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It's the first of three icons near the far left (the Paths option is the middle of the three icons followed by the Fill Pixels option on the right): To draw vector shapes, select the Shape Layers option in the Options Bar. The edges of vector shapes will always remain crisp and sharp, both on the screen and when we go to print them. Unlike pixels, vector shapes are resolution-independent and fully scalable, which means we can make them as big as we like and resize them as often as we like without any loss of image quality. We'll look more closely at the differences between the three and why you'd want to use each one in another tutorial, but in most cases, you'll want to be drawing vector shapes, which are the same types of shapes we'd be drawing in a program like Illustrator. Photoshop actually lets us draw three very different kinds of shapes - vector shapes, paths, or pixel-based shapes. The Shape Layers Optionīefore we start drawing any shapes, we first need to tell Photoshop which type of shape we want to draw, and by that, I don't mean rectangles or circles. By default, the Rectangle Tool is the one that's visible in the Tools panel, but if we click on the tool's icon and hold our mouse button down for a second or two, a fly-out menu appears showing us the other Shape tools we can choose from:Īll six Shape tools can be selected directly from the Options Bar (after one of them is first selected from the Tools panel). Photoshop gives us six Shape tools to choose from - the Rectangle Tool, the Rounded Rectangle Tool, the Ellipse Tool, the Polygon Tool, the Line Tool, and the Custom Shape Tool, and they're all nested together in the same spot in the Tools panel.
Make a rounded rectangle in photoshop how to#
Photoshop CS6 users will want to check out the fully updated How To Draw Vector Shapes In Photoshop CS6 tutorial.ĭownload this tutorial as a print-ready PDF! The Shape Tools This tutorial is for Photoshop CS5 and earlier.
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It's true that Illustrator's drawing and illustration features are far beyond Photoshop's, but Photoshop has more drawing ability than you might expect for a pixel-based image editor, thanks in large part to its Shape tools and Shape layers which make it easy to add simple vector-based graphics and shapes to our designs and layouts. Most people think of Photoshop as a photo editing program, and if you were to ask someone to recommend a good drawing program, Adobe Illustrator would usually be at the top of their list. Then, in the next tutorial, we'll learn how to add more complex shapes to our documents with Photoshop's Custom Shape Tool. In this tutorial, we'll learn the essentials of working with shapes and Shape layers in Photoshop! We'll start by learning how to use the five geometric shape tools - the Rectangle Tool, the Rounded Rectangle Tool, the Ellipse Tool, the Polygon Tool, and the Line Tool.
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