Chapter 7: Shapes and Styles

Overview

Any longtime user of Adobe products will tell you, things sure were a lot simpler in the old days. If you wanted to work in a pixel-based environment, touching up photos and creating artistic images, Photoshop was the only place to be. If you wanted to work with vectors, creating object-based art with razor -sharp edges, Illustrator was made just for you.

Now, things are different. Illustrator gives bitmap graphics a full embrace now ” pixels are now one of the built-in units of measurement. And although Photoshop's paths have always been vector-based, the Shape tools bring all the advantages of drawing with vectors into Photoshop, ensuring that anything you create with them stays sharp, whether the final destination is a high-end printer or the World Wide Web.

It might seem that with all this cross-pollination of programs, we're headed for a single, all-powerful product that does it all for any kind of image ” or that these two heaviest of hitters in the graphics software market will become duplicates of each other. Who knows which way it will go? In the meantime, Photoshop is still Photoshop, and we'll continue our trek through its long-standing and new features, taking in the changes as we go. First up in this chapter are Photoshop's aforementioned Shape tools. These enable you to draw object- oriented paths filled with anything from solid colors to gradients to photographic images. Other bitmap image-editing programs may have done it before Photoshop, but none has done it better.

Next, the chapter discusses layer styles. Although the promise of "instant drop shadows and glows" may sound at first like a cheap trick unworthy of inclusion in Photoshop's professional high-end tool set, they've actually proven to be an invaluable addition. Not only do they give you painstaking control over drop shadows, glows , and bevels, but they can also coat layers with gradients, patterns, and contoured wave patterns, as well as trace outlines around layers . When combined with the Advanced Blending options discussed in Chapter 6, layer styles blossom into a powerful special-effects laboratory, one of the most far-reaching and flexible Adobe has ever delivered. Furthermore, you can save the effects and reapply them to future layers. These features may not be the reason you started to use Photoshop in the first place ” and there's no question that they take time and patience to fully understand ” but you'll be rewarded with greater proficiency and versatility in the long run.



Photoshop CS2 Bible
Photoshop CS2 Bible
ISBN: 0764589725
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 95

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