You can add shapes to your own photo as a design element or may alter the shape of the photo itself.

A lot of times, you may feel that a photo would be much more perfect if you are adding it with a special design whether it is the shape from Photoshop itself or from your own design. Custom shapes can be said to be resolution independent vector shapes that maintain crisp edges when they are resized or saved in a PDF format. You can add shapes to your own photo as a design element or alter the shape of the photo itself.
You can access much more custom shapes than the default set with clicking the custom shape icon in the options bar and also click the shape icon drop down arrow to open the selection menu. If you are clicking the drop down arrow on the menu, you will select one of the shape groups at the menu or select all if you want to see all of the installed shapes at once. If you want to select it, you only need to click a shape thumbnail.
When you are using shapes, you will see two boxes in the layers palette that contains fill layer and a linked vector mask. You can choose the fill layers color in the options bar just before you draw the shape or you also can set the fill color to the zero opacity. Here is how to use custom shape layers to add designs to photos.

1. Duplicate the background layer of an image.
2. Click the custom shape tool. Double click a shape and close the selection box. Double click the 0 percent opacity icon.
3. Click and drag in your image to draw the shape. Ctrl + click the layer thumbnail to change to a selection.
4. Click the shape layer thumbnail that you can find in the layers palette. Drag it to the layer trash. The selection will remain on the image.
5. Press D if you want to reset the foreground and background colours to default. Press X to reverse the default colours.
6. Press Ctrl + J to duplicate the selection to the layer. Click the background copy layer to select it.
7. Click layer – new fill – gradient. Click OK.
8. Click OK in the gradient fill dialog box. You can also change the attributes. The shape highlights the subject of the photo.

With the shape layer techniques, you are also able to add type and then flatten the layers to finish the design. It can be found on the greeting card and advertising needs.
M.A.H.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!