Welcome to this new section of the photoshop course.
This section is about creating shapes.
We're gonna die of a little bit deeper into the shape tools that we've seen before.
And we're also going to learn about creating custom shapes with the pen tool and the curvature tool
and a lot of cool stuff coming up in this section.
So just a brief overview of how to create a shape in photoshop.
You probably saw this in a previous lesson but you have your shape tool down here.
So if you click and hover over it you have a rectangle rounded rectangle which is around a rectangle
with rounded corners an ellipse a polygon and a line tool and then also this custom shape tool.
Let's go ahead and take the rounded rectangle tool for fun.
And we've got our color up here of the fill which is the inside our stroke is turned off.
Let's actually go ahead and turn on our stroke and you can see as we saw before.
We have different views for our colors.
So you have previously used up here recent colors and also you can click in this color picker box to
open up the color picker window and you can pick a specific color.
So say we want a black stroke we can check that.
Also notice there are a couple other options for the type of color at the top.
We saw this white with a red slash through it.
That means no it's no color.
Meaning that it's going to be transparent or not there and you can choose that for the fill or the stroke.
This next one is a solid color.
So that's if you want to color this next one is a gradient.
So we'll look into that in just a minute.
And then this last one is a pattern.
There are some pre built patterns that you can use here but you can also download or create them yourself.
So let's just choose our solid color are black these settings for the width and height.
So if you have a specific width and height in mine say one hundred pixels by 50 pixels then you can
actually create a shape that is exactly that shape.
So if you just go down into your canvas and click and then click OK it's going to create that shape
for you.
Of course you can also just go ahead and.
All right.
So let me undo that.
And you can also create a shape just by clicking and dragging to any sort of custom size or with that
you want you'll see the aspect up here in width and height as well the next buttons are more options.
So this next one is the what will happen when you create a new shape.
So will there be a new layer.
Will it combine with the previous shape that you've created.
You can subtract intersect exclude.
So let me show you those really quick.
So if we create a new shape just like so you can see that created this new layer.
If we have it on combined shapes you can see that it actually combines these shapes and the stroke goes
around the edge so you can create some custom shapes that way.
So say we go to subtract and if you have a shape layer selected it's going to automatically actually
subtract from that layer.
Let's undo that and say we want to subtract from the inside.
You can just click from the inside of a shape and it will subtract from there.
We can also show you intersect.
So if we have two shapes that are intersecting it will create a shape within the intersection of the
lines or the shapes that you are creating.
So you can create something pretty interesting there or exclude which is kind of the opposite of the
intersection.
So play around with these you can see that you can create some with super custom shapes that way.
There's a couple more advanced options I'm going to skip right now radio though is important especially
if you're using the rounded rectangle tool.
This is going to adjust the radius or the curve of your edges so a higher radius in pixels will have
a more curved edge as you can see if I zoom in here you can see that this top shape has a more curved
edge with that 50 pixels radius whereas the bottom one has the 10 pick it had it.
I believe it was a 10 pixel radius.
All these things can be changed once you create a shape by going back to the shape tool and you can
adjust them.
So say we want a thicker stroke we can do that.
You have to have the shape selected in your layer panel to do that.
If you want to change the shape style to dashes for example you can do that if you want dashes but you
want more dashes note that you need to decrease the number or the size.
You can also adjust with more options how it looks.
So say you want a larger gap between the dashes or a smaller gap.
You can create a dash with you can create sort of a multiple style gap.
So let's actually create a higher gap so now it's do a dash a two dash then a one dash a two dash then
a one dash so you can kind of really go crazy with how custom this is.
And then also these options above applying caps and corners this will make more sense if you're drawing
just a line in terms of the caps.
But for a line right now it's on the inside edge of the shape you can see here if we zoom in
see how these dots are on the inside of the shape.
If we go back to our strokes setting eye which you can get to right here you can put it on the line
itself or outside the line.
So again if you want to create some sort of like this would be a cool little marquee sign.
If we change the stroke color to something like a yellow yellowish and then we have the inside of the
stroke or the shape be maybe like a white and then we can type in some text.
Let's add a dark background to this.
So let's just add a black background and there you have our marquee sign in the works.
We'd have to add some texts and stuff but see you can get pretty creative with these shapes.
Now let's go over the different shape fill options really quickly but let's choose a different type
of shape.
So we've seen the rectangle and ellipse tool.
I want to show you the polygon tool which is a cool way to create a perfectly symmetrical polygon with
however many sides you want.
So you have all the same sort of options up here at the top that we saw before but we also have this
side's option.
So if you want a polygon with three sides What's that.
That's a triangle.
So if you create that shape right there you have a three sided polygon.
Say we want a hexagon.
We can create that just like so and so that's a cool way to quickly create a custom shape or whatever
shape you want with equal sides let's look at the fill options for these shapes really quick.
So let's go to this triangle right here and in the fill options you saw that we have a gradient option.
So by clicking that.
Let me move this over to the side so you can see it you see that we now have this gradient going from
dark to light so black to white from the bottom to the top of this shape to change the color of the
gradient.
Double click this little box at the bottom left of the gradient and then choose a different color.
So now we have red and then to change the top one you can double click that white little box or it was
white for me and change it to something else.
You can even create a new color point wherever you want.
In this line and this will actually make a great a three color gradient.
Right.
So it goes from red to blue to purple.
You also have some presets up here that you can choose underneath these folders you have even more presets.
I mean gradients are actually kind of popular now.
It's funny up until the past years so I would say gradients were seen as something of the past something
from like the 90s but now a lot of people are using gradients in their graphic design.
Now no there's these other boxes at the top of the this gradient bar.
If you double click these you'll see or just click them you'll see that it's the opacity 100 percent.
And so if we set this to 0 for example what happens it makes it white.
And so kind of like we've seen in our layer masks the White is the when this is set to white actually
it set to 0 percent opacity and when the set to black or 100 percent it's 100 percent opacity I accidentally
created another point.
And to get rid of a point just drag it off to the side so you can actually change the opacity.
Now when would that actually come in handy.
So say we have some sort of social media graphic I'm gonna delete these shapes.
We're gonna take our rectangle tool create a rectangle at the bottom of our our canvas.
We're gonna change the fill to a gradient and for the top part of the gradient we want this to actually
be opaque or transparent rather.
So we're going to change the opacity to zero.
So now we see that this actually fades and let's turn off the.
Well first let's turn off the stroke for this.
This layer you don't want a stroke and now you can see that without the background on we have this transparent
gradient from the bottom to the top.
So say we add some text we're gonna look at text in the next section but say we have some text here
for our name for example and you're putting this over a video card or something like that you're creating
some sort of video graphic.
It might be nice to have some sort of gradient transparency at the bottom that feeds into the video.
So the top is completely transparent but the bottom has a little bit of trance of opaqueness.
So you can see the title card better.
So that is a more practical demonstration of why you would use that sort of transparent gradient.
Really quickly just if we go back to our fill colors and let's set this back to 100 you could change
the direction of the gradient by changing this.
Turning this dial right here.
Think of it as 360 degrees and it's the angle so if you want something diagonal you can change it.
You could also change it from a linear gradient that goes from one side to the other to a radial which
goes from the inside to the out angle which kind of is like a clock.
It goes from it's like a circle and it goes from one point all around the clock all the way to the other
reflected Diamond.
They just do different styles.
Now also say you have let's go to this radial one but say that this circle is too small you want it
to be bigger you can adjust the scale.
So see how we have this scale dropdown right here.
You can increase or decrease the scale and you could do this for any of these.
So for linear or radial and this can help you blend the gradient make it a little bit smoother depending
on the color choices.
I would say like a harsh gradient something like this doesn't look that good but maybe if you have the
scale up a little bit it'll look even better.
So that's the option for that.
Let me just show you really quick.
If we select our pattern this is pretty cool.
You can create patterns or add patterns if you there's patterns that you often use.
You can actually import patterns by clicking this gear icon right here clicking import patterns and
then finding a pattern from really just like an image file from your computer and it will actually save
it and create a pattern for you that you can use.
And this is great if you're constantly using a similar kind of style or pattern for your graphic designs.
All right.
So this is a lot with shapes but we're going to dive a little bit deeper into creating more custom shapes
in the next lesson.
And then of course at the end of the section we'll have a fun project to create a social media graphic
using shapes.
All right.
See it in the next lesson.