Photoshop User - USA (2020-03)

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> PHOTOSHOP USER

>^ MARCH 2020

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a new pattern. You can add as many patterns as you like

without closing the dialog. They take a couple of seconds

to sync, but they’ll all automatically appear in the Libraries

panel under a group called Patterns in the new library that

you created earlier.

Note: One quick gotcha. If you have an empty layer

active when you open the Capture from Image dialog,

you get an option to drag-and-drop an image from your

computer into the dialog. To avoid this, just make sure

you have the image layer active in the Layers panel first.

But this does give you the opportunity to add additional

images right into the pattern maker to create patterns and

extract new color swatches!

SHAPES

Shapes is a vector tracing tool, but it’s quite a crude one.

Think of the Threshold tool in Photoshop, but in this case

it’s creating a black-and-white vector shape from the detail

it can find in an image. With a photo, you might find it’s

a little too fussy, and doesn’t give a great result. But for

things such as basic shapes, logos, lettering, or doodles, it

works a little better. Obviously, the cleaner the sketch, the

cleaner the result. In this example, I sketched out some let-

tering with a pencil on a pad and scanned it into Photoshop.

I want to take it into Illustrator and fine-tune it, but I first

need to turn it into a vector shape.

The Shapes option only has a few basic settings. The

Detail slider ranges from 0–100, with 0 being almost white

with very little detail, and 100 being almost all black with

too much detail. You can also Invert the result which can be

interesting. The final option is Smooth On Save, which does

exactly that; it takes away some of the roughness from the

vector extraction when sending it to the CC Library.

There’s also an Eraser tool located above the top left of

the image preview that you can use to erase any of the detail

you don’t want. It’s not the slickest of brushes/erasers but

it can help remove some unwanted vector clutter before

you save it to your library. You can see in this example that

I captured a crude selection of the guitarist, and then

erased all the details in the background.

In the lettering example, I was able to get a reasonable

extraction of the word “Johnny” from my sketch. Once you’re

happy with the result, just click that Save to CC Libraries

button and it will appear in a group called “Graphics.”