Shapes | The Photoshop CS2 Help Desk Book

Shapes

If you own Illustrator (versions 10 and higher), you can easily create additional custom shapes for use in Photo-shop CS2. It's basically a simple copy-and-pasteas long as you've converted Type to Outlines and you're copying a one- color design.

Step One.

Select and copy (Edit>Copy) the artwork in Illustrator.

Step Two.

Switch to Photoshop, create a new document (File>New), and paste your Illustrator object (Edit>Paste). In the resulting dialog, choose Shape Layer.

Copying In Illustrator

When you copy in Illustrator and paste in Photoshop, the Paste dialog should automatically appear. If it doesn't and the artwork pastes without warning, you'll need to return to Illustrator and change a Preference. In Illustrator go to Preferences (Command-K [PC: Control-K]), under File Handling & Clipboard, and make sure that AICB is checked. Then copy again, switch to Photoshop, and pastethe Paste dialog should appear.

Step Three.

From the Edit menu, choose Define Custom Shape. In the resulting dialog, name the shape and click OK.

Step Four.

To use your newly created shape, click on the Custom Shape tool in the Toolbox (it's nested under the Rectangle tool), and pick your shape from the Custom Shape Picker in the Options Bar (it's the down- facing arrow to the right of the word "Shape").

Step Five.

Open a new document. Decide whether you want to create a Shape Layer, Paths, or Fill Pixels and click the appropriate icon in the Options Bar. Select a color by clicking on the Color swatch in the Options Bar, and then click-and-drag to draw the shape (hold down the Shift key as you drag to keep your shape in proportion).

Another Example : Even if you have limited drawing abilities , you can still use Illustrator to create a custom shape. Here I used one of Illustrator's built-in symbols from the Symbols palette (found under the Window menu). I simply dragged the symbol onto a new Illustrator document, selected the object, then used Object>Expand and Object>Path>Outline Stroke. Then I copied -and-pasted the selected artwork into Photoshop and defined a new shape.

ISTOCKPHOTO/CHARTCHAI MEESANGNIN