Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Drawing with the Shape Tools

Photoshop has a pretty good stockpile of built-in, vector-based shapes, which are perfect for adding artistic embellishments or using as vector masks. They include a rectangle, a rounded rectangle (great for making round-edged selections; see The Vector Shape Tools), an ellipse (handy for romantic, soft-edge vignette collages; see Masking with Paths), a polygon, a line, and a gazillion custom shapes (Drawing Multiple Shapes on One Layer). These preset goodies are huge timesavers because they keep you from having to draw something that already exists. And since these preset shapes are made from paths, you can use the techniques described later in this chapter to morph them into anything you want.

UP TO SPEED: Drawing with a French Curve

This Bezier curve business is tough to wrap your brain around. But if you’ve taken any kind of art class—even if it was as far back as middle school—there’s a real-world counterpart that makes the curved paths you draw with the Pen tool a little easier to understand.

Drawing with Photoshop’s Pen tool is similar to using a brush, pencil, or art knife with a set of French curves—plastic stencils that folks use as guides to create flowing, curved lines. French curves have some of the same limitations as the Pen tool. For example, the main challenge when using French curves is picking the stencil that will give you the longest sweep (or arc) possible. You often have to switch stencils or change its position to follow a particular ...