How to Easily Get Started with Shapes in Photoshop

Learn how to create shapes in Photoshop on your canvas and use the Live Shape Properties to interact with your shapes in Photoshop. Photoshop comes with the ability to draw and edit vector shapes easily. You can also convert your vector shapes in Photoshop to a raster or pixel-based shape.

Shapes in Photoshop

Today, you’re going to start working with shapes in Photoshop. You’ll learn how to use the custom shapes that come with Photoshop and be able to draw your own with the shape tool. So to get to our shape tool over here on the menu bar, there are these three dots you can click and hold and you’ll see these shape tools.

The rectangle tool, the ellipse tool, the polygon tool line tool, and the custom shape tool. Let’s start working with custom shapes first. Now, these are the shapes that come with Photoshop. If I select a custom shape tool up here at the top of the menu bar, you can drop this arrow down and you see all these shapes.

How to Work with Custom Shapes in Photoshop

There’s a better way to see all these shapes. You come up here to window and down here to shapes. You’ll get an expanded size window. And like I said, these are all shapes that come with Photoshop. And down here, there’s something called legacy shapes and more. If you don’t see that, click on this hamburger menu right here, and flies out and down here, you can click on Legacy Shapes and more, and it will appear in this window.

And as far as the display of shapes, you have the option of clicking on showing text, only small thumbnails, and you can import shapes that you may find from somewhere else. Let’s use a shape here. This is under wild animals. So I’m going to select this tiger right here and drag it onto my image. And right away, you have the properties window that comes up. And in the layers panel, you have a layer that is a vector image of your, in this case, a tiger. And here you have this chain. You want that selected.

So if you want to change your width and height by these transform parameters here, it will keep the aspect ratio. So that’s one way to change the size of your shape. You can do it that way or you can use the transform tool. But now, fill, is the color of your shape. I had already sampled the color of the elephant shape behind that. So I’m going to select that for my fill. And I’m going to close this because I want to select my layer and use my transform tool to resize my shape and move around.

You can change the shape like that. I can add a tree here. And again, as I add the shape my properties come up. And if I want to, I could change the height and width here or I could use the transform tool. I’m going to change the fill color of that shape to match everything else. I think I want to put a bird in here. So I’m going grab that one, change my fill, color of the bird to match everything else.

And again, I want to use I transform tool command T and resize it and reposition it, something like that. And so you have all these different shapes that you can use in different images. You can fill them with different colors. So that’s how you would get started with just custom shapes.

How to Use the Shape Tool in Photoshop

So now let’s look at how we can draw our own shapes. So, again, I’m going to come down here to these three dots here and click and hold. So I’m going to select the rectangle tool and hold the shift key down to constrain the shape’s proportions. And as I draw in, I can hold the spacebar down and move it around. As soon as I let go I have the on canvas menu that comes up.

Let’s go up here to the top menu and explain some of the toolbar options. We definitely want a shape. That’s definitely the mode we want to work in. Fill if you click that, that is the fill color of your shape. You can choose from any of the colors in the swatch here.

Stroke, I’ll show you what stroke does if you click on that and you click on another color. You could set the stroke width right up here, and I’m going to change that and you could see what stroke is. So that’s what stroke looks like. And when you click on stroke and you click on this white box with the red line through it, your stroke goes away.

And up here, you can set your width in your height manually. If you highlight this chain right here, it will change your height and width proportionately. So you see him changing it. It’s changing, proportionately. You had that same option over here in the properties they call your live shape properties. You could change the height and width of your rectangle in this case. Change your fill and your stroke.

You could change how rounded the edges are going to be. I wanted this to be a square. So it’s zero pixels. So this allows you to round the edges of your rectangle. You can see how I’m doing that. And because this chain is highlighted, it does it proportionately to all corners. Up here, you have path operations. This is how your shapes interact with each other every time you create a shape. In this case, when this is checked for a new layer, every time I create a new shape on this canvas here, it’s going to be on a different layer.

And you can combine shapes. You can use the path alignment to align and distribute your shape components. You know, path management to set the stacking order of the shapes that you create. You have additional shape options with this gear right here. And once you’ve drawn a shape like in this case, I just drew a rectangle. If I click anywhere in the canvas, it brings up this dialog box and I can create another rectangle here. And of course, the properties come up every time I do create a new rectangle.

If I come up here and click on combined shapes and click down here again, create a rectangle, look in the layers panel, right now, you could see that both of the rectangles are on one layer now instead of two. When I moved my rectangle over, they both moved because they’re on the same layer. I’m changing it back to a new layer.

So this is kind of interesting to do with shapes. Go to custom shape to come back over here and bring up our shapes. I can search for something like, say, Star. He’s all my star shapes. They have all these different stars. Going to put a few of them out there. Going to resize it here just to show you something.

So with custom shapes, I’ve created a ten-point star, a ten-point star with a frame, and a five-point star. And with my polygon tool selected, if I just click, I have this dialog that says create a polygon, but it says a number of sides. I can say even sides and a star ratio I’m going to make this twenty-five and say, OK, and let’s close this. And say command + t you know, I’m going to resize my star just like this.

So now I’ve created a seven-point star using the polygon-shaped tool. And if at any time you want to edit any of your shapes all you need to do is come into your layers, panel, highlight the shape that you want to edit, come up here to window properties. And here is your on canvas menu that you can make your adjustment. You can use your transform to change your width and height, or you can change the fill color. Or if you just want to scale your shape up and down, you can use a transform tool command +T and just scale it, because this is a vector is going to maintain the quality of the shape.

Example Design Using the Shape Tool in Photoshop

So now that we know how to draw our own shapes and edit them, let’s do something with it. I’m going to start with file new. And I’m going to create a new document. Say twelve eighty by seven twenty with a white background. Any size document will do.

I’ll start by clicking on my menu getting the Ellipse to hold down my shift and draw out my ellipse and use my spacebar to move it around the same time and draw my ellipse right there. I’m going to close this and I’m going to come up here and my fill, and I’m going to click on this white icon here with the red slash through it. That’s no color. And then click on stroke and I’m going to make it maybe a say, seven pixels. That’s what I want, my stroke at.

Now I have an ellipse, no fill. And the stroke is seven pixels. And I’m going to draw another ellipse, hold down my shift, draw it out, pull down my spacebar so I can move this around and I could see my guide at the top where it’s pink. And I kind of want it centered, but I want it smaller. So it’s about Midway. So right about there.

And again, I want no fill and, adjust my stroke here and make it, say, seven pixels just like that, I can close my properties. So that’s two different ways. You saw me get to my properties. Now I can say command + T and use my transform tool to move this around and make it smaller. So it’s about centered. That’s about where I want my ellipse, click my checkmark. And I want to duplicate that last ellipse, which command + J.

So I duplicated my top layer, and I’m going to move this down and position it there. You can see my guides. I think I want to position it down a little bit more, something like that. And I want to duplicate the last layer that I created, command + J and that over here to the side and duplicate that last layer and move this over to this side. Get these are touching something like that.

Now I want to go to my menu, click and hold and get my rectangle tool hold down, shift, and draw my rectangle. I don’t want any fill. And my stroke, I want it to be seven pixels. Now, what I want to do is I want to actually change the shape of that rectangle, bringing in a little bit command T, try and move it around, and here to where I want it to.

So far, I’ve created all these shapes within my original ellipse. I want to do is put all these shapes in a group. We select all my shapes then command + G. We’re going to call this group shapes I’ll duplicate that group, command+J. And I’ll say, merge group. So put all those shapes in a group and duplicated them. I don’t need them, but that’s just in case I need to go back later and make any adjustments to them.

So now all my shapes are on one layer. And we have a design here. We have the shapes that we made into a group. And then we duplicated that group and made all our shapes on one layer. I am hiding the original shapes group. And now I have an image that I want to actually put in all these little different areas here. And we’re going to use a layer mask to help us out.

So I’m going to drag this image into my project here. Going to make this a little bit bigger, click my checkmark. And right now I’m going to hide this image and I’m going to select individual areas here. One at a time for right now. But I’m going to get the magic wand tool. And I have a two-by-three average tolerance set to 32. And alias checked and contiguous checked.

Be sure that you have your shape’s layer selected and click your image. And I’ve selected right here in the middle. I’m going to click on my image here and turn it on and make it visible and click on my layer mask down here. But now you see that that image is right here in the shape.

And one thing you should make sure you do is to click this link so that the thumbnail here and the layer mask are independent of each other. And if I click on the thumbnail and say command T, and then when I’ve moved my image around, you can see that it is changing what is seen in that one area of the layer mask. If I click my checkmark. So this is going to be a pattern here.

So I’m going to duplicate the last layer that I was on. I’m going to delete the layer mask, hide my layer, come down to my shapes. The magic wand tool, click and select an area. Come back up to my image. Make my image visible. Get my layer mask. Click on this link here and now select my thumbnail. Say command T and I can move this around any way I want. You can also rotate to get a different pattern. So that’s the pattern.

First duplicate that layer delete the layer mask. Make that image invisible. Select my shapes layer. Use my magic wand tool to select an area. Come back up to my image, make it visible. Hit my layer mask, make sure that I uncheck this this chain that links those two together. Click on my thumbnail. Hit command + T again, I can rotate this. Click on my checkmark.

I’ll do this one more time and I’ll show you how we can speed this up. So command + J on my last layer. I’m going to delete my layer mask. Make this invisible. Come down to my shape. Select the area with my magic wand tool come back up to my image layer. Turn it on. Create a layer mask. Click this chain. Now I want to reposition that, I just highlight my thumbnail. Say command +T and I can move my image around and however, I want and click my checkmark.

So if you want to speed this up, a good way to do it is to hit command J to duplicate the top layer, delete my layer mask. Turn off visibility to my image come down here to my shapes. Use the magic wand tool, but this time hold shift. And I’m going to select four of these areas at the same time come back up to my image, make it visible hit my layer mask. And I fill those in at the same time, click this chain, and now say command T and I can move those around just like this.

I’m going to speed this up and do the rest of these areas here and come back into the video. So now I finished filling in all the different areas of the shapes with the background image. So now you can do, a number of things here. You could change the background color.

But what I want to do is I want to bring in an image. Actually, the same image that we were using for these shapes. And I’m going to make it a little bit bigger. So that’s our background now, adjust here to whatever we want. And there’s a number of things you can do to this. I’m going to click on my shapes and a double click, you know, and come up here to color overlay and see that change the color of all the shapes.

You can change that to any color you want. And you say, OK, also, what you can do if you want to increase the color saturation here, you can bring a hue and saturation adjustment layer. You can increase the saturation overall, change the lightness of the color. Something like that. We made designs from our ellipse and rectangle tools. And you basically watch me make the thumbnail that I use for this video.

Read the previous blog article here 👉 Gradient Map vs Gradient fill – What is the Difference? 2021

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