Wow, so many brush options and Adobe still isn’t done—there’s yet another way to draw things in Elements. The program includes the Shape tool (which is actually a group of tools that share one slot in the Tools panel), which lets you draw geometrically perfect shapes, regardless of your artistic ability. And not just simple shapes like circles and rectangles: You can draw animals, plants, starbursts, picture frames—all sorts of things, as shown in Figure 12-22. This tool should appeal to anyone whose grade-school “masterpieces” always got put up on the wall…behind the piano.
Figure 12-22. Here are just a few of the shapes you can draw with Elements, even if you flunked elementary school art class. These objects look even more impressive once you gussy them up with Layer styles (page 456).
Note
If you want to create text that follows the outline of a shape—to put words around the outside of a trombone, say—don’t use the Shape tool to create the path for the text. Use the Text on Shape tool (Adding Text to a Selection) instead.
Turning yourself into an artist by using Elements’ Shape tool is easy. Just follow these steps:
Open an image or create a new one.
Activate the Shape tool.
Click the Shape tool in the Tools panel or press U. The Shape tool is sometimes a little confusing to Elements newcomers because its Tools panel icon reflects the shape that’s currently active—so you may see a rectangle, a polygon, or a line, for instance. (You’ll see a blue heart if you haven’t used this tool before.)
Select the shape you want to draw.
Use the Tools panel menu to choose a rectangle, a rounded rectangle, an ellipse, a polygon, a line, or a custom shape. (If you select the custom shape, you have lots of shapes to choose from; click the Shape pull-down menu in the Options bar to pick one.) All the shapes, and their accompanying options, are described in the following sections.
Tip
You can also add custom shapes by choosing them in the Content panel (Photo Stamps). There, just double-click the shape you want, or click the shape’s thumbnail and then click Apply.
Adjust your settings in the Options bar.
Choose a color by clicking the color square in the Options bar or just use the Foreground color, which automatically appears in the Options bar when you switch to the Shape tool. Clicking the Options bar’s color square brings up the Color Picker. If you click the arrow to the right of the square instead, you get the Color Swatches panel (The Color Swatches Panel).
If you have special requirements, like a rectangle that’s exactly 1″x2″, click the down arrow just to the right of the tool’s icon to open the Custom Shape Options panel, where you can enter a size for your shape.
There’s also an Options bar setting that lets you apply a Layer style (see Adding Layer Styles) as you draw your shape. Just click the down arrow on the right side of the Style box, and then choose the style you want from the pop-out panel. To go back to drawing without applying a style, choose the square with the diagonal red line through it.
Drag in your image to draw the shape.
Notice that how you drag affects the final appearance of the shape. For example, the way you drag determines its proportions. If you’re drawing a fish, you can drag so that it’s long and skinny or short and fat. Even with practice, it can take a couple of tries to get exactly the proportions you want.
Tip
If you’re trying to create exact copies of a particular shape you’ve already drawn, use the Shape Selection tool (The Shape Selection Tool) to create the duplicates.
The Shape tool automatically puts each shape on its own layer. If you don’t want it to do that, or need to control how shapes interact, use the squares in the middle of the Options bar. They’re the same as the ones for managing selections (Selecting with a Brush). Use them to add more than one shape to a layer, subtract one shape from another, keep only the area where shapes intersect, or exclude the areas where they intersect.
Tip
If you want to draw multiple shapes on one layer, click the Options bar’s “Add to shape area (+)” button. That way, all the shapes you add end up on the same layer. (Shapes don’t have to touch or overlap to use this option.)
Clicking the Simplify button in the Options bar turns any shape from a vector image (which is infinitely resizable) into a raster image (one that’s drawn pixel by pixel). The box on Rasterizing Vector Shapes tells you everything you need to know about the difference between these types of images, including why and when you’d want to make this change.
The following sections describe all the main shape categories and their special settings.
The Rectangle and Rounded Rectangle tools work pretty much the same way, and they’re both really popular for creating web-page buttons. With either tool active (select them from the Tools panel or press U repeatedly until one of their icons appears in the Tools panel), in the Options bar, you can click down arrow to the right of the blue version of the shape to display a menu. (Adobe calls this the Geometry Options menu.) There, you’ll find the following settings:
Unconstrained. Elements selects this option automatically unless you change it. It lets you draw a rectangle with whatever dimensions you want; how you drag determines the proportions.
Square. To draw a square instead of a rectangle, click this radio button before you start, or just hold down the Shift key as you drag.
Fixed Size. This setting makes Elements draw your shape the size you specify. Just enter the dimensions you want in inches, pixels, or centimeters.
Proportional. Use this setting if you know the proportions you want your rectangle to have, but not the exact size. For example, if you enter a width of 2 and a height of 1, no matter where you drag, the shape will always be twice as long as it is high.
From Center. This setting lets you draw your shape from its center instead of from a corner. It’s useful when you know where you want the shape but aren’t sure how big it needs to be.
Snap to Pixels. This checkbox tells Elements to make sure that the edges of your rectangle fall exactly on the edge of a pixel to help create crisper-looking edges. It’s available only for the Rectangle and Rounded Rectangle tools.
Most of the Shape tools have similar options, though the Rounded Rectangle has one Options bar setting of its own: Radius, which is the amount (in pixels) that the corners are rounded off; a higher number means more rounding.
Tip
Looking to add a simple, empty rectangle, square, circle, or ellipse rather than one filled with color? See the box on Drawing Outlines and Borders to learn how.
The Ellipse tool has the same Geometry Options settings as the Rectangle tool. The only difference is that you can opt for a circle instead of a square. You can also draw a circle by pressing the Shift key while you drag.
You can draw many kinds of regular polygons with this tool. Use the Options bar’s Sides setting to choose the number of sides. The Geometry Options settings for this tool are a bit different than for the other Shape tools:
Radius. This setting controls the distance from the center of the polygon to its outermost points.
Smooth Corners. If you don’t want sharp edges at the shape’s corners, turn on this checkbox.
Star. This setting inverts the polygon’s angles to create a star-like shape, as shown in Figure 12-23.
Indent Sides By. If you’re drawing a star, enter a percentage here to set how much of the sides to indent.
Smooth Indents. Turn this checkbox on if you don’t want sharp interior angles on your star.
Not surprisingly, you use this tool to draw straight lines and arrows. Specify the weight (width) of the line in pixels in the Options bar. If you want your line to have an arrowhead on it, the Geometry Options menu lets you control what it looks like:
Start/End. Do you want the arrowhead at the start or the end of the line you draw? Tell Elements your preference by turning on the appropriate checkbox.
Width and Length. These settings determine how wide and long the arrowhead is. The unit of measurement here is the percentage of the line’s width, so if you enter a number lower than 100, your arrowhead will be narrower than the line it’s attached to. You can pick values between 10 and 5,000 percent. If your length setting is too low, you’ll get a shape that looks more like a T than an arrow.
Concavity. Use this setting if you want Elements to indent the side of the arrowhead where it meets the line. This number determines the amount of curvature on the widest part of the arrowhead (see Figure 12-24). You can pick a setting between –50 percent and +50 percent.
This tool lets you draw a huge variety of different objects, as you can see in Figure 12-25. Its Tools panel icon is the little blue heart. Click it or press U and then choose the Custom Shape tool from the pop-out menu.
Figure 12-25. Here’s just a small part of the shape library you can choose from in the Shape Picker.
Once the Custom Shape tool is active, the Options bar displays a little thumbnail labeled “Shape” with a down arrow next to it; click this arrow to bring up the Shape Picker. Various shapes automatically appear, but if you click the double arrows in the upper-right corner of the window, you see a menu with lots more choices. To scroll through them all, choose All Elements Shapes.
Tip
The Shape Picker includes a copyright symbol you can use if you want something official-looking that’s easy to enlarge and use as a watermark on your photos.
The Custom Shape tool also has a few Geometry Options settings:
Unconstrained. This setting lets you control the proportions of your shape by dragging.
Defined Proportions. Makes the shape keep its original proportions.
Defined Size. The shape is always the size it was originally created to be—dragging won’t make it bigger or smaller. It just plinks down at a fixed size you can’t control (except by resizing it after the fact).
Fixed Size. Enter the dimensions you want in inches, pixels, or centimeters.
From Center. Lets you start drawing in the center of the object.
Note
You can add shapes to Elements (the file posted on this book’s Missing CD page for Chapter 19 explains how). Depending on where you put them, they may appear in either the Content panel or the Shape Picker. Look for files that end in .csh when you’re downloading new shapes.
The gray, up-arrow icon you see in the Options bar when you have any of the Shape tools active (it’s just to the left of any Shape tool’s icon) is the Shape Selection tool. This is a special kind of Move tool that works only on shapes that haven’t been simplified yet (Polygon), as explained in Figure 12-26. (You can also activate the Shape Selection tool from the Tools panel, where it shares a slot with all the shape tools.)
Figure 12-26. The Shape Selection tool gives you the same kind of bounding box as the Move tool, and it works the same way, but only on shapes that haven’t been simplified. You can also apply transformations like skewing and rotating (page 389) when the Shape Selection tool is active. Once you simplify a shape’s layer, you have to use the regular Move tool to move it around. (You can always use the Move tool, even on shapes that haven’t been simplified, where you could use the Shape Selection tool instead.)
Just click the Shape Selection tool and then move your shape. (The shape doesn’t even have to be on the active layer.) This may seem like an unnecessary tool, but it’s very handy for some tasks, like making exact duplicates of shapes (Alt-drag/Option-drag a shape to copy it). You can also use this tool to combine multiple shapes into one by clicking the Options bar’s Combine button. The Options bar also includes the choices you have when using any of the shape tools: add, subtract, intersect, and exclude.
The Shape Selection tool works just like the Move tool: You can drag to move a shape, hold down Alt/Option while you drag to copy (instead of move) the original shape, drag the handles to resize the shape, and so on. Unfortunately, you can’t align and distribute shapes with this tool the way you can with the Move tool. If you need to line things up, use the regular Move tool instead.