The Photoshop Productivity Series: Customizing Photoshop

Shapes

Photoshop lets you create custom shapes from existing artwork. This works best with vector artwork such as Adobe Illustrator files because shapes are vector-based and, as such, they are very scalable. Starting in Illustrator, select all the artwork. If your artwork contains type, you need to convert the text to outlines (Type > Create Outlines) as shown in Figure 6.14).

Figure 6.14 Selecting artwork and converting type to outlines.

Copy the artwork, switch to Photoshop, and choose Edit > Paste. When the Paste options display, choose Shape Layer (Figure 6.15).

Figure 6.15 Pasting the artwork on a shape layer.

A new shape layer appears, ...