If you already have one of the other Shape tools selected, you can quickly grab the Custom Shape Tool from the Options Bar. You'll see a series of six icons, each representing a different Shape tool. The Custom Shape Tool is the last icon on the right it's the icon that looks like a blob :.
Once we have the Custom Shape Tool selected, we need to choose the shape we want to draw. The thumbnail displays the custom shape that's currently selected:. To choose a different shape, click on the preview thumbnail.
This will open the Shape Picker which displays all of the shapes we currently have to choose from. Photoshop actually comes with many more shapes than the limited number we're presented with at first. We'll see how to load in the other shapes in a moment:.
Or, double-click on the thumbnail, which will select the shape and close the Shape Picker for you. I'll choose the Heart shape:. Once you've chosen your shape, select a color for it by clicking on the color swatch to the right of the word Color in the Options Bar:.
Photoshop will pop open the Color Picker so we can choose the color we want. Since I selected a heart shape, I'll choose red for my color. Click OK when you're done to close out of the Color Picker:.
As I mentioned in the previous tutorial , Photoshop lets us draw three very different kinds of shapes with the Shape tools. We can draw vector shapes , which are resolution-independent and fully scalable without any loss of image quality the same type of shapes we'd draw in a program like Illustrator. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy.
Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article methods. Related Articles. Article Summary. Method 1. You can do this from the Photoshop File menu. Click on the Shape Tool icon. This is in the menu along the left of the application window.
Click a Shape Tool. You can choose a preset line, square, rectangle, polygon, ellipse, or circle. You can create a custom shape by clicking the sloppy star icon. Or the shape of a dog or cat to add to a pet store logo? How about shapes of flowers or leaves, snowflakes, music notes, or even a copyright symbol to add to your images?
Photoshop actually includes all of these shapes and more, and we can add them to our designs and layouts just as easily as adding circles and squares.
Adobe calls these more complex shapes custom shapes , and we draw them using the Custom Shape Tool. The only problem is that, by default, only a handful of these custom shapes are available to us. Most of them are hidden. So in this tutorial, we'll learn everything we need to know about drawing shapes with the Custom Shape Tool, including how to access every custom shape that Photoshop has to offer!
If you're not yet familiar with the basics of drawing vector shapes in Photoshop, I highly recommend reading the previous tutorial before you continue. To select it, click and hold on the icon for whichever shape tool is currently visible which will either be the Rectangle Tool the default or whichever shape tool you used last.
When you click and hold on the icon, a fly-out menu appears showing the other shape tools that are available. Select the Custom Shape Tool from the bottom of the list:. With the Custom Shape Tool selected, the next thing we want to do is make sure we're drawing vector shapes , not paths or pixel-based shapes. We learned the important difference between vector shapes and pixel shapes in the Drawing Vector vs Pixel Shapes tutorial, but in short, vector shapes are flexible , editable , and resolution-independent , meaning we can edit and scale them as much as we want, and even print them any size we need, and the edges of vector shapes will always remain crisp and sharp.
To make sure you're working with vector shapes, set the Tool Mode option in the Options Bar along the top of the screen to Shape short for "Vector Shape" :. Next, we need to tell Photoshop which custom shape we want to draw, and we do that by clicking on the shape thumbnail in the Options Bar. The thumbnail shows us the shape that's currently selected:.
Clicking the thumbnail opens the Custom Shape Picker , with thumbnail previews of each shape that we can choose from. Use the scroll bar along the right to scroll through the thumbnails. As I mentioned at the beginning of the tutorial, only a handful of shapes are available initially, but there's many more that we can choose from.
All we need to do is load them in. To do that, click on the gear icon in the upper right:. In the bottom half of the menu that appears, you'll see a list of all the custom shape sets that Adobe includes with Photoshop. The shapes that are displayed initially are the default set, but looking through the list, we see that we have lots of other interesting sets, like Animals, Music, Nature, and so on.
To load one of these sets, simply choose it from the list. The only problem is that unless you've been using Photoshop for a while and spent much of that time working with custom shapes , it's hard to know which shapes you'll find in each set.
So, rather than choosing the sets individually, what I'd recommend is selecting All at the top of the list, which will load the shapes from every set all at once:. Photoshop will ask if you want to replace the current shapes with the new ones. If you click the Append button, rather than replacing the current shapes with the new shapes, it tells Photoshop to keep the existing shapes and simply add the new ones below them.
That may be a good choice if you were selecting an individual shape set from the list and you just wanted to add it to the default shapes. In this case, because I'm choosing All which includes the default shapes as part of the collection , I'm going to click OK.
At the end of the tutorial, we'll learn how to reset the shapes back to the defaults:. With all of the shapes now loaded in, we have far more to choose from. You can resize the Custom Shape Picker to see more shapes at a time by clicking and dragging its bottom right corner. From the Options Bar click the Preset Picker triangle icon , then click the gear icon on the right of Preset Picker Panel, and after that select the Import Shapes… option from the drop down list or Load Shapes… when using an older version of Adobe Photoshop.
Step 3. From the Import Shapes dialog box select the photoshop custom shapes file. CSH on your hard drive.
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