organized these days. 9. 8 Rearrange and Delete Shapes: In the previous video, I suggested that in this video we will look at rearranging the shapes because in the past when you opened up the shapes panel, it was like opening up just a bucket of shapes, and all the shapes that you wanted to have access to were all there and a lot of people like that arrangement. If you want to have all your shapes in an accessible bucket, this is what you're going to do. We're going to open up these by groups. I'm going to open up the web group. I'm going to click on the first one, Shift-click on the last one because that selects all of them. I'm just going to move them out of the way. I'm just going to position them where they're no longer in the web group. You can see that tiles are here and here's the web group. I'm going to then Right-click on this, and I'm going to delete it because I don't need the group any longer because it's empty. Then I'm going to go through and do that with each subsequent group. I've just found it a little bit easier to work from the bottom up. You can say here that tiles no longer has anything in it so we're just going to get rid of tiles. Now at the same time, if you see any of these that you absolutely would never want to use, for example, then you could get rid of them. Let me just get rid of this group because I want to clean things up here. Say I never saw myself using, for example, this option here, what I could do is just click on it to select it and go to the trash can, and that will remove that shape from the shape collection. You can curate these if you like. Then just be aware that we're not actually destroying the legacy shapes. We could always come back in here and just click on legacy shapes and more and get all these groups back again. What we're doing is we're creating for ourselves a collection of shapes that is meaningful for us. But then we can see all at once rather than having to navigate through these individual groups of shapes and say to ourselves, is that an ornament or an object or a shape or what really is it? I think that will appeal to a lot of long time users of Photoshop. It might also appeal to you, if you are a new user of Photoshop, to have all your shapes in one bin. Now I'm going to go ahead and put all these shapes and this one bin. Then I'll come back and show you exactly how we can save these shapes so that we could get them back later on without having to do what it is that I'm doing right now. Now that I've arranged all these shapes into a couple of buckets and I could actually make them into one bucket if I wanted to by just pulling them all into one group. But for now I'm just going to leave them as two. I am going to rename them though. I'm going to go to rename group and I'm going to call it 2019 shapes, all in one group. I'll do the same for my legacy default shapes. I'm going to drag these groups out of that legacy shapes, and more collection. I'm going to do the same here and just drag them out. They're in separate groups. I'm going to now delete legacy shapes and more because it doesn't have anything in it anyway. Now I have two separate groups. I'm going to right click them and I'm going to export them. I'm going to export selected shapes. But you could see that I could do both sets at once, which I'm going to do. I'm going to export them all to one file. I'm calling this all old Photoshop shapes. You can call it whatever you like, just as long as you recognize it when you come to use them. The location that Photoshop has selected is the location that you should leave them in, because this is the location that Photoshop expects your shapes to be in if later on you need to, for example, reload them. I'm just going to leave them here, and I'll click Save. They are now saved in their buckets, if you like. I could get back to them at any stage in the future. That's important because I want to make sure that all the work that I've just done of putting them all together in big groups is not something that I'll have to do again later on if, for example, I lose these shapes. 10. 9 Download and Import Shapes: There's one thing to be really aware of in Photoshop that things like patterns and shapes, while they appear inside Photoshop every time you open the program, well, at least you hope they're going to, there's a chance that one day they may not. I'm going to Window and then shapes here and you can see that all the shapes that I was working on within the last video have been removed from the Shapes panel. Now, the reason for this is because I actually deleted them myself. But the same situation could occur if, for example, you opened Photoshop by deleting your preferences file. Now by way of explanation, that's probably the first thing that people suggest that you do if you're having problems with Photoshop. They'll say, hold down these two keys when you open Photoshop and that will remove your preferences file and there's a really good chance that Photoshop will open and behave really well. Well, what they're not telling you is about to happen is that you will also lose any of your custom shapes that have not been saved, you'll lose all your patterns that have not been saved. In the process of restoring Photoshop and getting it to work again, you could lose a lot of work. What you should be doing is what I did in the last video, and that is saving your shapes at a regular interval onto your disk as a separate file so that you can get them back in case you encounter this situation where your shapes are missing. My shapes are "missing". If we want to get them back, what I'm going to do is open the Shapes panel here from the Windows menu. Let me just clarify that this is the Shapes panel that I'm using. I'm going to click on the three bars here and choose "Import Shapes". Photoshop will open up the location where it expects saved shapes to be. Now they could be elsewhere and that would just be fine, but of course, we save these into that location just for ease. I'm now going to click on that file and click "Load". All the old Photoshop shapes that's the filename have been loaded and you'll see that they're into groups. It's a little bit inconvenient that Photoshop opens them this way, but it's very easy for me to just grab this group and pull it out, and grab this group and pull it out and then just delete the container if you like. Now I have all my 2019 shapes in one group and all the legacy default shapes in one group. We're back to where we were before those shapes just disappeared out of the Shapes panel. Now there's another situation in which you may want to be able to import shapes and that is the situation where you download shapes online because shapes are something that are really popular online. I have a site opened here, It's called brusheezy.com. I'll give you this location because what we're going to do now is to download these shapes. I'm going to click here on "Free Download". Now these shapes are going to be downloaded. I'm going to locate my downloads folder and I'll just click "Save". Now, this is a pretty small file, so I'm going to click on the option here and I'll go to show in a folder so we can see these shapes inside the folder. Now if you're on a Mac, there's a really good chance that this shapes file will have already been opened and the files will be extracted from it. It's not the case on the PC. I'm just going to open this with Windows Explorer so I can get into here, double-click on it. We have four files here. We've got the license information, we've got a preview. There's a PNG file, so that's going to be just an image file of the shapes. This is one we're interested in, the cooking shapes file. I'm going to go ahead and extract these files. They're just going to extract on the PC into a folder of the same name. That's fine for me. I want to see the extracted files when I complete so just click "Extract". Now we can go into the folder. Here's our shapes file. Now, I need to open them in Photoshop. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click here in this bar and I'm going to right-click and choose "Copy" because that's going to copy this folder name so I don't have to type it in. Let's go back to Photoshop. We're going back to our Shapes panel. I'm going to the flyout menu and I want to import shapes. Now last time we imported them from this folder because that's where Photoshop expects your shapes to be, but you shapes can be anywhere. In our case, they're in this folder. I'm going to right-click and click "Paste" because now I'm pasting in the location of my shapes. I'll just press the "Enter" or "Return" key and I'm going into the shapes folder. We know that there are four files in here, but only one is showing up because we're only seeing custom shapes. That is as it should be. I'll click on this and click "Load". Here are my cooking shapes. We've gone ahead and located some shapes online and you can just lookup free shapes online and you'll be able to find lots of places that have free shapes. This is the shape set that I located. We've downloaded it and now we've imported it into Photoshop and we can now go ahead and use it. With the custom shapes tool selected, I'm going to the drop-down list here. Let's go to our cooking shapes. Let's select one of our cooking shapes. Let's do the kettle. I'm just going to drag out the kettle in my document. If I add the Shift key to it as I drag it out, it's going to be constrained to its original proportions. It's going to be a nicely proportioned kettle. Of course, it's going to have the fill and stroke that we have set up for it. I'm just going to give it a very narrow stroke. This shape is going to behave like any other shape in Photoshop. It's similar to a square or a rectangle or a circle. It's just that this shape is one of a kettle. 11. 10 Interesting and Weird Shape Behaviours: If you've been using Photoshop for awhile, you'll know that it has some unexpected and somewhat unusual behaviors from time to time. In this video, we're going to look at one of those. Now, one of these behaviors is really handy, and that is if I click on an object, noting that I have the path selection tool set to select all layers, this means I can just click on an object and it will select regardless of what layer it is in. I'm going to open up the layers panel because here is this shape. If I double-click on the thumbnail here, what happens is that the color picker opens. You'll see that the color here is the color that's used for the fill of this shape. If I go and choose a different color, you can say that it's filling the shape, but it's doing it in a live way. This is really handy in terms of being able to find a different color for your shape, but select the color in a live manner. If you don't like the color that you're seeing, then you can just go and select a different one. If you want your dialogue to look like mine, just note that it is looking like this because I have this H button here selected. If I was to choose S for saturation, this is what my color picker would look like, and this is for brightness, but I have hue selected and so this is why my color picker looks like this. Yours doesn't have to look like anything, whatever you're happy with using, just set up your color picker to look that way, but if you want yours to look like this, this is the reason why it looks that way. I can just drag over a color and my kettle here is going to change color. The same thing here for this one, let's make it a slightly darker pink. That is a nice handy way of changing the fill color of a shape. Unfortunately, it does not work for the stroke color. For the stroke color, you will need to get access through the stroke option to be able to change its color. Let's have a look at what I term one of the weird behaviors. I have this shape selected here, and when I go to the Properties panel, you can see I've got a fill selected and a stroke selected. I'm going to change the stroke color on this particular shape. Nice and easy to do, probably the behavior you expected to happen. Let's try this one. When I click on this shape, you can see that the properties panel looks really different. This is this shape, this is this shape. Why is it when I click each of these shapes, the properties panel changes enormously, and for this shape over here, I don't have access to the fill and stroke that I have for this shape or any of these other options at all? Well, the reason is that I edited this shape a little bit, not enough that you would actually notice that, but enough to turn it from what's called a live shape into a regular shape. Let's see what I did. I went to the direct selection tool, the white arrow tool, and I selected over an anchor point. It doesn't matter which one, I just selected over this one, you can see it's blue and all the other ones are hollow, and I just moved it slightly enough to get this dialogue to appear. This is telling me that the operation will turn a live shape into a regular path. Do I want to continue? Yes, I do. Now you can say that the properties panel is not giving me access to those color options because it's no longer a live shape, the properties panel behaves very differently. That begs the question of knowing what to do when you have a shape selected that is not a live shape. To get access to changing its color, what you will need to do is to select a shape tool. In that sense, it is the path selection tool or even the custom shape tool, anything in this area here that you can select. Even though you're not going to draw a custom shape, you just clicking on this tool to see these options on the toolbar because they're going to let you make the changes that you want to make. Let's change the fill of this kettle here. Just be aware that sometimes the properties panel is not going to show you what you expect to see and know that you're going to need to target a shape tool to be able to get access through the tools on the toolbar up here. That will give you the ability to change things that you can no longer change using the properties panel because your shape is no longer a live shape. 12. 11 More Weird Shape Behaviour: Occasionally it's possible to get into a problem with Photoshop when you're trying to, for example, subtract shapes. I'm going to show you what's going to happen and just so that you can see it and you can avoid it in future if it happens to you. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle here. What I want to do is remove a portion from that rectangle. I want to draw something over the top of it and remove it. You might be tempted to go here and to choose subtract front shape with the view that you're going to add a front shape to subtract it. But look what's happening here. What we've got is notionally a fill for our shape but the shape itself is now all this outside area. There are actually no anchor points along these edges, so we've got a shape that is somehow attached to the edge of the artboard, and if we try and change the fill color here, the fill color is changing. But what is filled is not really technically a shape, it's everything back the shape. This can happen in Photoshop and it can be incredibly frustrating when it does happen. To get out of this, the best idea is to come into this option here on the toolbar and just work on combining shapes. As soon as you combine your shapes, you'll flip this back the other way so that you can get access to fills and strokes and to a shape that actually is going to behave like a shape. I'm just warning you that that can happen and just be aware of it and you know what you can do if it does happen, is just go back and select this combined shapes so that you get out of this really strange and highly unusual behavior for vectors. Now you might be wondering how you would actually subtract a corner from a shape. What we were trying to do earlier but which failed spectacularly. Going back to my rectangle tool, I'm going to drag out a rectangle. I would go ahead and position that wherever I wanted it. Now I'm going to curve out a quarter circle from the bottom corner here. I'm going to select the ellipse tool. To get into minus mode, I'm going to hold down the Alt key that would be option on a Mac. You can see that the mouse pointer is actually a set of crosshairs with a little minus indicating that we're in remove mode. But we're also potentially going to be in draw from center mode, so just be aware of that. I'm going to start drawing here and we are drawing from the center. To move this shape, I'm going to hold down the spacebar while I still got the left mouse button pressed so I can position my shape in the right spot. Now, I'm going to add the Shift key to this just to make sure that I'm working with a perfect circle. I can read from the tool tip that this circle is 366 pixels in each direction horizontally and vertically, so it is a circle. I'll use the space bar just to position the shape exactly where I want it. I still have Shift and Alt enabled and I still have my left mouse button pressed. I'm going to let go of my left mouse button first and then the other two keys. You can see that we've successfully removed the corner from this rectangle. If we want to end up with a shape that is not two shapes that have got our relationship with each other, the circle that is removing portion of the rectangle with everything still selected, we'll go up here to the option which causes all the grief a little bit earlier, and we'll just go down to merge check shape components. Now we're warned that this is going to turn on live shape into a regular path. That's fine. We'll click "Okay," and now we can say that we have what we proved to much wanted in the first place, which is a rectangle missing a piece. It's just that this time we've managed to be successful in achieving the result that we wanted. 13. 12 Strange Align and Distribute Behaviours: There are tools in Photoshop that are going to allow you to align shapes within a document and also to make sure that they're spaced correctly. Again, since we've been talking about weird behaviors in Photoshop, this one's a weird one too. So I have all these three shapes on the same layer. So I'm going to select over all of them. I'm going to this option here because this will allow me to align the shapes to this selection or to the canvas. If I align to the canvas, that means that when I click, for example, align top edges, the top edges are going to be aligned to the top of the canvas. Let's just do that. I'll click here on that. Let me undo it and let's do this time selection. In this case, the shapes are all going to be aligned so that their tops are aligned in align but not to the edge of the canvas. So you can see here that they just moved up to align evenly. We can also distribute the spacing. In this case, the horizontal spacing makes better sense because we want to make sure that these spaces are even. So I'll just click here and the shapes of now got even amounts of space between them. You could align them, for example, to their middles, to their top or bottom. Then there are these distribution options as well. But as I said, there's some pretty weird behavior and that's coming up next. So here I have three shapes and this time they're all on separate layers. I'm going to select all these layers. I'm clicking on the first one and then shift-clicking on the last. I could also just drag over these shapes because I have select set to all layers. That will select all the objects on these layers. I've just hidden these circles for the moment. Now if I go up here to the option that we used when all the shapes are on the same layer, you'll see that I still have the option of selection or Canvas. The problem is that none of these icons is selectable. While it looks like I can use this to arrange my shapes, I can't. There is another option that we can use and that's on the layer menu here, and it's called align. But let me just go back and start that over again. Select over these shapes and go to layer. This time align is not enabled. What happened previously was I went to this tool first, figured it wouldn't work, and then went to layer menu, and align was appearing this time because I went straight to the layer menu, align does not appear. But if I go now to this menu, discover that it doesn't work, and go back to layer align is visible. As I said, there's some really weird behavior here and we just need to live with it. I'm going to choose here vertical centers so that their stars will all be aligned with their vertical centers lined up. You'll notice that I have selection set here though. Let me just undo that and this time let me set this to Canvas. Let's go to layer where align is available to me because I've been to this dialog already and this time let me choose align, top edges. You can say that the top edges are aligned to the canvas. If we set it here to align to selection and then go and choose align to top edges, they're only going to be aligned with each other and not with the Canvas. There's selection for whether we use Canvas or selection is on this dialogue here. But the actual thing that we use to make those changes is here and of course, now I've lost that oxygen entirely. Just be aware that on separate layers you might have to flip between these two options. It gets better. Let me go and turn off the individual shape layers. Let's go and have a look at three shapes on one layer. I'm going to select over these and I'm going to the layer option. You'll see that align is available for these. Let's choose vertical centers. We're told that it doesn't work. Photoshop is telling us it can't complete the vertical center's command because of a program error. If you go to learn how to fix it doesn't help at all. I'm assuming that that is because you can't use the options on the layer menu to actually align and distribute. Instead, if you've got shapes that are all on the same layer, you need to use this option up here to align, for example, their vertical centers. It's working just fine when you use the right tool. There are two sets of tools for align and distribute and all those lineup and spread things apart options and you'll just need to work between them. Be aware that sometimes this will work if everything's on the same layer and if everything is not on the same layer, then the options here on the layer menu will work but only if you go to this option first and then come back to the layer menu. As I said, bit of a strange behavior, but you can get it to work if you know how to do it. 14. 13 Merge Shapes: Let's look now at the process of merging shapes together. I have three shapes here that are all on the same layer. I want to arrange them so that they form a shape that is more complex than the three individual ones. I'm going to place this one over here, and I'm going to place this one over this end. What I want to do is join these three together. On the face of it, it looks like they're joined together but when I select over them, the triangle, the circle, and the rectangle or square, readily identifiable. We can merge them all together into a single shape by going up here and clicking this icon, you can see that it says Combine Shapes. There are other options here such as Subtract, Intersect, and Exclude. These are going to give you different results, but obviously combine is what we came here to do. Now if we want to bake this in and join the three shapes together, we can just come down here and click on "Merge Shaped Components." Click, "Yes," because we're going to turn this into a regular path. That's just fine, and we'll Click, "Away." Now we do have a slight problem happening up here in the corner. Let's see what that problem is. Let's go to the direct selection tool. Let's just identify this anchor point and I'm just going to move it. Here's the problem. We appear to have multiple anchor points in the same location. In fact, we've got three of them. I'm just undoing that and I'm going here to the Pen Tool options. There are a number of tools here underneath the Pen Tool and we're going to delete anchor point. I'm just going to click on this once to remove one of those anchor points. You'll see that all that did was remove the anchor point and it's removed the stroke that was going in totally the wrong direction. Let's click it again to get rid of the second one. Now we've got a nice clean corner. We had three points. If you go too far, you're going to lose it. Just undo it, that's fine. It can happen but just step backwards one step. Then we've got our combined shape. We can also do that to individual shapes. Let me just bring back these same shapes, but this time they're on different layers and they have different attributes. Let's go to the Path Selection Tool again. Just going to line these up. They're all looking pretty good here. I'm going to select over them. Now when we come up here, you can say that even though we've got combined shapes select that we can't merge them. It's not possible for us to merge them this way. We're coming across here to the Layers panel. When you've got shapes on separate layers and you want to merge them, you're simply going to select the individual layers and right-click, remembering that of course, the right-click menu is different depending on where you click on it. What I'm going to do is right-click over here, just right-click and choose Merge Shapes. The selected shapes, they're going to be merged together. I've just backed out of that so that you can say that the combined shape is inheriting the stroke weight and color and also the fill of the topmost one of these shapes. Let's go back and do that again. We've got the same problem as we had last time. We've still got individual recognizable shapes. But now because they're all on the same layer, we can merge the shape components together. Then we're going to still have this exact same problem, but we know already what the problem is. The chances are we have three anchor points on top of each other. Click to remove one of them, click to remove the second one. There were three. I went too far. I'm just pressing Control Z to undo it. Anytime you want to merge shapes together, if the shapes are all on the same layer, you can just select them and use the options on this menu up here. If the shapes are on individual layers, then you'll first need to select them and then right-click and merge the shapes. Right now it's saying merge layers because we don't have shapes selected, but it will say merge shapes if you need it to merge shapes if you've got multiple shapes selected that you can merge. Then of course, once you've done that, then all the shapes are on the one layer. Then you can come up here and select the Merge Shaped Components to merge them together into a single shape and then clean up any excess anchor points that you need to remove. It's not typically going to be a really big problem for most shapes, but obviously, with a triangle, it was a problem. 15. 14 More Advanced Shape Merging: Let's look now at a slightly more detailed example. I have a little house here built up of some shapes. What I want to do is to create it as a house that I could draw myself using a shape. So I'm going to make it into a custom shape. What I want to do is I want to have this basic orange area as my house shape, but I want to cut out the door and the window so there are holes in the shape for the door and window. Let's turn off the background because I just had that for the purpose of showing you how it might look. Let's turn off the door and the windows for now and have a look at what we've got here. I've got a triangle here for the roof, and I've got a rectangle here for the basic house shape. Well, we already know how to put those together. I'm using the path selection tool here, and I have it set to select all layers, so I can drag over these two objects to select them. We'll right-click here because they're on separate layers and merge them using merge shapes. So that puts them onto the same layer, but it just doesn't solve the problem of the fact that there's still two shapes. There's still a triangle here, there's still a rectangle here. To stick them together, we're coming up here to this option and we're going to merge the shape components. We'll click Yes because we need to turn them from a live shape into a regular path because that's what Photoshop does when you merge shapes together like this. So now, our shape is all one shape, the triangle and the rectangle are merged together. Let's have a look at the door. I want to cut the door out of the house. What I'm going to do is go to the door layer here and I'm going to choose Edit and then Copy. So I've got a copy of the door on the Windows clipboard. On a Mac, it would be on the Mac clipboard. I'm going to target my house shape and I'm going to paste my door in, Edit, and then Paste. That pastes the door onto the house. Because the door just got pasted onto the house layer, it's the second thing to be added to the layer, so it's above it. If you think in terms of a layer stack, the door is on top of the house, on top of the building. So we can come up here and choose, subtract front shape because we've got a front shape, and the door is now subtracted from the house. It's just not completely subtracted. So if we wanted to finish off here, we're just going to click on Merge Shaped Components. That will merge them together so that you can say that the door is actually removed from the house. The path goes all the way round here and skips the door. To get rid of the window from the house, we're going to draw the exact same thing. Target the window layer, path selection tool, Edit, Copy, turn the layer off because we don't need it any longer. Target the house layer, Edit, Paste. The windows are now positioned on top of the house, but we're not saying through here because we haven't subtracted it yet. The windows were pasted onto the house layer. They're the second things there, so they're on top on that mini stacking order, if you like. Let's click Subtract front shape. Now we can see the background through the windows. Of course, we want to bake this into a finished shape, so we're going to select here and choose Merge Shaped Components. Again, we're asked if we want to turn a live shape into a regular path. In this case, it's the windows that are being turned into the regular path, we'll click Yes. So this is our finished shape. Now, if I want to save it so I can use it over and over again, I'm going to target the shape with the path selection tool. I'm going to choose Edit and then Define Custom Shape. I'm going to call this house, and click Okay. So now the house is saved as a custom shape. Let's just create a brand new file. Let's go and select our custom shapes. We're going to Custom Shape Tool, and let's go and select the house. I'm going to use a pink fill no stroke. It's already set up for that. I'll hold the Shift key as I draw out my house so that it is drawn with the same proportions as it had when I created it. Now, this house is a shape and it's saved inside Photoshop and it will continue to appear inside Photoshop until something happens. For example, we delete our preferences file because we have a problem with Photoshop and that's the first solution is to delete the preference of this file to reopen Photoshop. Or an accident happens and the shape just disappears. So we want to make sure that we can save the shape so that it's in an external file. Let's click on Shapes. I'll target my shape right click and choose Export Selected shapes. Now, here's a problem with Photoshop and a really inconvenient problem because what Photoshop saying is, last time you were messing around with shapes, you are in your downloads folder. I'm just going to take you back there. Of course, if I want it to be somewhere where Photoshop can find it in future, it would be better if it was in the actual shapes folder. So on a PC, this is going to be a little tricky to find, but I'm going to put it there. I'm going to this PC. I'm going to my Windows drive and I'm going to users. Then I'll choose Helen because that's my username. I'm going to an area called Appdata. I'm just going to double-click on Appdata. Then we're going to roaming and Adobe. We're looking for Adobe Photoshop and we want to Photoshop 2022 because that's the version I'm working with. I'll double-click to open it. We'll go to Presets and then custom shapes. In here, you can say this is where those shapes were. You'll be able to find this location if you go looking for your shapes folder. Go looking for one of the files that have these names, then you should be able to find your shapes folder if you can't navigate through to it following the instructions that I just gave you. Of course, they're going to be different on a Mac. So I'm just going to call this house. It will get the CSH extension as it should because it has a shape and shapes have a CSH extension. I'm just going to click Save. So that's now saved as an external file. So if it was deleted for any reason from the shapes collection, it's going to be accessible on disk. Of course, you may want to just save these shapes to something like your desktop if you want to share them with other people because they are a thing that you can sell, you can share them with other people. We've already seen that we were able to download this kitchen set. So you may want to make a collection of shapes and sell them or give them away. Of course, in that instance, you would probably want to be saving them onto your desktop just so that life is a little bit easier. Let's go and put this set on the desktop as well so I can find the house more easily to share it with other people, for example. 16. 15 Strange Behaviours on Deleting Anchor Points: Let's have a look at this rectangle here. What I want to do is to remove one of the anchor points here to end up with a triangle. So I'm going to the delete anchor point tool here. I can just select over this point and click to delete it. Not unsurprisingly, this will turn a live shape into a regular path, but this behavior is surprising. It's really difficult for me to organize this into a triangle. Let me just click away. Again, we're going to be prompted to confirm that it's okay to turn this into a regular shape. The process of deleting an anchor point isn't really as simple as you might have thought it would be, getting a triangle by default. Let me just undo that and explain what's happening here. In the path selection tool, which is interesting, not the Delete Anchor Point Tool but in the path selection tool area, there is an option up here for constrained path dragging. Right now, it's disabled and that's why we get that behavior when we try to delete a corner point. Let's turn constrained path dragging on. So that's with the Path Selection Tool. Now let's go to the delete anchor point tool. Let's go and click on the anchor point that we want to delete. This time we get better behavior. So I've got the line showing here, but it hasn't finished the process. I'll click again on the shape and for the second time confirmed that it's okay to turn it into a regular shape. We get what we would expect to happen. A triangle, not some sort line. Now the bendy line effect is going to be fine in terms of a circle. You would probably expect that to be the case with a circle and you're going to get that with the circle whether or not you have that constrained path dragging option selected or not. So really the effect or the problem that we have is associated with regular shapes, with shapes that have straight edges. So anytime you want to remove an anchor point from them, you're going to want to make sure that in the path selection tool, that constrained path dragging is enabled. That way, when you try to delete an anchor point, you're going to get a behavior that makes more sense probably to you. 17. 16 Make a Shape from a Photo: One of the fun things that you can do inside Photoshop is to make shapes from things. This leaf shape, for example, I created from a photograph and let's see how we would do that. I'm going to click on "New File" and I'm just going to create a file that is big enough for the image I'm going to bring in. The image is actually 4,500 pixels in size so it's way bigger than it needs to be. If I do it this way and actually bring the image into Photoshop, it's going to be scaled as it comes. This is the image I'm using, it's just a green leaf on a white background from unsplash.com. I downloaded it and I have it accessible. I'm going to choose "File" and "Place Embedded", and here is the leaf. I'm going to click on it and click, "Place", and it just appears inside this document. It's a little bit smaller than 1,000 by 1,000. This is perfect. Inside the layers pallet, you'll see here it's a smart object. That's just fine, it can stay that way. I'm going up here to the new Object Selection Tool and I'm just going to click on this shape to select it and let Photoshop go ahead and do the work. Now, Photoshop has selected around the shape. What I want to do is to make this into a path. You can do that with a selection in place if you go to the rectangular marquee tool. Makes no sense at all why you would do that, but this is how it works because now if I right-click on the shape, we have the option to Make Work Path. Now, in this Make Work Path dialogue, there's a tolerance setting. This can go from 0.5 all the way up to 10. Let's go and see what happens. I'm doing 0.5. You can see that this shape has a lot of anchor points, way too many to make any sense. I'm going to undo that right-click and choose "Make Work Path" again. This time, go for the maximum value. With the maximum value, we are getting the minimum number of anchor points. Probably not quite enough, but somewhere between there is going to be the sweet spot. I've just undone this again, I'm going back to Make Work Path and let's just give it five. I'm going to click "Okay". Now we've got a few anchor points, just not a lot of them. I'm going to turn off the photograph. Now, let's go to a brand new layer and let's have a look at this shape. I want to fill it so I can just see how it's working. I'll go to the paths palette, and you'll see here that there's an option to fill the path of the current foreground color, which at the moment is black. Just click on that. If I click "Away" here in the Paths palette, you can see the result. I'm not really happy with this skinny beat here so let's just go back into this shape and let's just make a couple of edits to it. I'm going to zoom in so that I can see where the problem areas are. I'm using the white arrow tool, the Direct Selection Tool. Here is one of the problems. I'm just going to make this a little bit rounder here. I'll have moved the leaf a little bit at the top, but that really hasn't affected it much. Here, I'm just going to straighten this up a little bit. I could bring in the bottom as well. Now, let's have a look in the last palette. Let's go and fill this path again and have a look and see what it looks like. This is a much better shape, it's a really lovely little shape. I'm happy with it now so let's go and make a custom shape from it. I'm going to click back on my shape so it's selected here in the Paths palette, and go to Edit and then Define Custom Shape. I'm just going to call it a Leaf then click "Okay". Just to prove that it's now accessible to me at anytime, I'm going to create a larger size document. Let's go to the Custom Shapes Tool. Let's go to the custom shapes list. Here is my leaf shape. I'm just going to hold down the Shift key so it's constrained to its original proportions. Now, my shape has been created and filled as would any shape in Adobe Photoshop. If you can get interesting shapes, interesting objects that look good in black and white or look good in a single color, then you can create them as shapes in Photoshop using this process. I think that you're going to really enjoy it. Just a heads up, these shapes are salable. 18. 17 Text as a Shape: Another object in Photoshop that you can convert to a shape is type. I have a 1920 by 1080 pixel document here that's fairly large. It's going to make a reasonably good size shape. I'm going to type tool. I've already selected my font and font size, and I've chosen a color. It's not going to be saved with the shape, but I do want to color that I can save on this document, and I'm going to type Happy Holidays. This is a little bit small, so I'm just going to scale it up. At this point, you want to make any changes to your type that you need. For example, if you want to alter the kerning or the spacing between characters, you would do that, if you've got any typos that you need to fix, you would do that as well. Just notice that as we're going to be working on it, this typeface is very angular and it's got lots of uneven, thick, thin transitions and that's going to be perfect as a shape. But when we're critiquing the actual shape, just remember that it started out looking like this. I'm going to make sure that I have my type selected knowing that it's been spell checked and I've made any adjustments needed to it. I'm going up here to type and I'm going to click "Convert to shape". Now, that's converted the type it to a shape and over here in the paths palette we can see the path that is defining our shape. Now, I'm going to zoom in here a little bit because there's some interesting things happening around the letter p. There are some extra lines in here. Again, that's part of that typeface. But I'm thinking I don't actually want those lines anymore so I'm going to come in here and I'm making sure that I have the shape selected here in the paths palette. I'm going to make a selection over the portion of the p that I want to get rid of. Now, it's not immediately obvious what's going to happen, but when I start pressing the delete key, even though I've got the letter p selected as well as this line, I'm actually only going to take out the line. This is a little bit confusing in terms of Photoshop's behavior, but I am making a very careful selection over just the piece that I wanted to delete, but it is attached to this other character. But when I press the "Delete" key once, twice, I'm actually removing that extra content. I'll go through here and see if there's anything else that I want to remove. Well, I think I'll take this out as well. It does takes a couple of clicks to get rid of it and of course, if it goes too far and remove something you didn't mean to remove, you would need to undo that. Let's just zoom back out so that we can see everything clearly. I'm just going to pop my paths palette up here for now. I've got my shape selected and now it's a little bit different. Once you've edited to your satisfaction, you can go ahead and make it a proper shape. Let me just re-select that, making sure that the letter s looks selected like everything else. I'm going up here to edit and I'm going to click on "Define Custom Shape" and this is going to be Happy Holidays. Let's create a brand new document and go and use that particular shape. It's going to be in the custom shapes palette. Let's go and grab our shape. I'm using red here, so that's fine and let's just drag it out. If I hold the shift key as I drag it out, it's going to be constrained to the original proportions. You can see that it is minus those little bits near the p and at the end near the s because I removed them before I created that shape. Now, a word of warning in terms of fonts is that fonts are actually copyright. If you're doing this for commercial purposes, to sell, for example, this text object, this text's shape, then you'll want to make sure that you're doing it with a font, that you have permission to do that with. Just be aware of that. But you can create little phrases, for example, using a font, create them as a shape, and then somebody can use them on their computer even if they don't have the font installed, because it's a shape and it doesn't rely on installed fonts. 19. 18 Shapes and Photographs: There are lots of ways that you can use shapes creatively in Photoshop. We're going to look at one of those now and it involves embedding a photograph inside a shape. I'm going to create this document and I actually want it to have a black background, so I'm going to add my black background. Now the photograph that I'm using is a coral image from Qui Nguyen and it's on unsplash.com. I went and looked up the word coral and this is the image that I downloaded. I'm going to bring in my photograph by using file and then place embedded. Now I've got a picture of some coral on a reef, so I'm just going to bring that into the document. I'm going to hide that for now. Let me just display my layers palette and just hide that. I'm going to get my shape. From the custom shapes collection, I'm actually using a shape here that were shipped with Photoshop in the early days and it is this fish shape over here. It's called angel fish. I'm going to click on that and just drag out a fish shape in my document. You can see it's got a red fill and no stroke. That's a really good selection to make because we're going to lose the red fill that's fine. No strokes perfectly all right at this stage. What I'm going to do next is with the coral reef visible and the shape visible, I'm going to switch these around. I'm going to move the coral reef picture above the shape. I'm doing that for a reason because there are a number of ways to cut this coral reef to the shape of the fish, but I think probably the easiest one to remember is this. That involves putting your photograph on top of whatever you want to cut it out to and then selecting over here, layer, create clipping mask. Now there is a way that you can create a clipping mask from the layers palette. Let me just undo that. What you can do is select the picture layer, the one that you want to cut to whatever it is underneath. Hold down control and Alt on a PC, that's command option on a Mac and hover over the join between the photograph and the shape layer and just click once and that creates your clipping mask for you. Now we have our fish and it is a fish shape out of the photograph. If I select on the photograph, I can actually position the portion of the photograph that most interests me in over the fish, I need to just make sure that I don't go too far and get the red filled because I didn't want to use that. Once I've got it in position, I'm pretty happy with that. Now the shape still has properties available to it. If we go to the fx icon here and click Stroke, we're able to add a stroke to this shape. What I've got here is a 10-pixel stroke. I'm actually going to bring it down a bit. I'll bring it down to five pixels. It's on the outside of the shape. The blend mode is normal. Here from the fill type drop-down list, I've just selected gradient and I went and shows one of the iridescent gradients that are shipped with Photoshop. Just grab that and it is now applied around the edge of the shape. It's changing its look as it moves around the shape. Like that effect. Now, remembering what we know about shapes and shape layers and adding things to them, I can target this shape layer and go in and get the ellipse tool. What I want to do here is to add some bubbles for the fish. I'm going to hold down the shift key as I start dragging out some little bubbles. When I click away, you can say that the bubbles have the coral image embedded in them and that's because they've been added to this fish layer. Turn off the fish, the bubbles disappear. Provided we are able to add bubbles to that layer, then it's again acting as part of that clipping mask. That's a fun way to utilize shapes in Photoshop with photographs. Of course, you can do that with shapes that you have bought or you've made, or ones that are shipped with Photoshop. 20. 19 Moving Shapes from Photoshop to Illustrator and vice versa: If you're familiar with both Photoshop and Illustrator, then you can work with shapes as between the two programs. You'll be familiar with the fact that Illustrator doesn't have a shape tool per se, so there are no custom shapes as such in Illustrator, but you can take them from Photoshop to Illustrator and you can bring them back the other way as well. I'm going to start with Illustrator. I'm just going to create a brand new file. Note that this is 1,000 by 1,000 pixels because this is going to bite us in just a minute. I'm going to select the rectangle tool. I'm going to make this a filled object, but no stroke. I'm just going to drag out a rectangle. What I'm going to make is like a file folder. I'm going to the round at rectangle tool, and let's just click and drag around the rectangle in here. Now, these are two separate shapes, so in Illustrator I'm just going to grab over the top of them, and I'll use the Pathfinder palette here and click on Unite, and that just puts them both together., so I have a single shape. I'm going to the white arrow, the direct selection tool here that shows me my little corner widgets. I'm just going to bring them in to give my file folder a nice curvy edge. If this is a shape that I've created in Illustrator, I can save it in Photoshop. Let's go and grab it. You might find that sometimes this is the easiest way to work if you're really familiar with Illustrator. I'll do edit and then copy. Let's head across to Photoshop, add a new file or open a new file that is the same 1,000 by 1,000 pixels. I'll choose edit and then paste. Now we get a series of options for our pasting. I'm just using shape layers. I'll click "Okay". As you can see, this shape is way, way bigger in Photoshop than it was in Illustrator. So just be aware of that, and you will need to shrink it down. I'm just dragging it down to a reasonable size within my 1,000 by 1,000 pixel document. Now we've got our shape from Illustrator into Photoshop. Of course, if we want to continue to use it in Photoshop, we need to add it to the custom shapes collection, so it'll be available next time we open Photoshop. I'm selecting over my shape and I'm just going to Edit and then Define Custom Shape and I'm going to call this file folder. Then click "Okay". Let's just delete that out of here and let's go and prove to ourselves that it is a usable shape. It's going to be red, that's fine. Let's hold the shift key as we drag it out, so it's constrained in its proportions. That's a way of taking a shape from Illustrator where it was created into Photoshop where it can be used over and over again. Let's go the other way. Let's go and get our leaf shape that we created earlier. I'm going to drag it out in the document. I'm holding the shift case so it's constrained to its original proportions. Doesn't matter what color it is, just that it is created as a shape. So you'll see here that I created it as a shape. Now having drawn this out in Photoshop, I'm going to pre-prepare my Illustrator document. Let's just go to Illustrator and empty this document out, so we've got plenty of room to move. Go back to Photoshop with it selected with the past selection tool selected, I'm going to choose Edit, and then Copy. Then we'll head across to Illustrator and we'll choose Edit and then Paste. We get a choice of a compound shape fully editable or a compound path. We're just going to choose compound shape. Here is our shape in Illustrator, has no stroke and no fill, that's fine, we can just go and apply a fill to it as we would a shape that we had drawn ourselves in Illustrator. A word of warning, if you have problems that when you copy this from Photoshop and try and paste it into Illustrator, there's nothing there. The paste option isn't available. Make sure that you had targeted the path selection tool before you did that copy and paste. You want to copy it with the path selection tool. That means that typically it should appear when you get to Illustrator. Let's head to Illustrator and I'm going to paste it in. I'll just move it out of the way a bit and color it. In terms of selling shapes, if you're happier working in Illustrator, you can easily draw your shapes in Illustrator and then just copy them to Photoshop, save them as shapes, and then export them as a shape package for sale or for giving away on your blog from Photoshop. There's nothing that says that you can't use Illustrator to make your shapes just need to work between the two programs, as we've seen here. 21. 20 Custom Sunburst Shape: We know quite a bit about shapes at this point. So let's have a look at a creative way of using a rotation effect to create a sunburst. I'm going to click on "New file." I'm going to create a file that is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. I'll click "Create." Now, I want a triangle for one of the elements of my sunburst. I'm using red. It doesn't matter what usually shapes don't have colors built-in. Just clicking in the document and creating just a regular triangle. I'm going to drag it down because I want it to be a fairly skinny triangle. I'm going to position it so it is pretty much in the center of the document. Well that's pointy end is pretty much in the center of the document. With it selected, I'm going to the layers palette, which I don't have visible, so I'm just pressing the function key F7 to show it, but you could also choose window and then layers. Here with this layer selected, I'm going to choose Layer, New Shape Layer via Copy. So I've got a second one of these triangles. Now I'll choose Edit and Free Transform path to get access to these tools up here. Now, you need to make sure that this check-mark is selected here because this gives you access to these nine little boxes. They specify the rotation point. So, we want the rotation point in this case to be the top of this nine set of boxes, the top middle one. The triangles about to rotate around this point here. We want a angle of rotation so that these are going to be evenly spaced around the document. There are 360 degrees in the circle we are about to make. So what we want is a rotation angle that if we divide that number into 360, there's nothing left over. In other words, it goes evenly. So 180 goes in twice, 90 goes in four times, 45 goes in eight times 30 would go in, 60 would go in, and so too would 20. I'm going to use 20 because this is a fairly thin triangle, and 20 is going to be a nice setting here, 15 would have worked too. I'm going to click the check mark with this triangle, this moved triangle rotated triangle still selected. I'm going to hold down Control Alt and Shift because I'm on a PC. If you're on a Mac, that's Command, Option and Shift. I'm going to tap repeatedly the letter T for transform. So holding down those three keys, tap T. Every time I tap the letter T, I'm getting another copy and rotated version of this triangle. Now I'm going to continue until I get all the shapes around the circle. One of them is on this layer here and the rest are on this layer here. I'm going to Shift click on this layer so that both these layers are selected right-click and just choose Merge Shapes. So that gives me this shape as a merged shape. Let me just zoom out a little bit. So, what I want to do now is not save this as a sunburst that looks like this. I want it to be able to be used on a square document. So let's go to the rectangle tool and let's add a rectangle to this document. I'm actually going to make sure it goes on a new layer by creating a new layer. I'm going to type the physical dimensions of this document, which are 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels and click, "Ok." I'm going to make sure that this is centered on the Canvas. So I'm going to Canvas and let's just center it. So right now I have a 1,000 by 1,000 square on top of a shape that is way more than 1,000 by 1,000. We learned in the house video, the house shape video how are we going to deal with this? So let's go and select the rectangle. Well, mostly how are we going to deal with it? Let's go and select the rectangle. I've got the Path Selection Tool selected here. I'm going to choose Edit and Copy, so that copies this square, rectangle, to the Windows clipboard. It would go to the Mac clipboard on a Mac, I'm targeting the triangle here and I'm going to choose Edit and then Paste and that pastes the square over the top of the sunburst. But you can still say that we can see the square and we can see the sunburst. Now, when we did the house, we subtracted the windows and the door from the building. Here we want something a bit different here we just want the area where these two shapes intersect, the sunburst and the rectangle or square. So, let's go up to this set of options here. What we want is Intersect Shape Areas. What's in red is the shape we're going to be left with. It's the area where the red rectangle or square and this fancy sunburst shape intersect where there's content on both of those areas. To bake this in, I'm going to click here and choose Merge Shape Components. When I click "Yes," you'll see that all over the rest of that shape, just totally disappears. It's no longer there. The entire shape is now just the sunburst. It's a square sunburst. Let's go to the paths palette and we can double-check that. So there it is in the paths palette. So let's go and save it as a shape it's selected, we will choose Edit and then Define Custom Shape, and we'll call it sunburst. Now I'm going to wind back out of this. I'm going all the way back to before when I added that rectangle or the square. I'm going to alter the canvas here, so I'm going to image and then Canvas size. This is not going to change the shape or anything to do with the sunburst. It's just going to change the canvas itself. I'm going to do something that is a different ratio. I'm thinking the width of the thousand is just fine, but I'm going to make the height 650. So it's not so tall, it's going to be a landscape rectangle. I'm going to make sure that my artwork is in the middle here. So that's a good selection there and I'll just click "Ok." Now I've got my sunburst in place, but this time I've got a different size rectangle, one that's 1,000 by 650. Well, we can create a second sunburst at this point that is the same dimensions, but let's just go and change the sunburst just a little bit. I'm going to grab my sunburst and I'm going to position it a little bit lower in the document, making sure that it's extending over the very edge of the document because I'm using a document as my sort of cutting guide. New layer, a rectangle that is the 1,000 pixels wide and the 650 pixels tall. This time, let's make it a slightly different color. Might be a little bit easier to understand. Let's go and make sure we're set to Canvas and let's center it up over the artwork here. We're going to copy it, make sure that you have the Path Selection Tool selected, choose, Edit, and then Copy. We'll turn it off because we don't need it any longer, will target the shape that we want to start cutting into pieces and choose Edit Paste. Now we make sure that we get the correct thing showing up. So, we're going to this drop-down list and knowing that Intersect Shape areas work last time, there's no reason to expect that it won't work perfectly this time. It is of course, the issue is that all of the rest of the shape area that's outside of the rectangle is still there. To get rid of it we just need to bake this fix in. So, we're coming down here to Merge Shape Components. Click "Yes," and now our shape, as you can see here in the paths palette, is this sunburst. We will go ahead and save it as a separate sunburst that we could use later on. Let's just go and test this. I'm going to create a brand-new document. I'm going to the custom shape tool. Let's go and select one of these. This is the square one, going to hold the Shift key to constrain it to its original proportions and it's drawing out as a square sunburst. I'll just remove that and let's test the second one. This is the rectangular one. Again, holding the Shift key we'll make sure that its constrained to its original proportions. By assembling a series of shapes and cropping them where necessary, you'll be able to build up even some very complex shapes and save them as custom shapes that you can use over and over again. 22. 21 Overlapping Circles Shape: Let's have a look at another way that shapes can interact with each other. I'm going to click here on "New File". I'm going to create a document 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. I want to guide across the middle of the documents. I'm just going to choose View Guides and then New Guide Layout and set it to two columns and two rows with nothing else set up and click "Okay". That just allows me to visibly see them middle of the document. I'm going to the Ellipse tool. When I click in the document, I know my document is 1,000 pixels wide, so I'm thinking a circle of about 300 pixels will be a good start here. I'm just going to click to create that. I'm going to position it so it's over this horizontal line, but I don't want it to be lined up with the middle of the document, in actual fact, that's why I marked out the middle of the document so I could avoid it. I want an overlap of about this much. I'm going to the Layers palette now and I'm going to make a duplicate of this layer. I'm going to choose Layer, New Shape Layer Via Copy. We've got a second circle on top of the first. Now, I want to rotate around this point here. The problem is it's a little bit tricky to get to that point. I'm going to show you a way of doing it. Let's just zoom in here. Let's go back to our path selection tool. I want to drag this over or position this sites over here, but I want it to be dead accurate. Let's see how we're going to do that. I'm going to select Edit and then Free Transform. That gives me access to these tools up here. But if I start typing 500 and 500, which I know is the dead middle of this document, I'm going to move the green shape across to that point, not its rotation points. What I'm going to do is just drag this and watch what happens up here when I drag the rotation point. Now, the rotation point becomes what's referred to with these x and y-values. I can move it nearly there and I'm going to finish it off by typing in 500 and 500. The rotation point now is the dead center of the document. Now, I can just rotate this shape around. I'm going to do it a 120 degrees, which is just going to allow me to put three of these green circles around my documents. I'm going to click the Check mark here and then Control Alt Shift, Command Option Shift on the Mac, and tap the letter T once. I've now got three circles. Let me just scroll back out. I don't need my guides any longer so I can just go and clear them. But I know these circles are all overlapping and there is an overlap. They're not just touching each other, they're very much overlapping. I'm going to grab all of these and I'm going to put them all on the same layer because what I'm about to do in a minute is to remove this shape and this shape and this shape, and just leave the outer curvy bits in the middle. I'm going to right-click and choose Merge Shapes. The shapes are all merged on the one layer, but we've got options up here, and the one we're going to use here right now, I can't get it, let me just go and re-select this, is Exclude Overlapping Shapes. That removes the areas where the shapes are overlapping and just leaves the outside edges and the area in the middle that is actually a triple overlap. The double overlaps are being removed, but the triple overlap in the middle where all three shapes are overlapping is kept. There are some funky rules about this, that we pick this was going to happen. But really, you've got these options here. You can just go through them and just see what you get. Here, we want exclude overlapping areas. This is the shape that I want. Of course, it's not baked in yet. We're going to come back here and choose Merge Shape Components. In the past palette, you'll see that this is our shapes. This is a custom shape that we could then save and reuse over and over again: Edit, Define Custom Shape. You may not have a lot of use for exclude overlapping shapes, but just be aware there are a number of our mathematical combinations here for how these shapes interact with each other and what's left when you select them, and they can allow you to create some really interesting shape effects. 23. Project and Wrapup for Photoshop Shape Secrets: We've now completed the video training portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this class is to create a range of shapes in Photoshop and to post an image of them as your class project. Now you might choose to build shapes yourself from other shapes or even make them from photos and other images. I'm really looking forward to seeing what shapes you come up with. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned lots about working with shapes in Photoshop. If you did enjoy the course and when you see a prompt that asks if you would recommend this class to others, please would you do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes that you do recommend this class and secondly, write even in just a few words, why you enjoyed the class. Your recommendation is going to help other students to say that this is a course that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be alerted when new classes are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your questions and comments, and I look at and review all your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in another class here on Skillshare very soon.