Drawing and Editing Shapes
Photoshop’s shape tools allow you to draw rectangles, ellipses,
polygons, and an assortment of prefab dingbats and symbols. On
the surface, they’re a pretty straightforward bunch. But when you
delve into them a little more deeply, you quickly discover that the
applications for shapes are every bit as wide-ranging and diverse
as those for text.
If you have even a modicum of experience using the marquee tools
(you may recall the elliptical marquee tool from pages 69 and 70 of
Lesson 3), you know how to draw rectangles and ellipses in Pho-
toshop. So in the following exercise, we’ll focus on the shapes we
haven’t yet seen—polygons, lines, and custom shapes—as well as
ways to blend vectors and images inside a single composition.
- Open an image. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll start
with a more or less neutral background. Open the file
Election.psd located in the Lesson 11 folder in Lesson
Files-PsCS5 1on1. After a possible “Update” alert message,
you’ll be greeted by what appears to be a couple of text layers
set against a white fabric background, as in Figure 11-26. But
in fact, the word ELECTION is a shape layer. I had originally
set the text in the Copperplate font—a popular typeface but
one you may not have on your system. To avoid having the let-
ters change to a different font on your machine, I converted the
letters to independent shapes. This prevents you from editing
the type, but you can scale or otherwise transform the vector-
based shapes without any degradation in quality.
Figure 11-26.Drawing and Editing Shapes 395