Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Drawing with the Shape Tools

Photoshop has a pretty good stockpile of built-in, vector-based shapes, which are perfect for adding artistic embellishments or using as vector masks (discussed later in this chapter). They include a rectangle, a rounded rectangle (great for making round-edged selections; see The Vector Shape Tools), an ellipse (handy for romantic, soft-edge vignette collages; see Creating a Soft Vignette), a polygon, a line, and a gazillion custom shapes (Using Custom Shapes). These preset goodies are huge timesavers because they keep you from having to draw something that already exists. And since these preset shapes are made from paths, you can also use the techniques described later in this chapter to morph them into anything you want.

The shape tools work in all three drawing modes (see Photoshop’s Drawing Modes). This section focuses on the first mode: Shape. Just like any other kind of layer, you can stroke, fill, and add layer styles to Shape layers, as well as load ’em as selections.

Say you want to create a starburst shape to draw a viewer’s attention to some important text in an ad (Figure 14-11); there’s no sense in drawing the starburst from scratch because Photoshop comes with one. And since the shapes are all vector-based, they’re resizable, rotatable, and colorable. If you need to make the shape bigger, for example, just activate the Shape layer, press ⌘-T (Ctrl+T) to summon Free Transform, and then use the little handles to make it as big as you want with ...