Photoshop® CS4 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Filling and Stroking

In This Chapter

• Filling and stroking selections or paths

• Building and applying gradients

• Creating and applying patterns

Photoshop offers several ways to create elements, such as geometric shapes, out of pixels, and filling and stroking them are two of the most venerable commands at your disposal. You can also paint geometric elements on your canvas by hand or convert vector shapes to pixels (see Book IV, Chapter 1 for more on that topic). But if you need pixels arranged into regular circles, ellipses, and polygons, the Fill and Stroke facilities of Photoshop are worthy of your consideration.

Here's how they work:

• The Fill command adds color or a pattern to a selection of any shape or form you've created.

• The Stroke command applies color around the selection outline only.

This chapter shows you how to create these objects by filling and stroking selections and paths, how to add smooth gradient blends, and the best ways to apply patterns. After reading this chapter, you'll have your fill of different strokes.

Tip

Another way of filling is by using a fill layer, which you can use to fill a shape. Because fill layers work a little differently from the types of fills discussed in this chapter, I cover them in Book V, Chapter 1.

Filling a Selection with a Solid Color

When you just want to add a solid color, you use either the foreground or background color. (These colors ...