No Drawing Necessary: Custom Shapes in Photoshop

Learn how to communicate visual concepts without drawing so much as a stick figure. Start saving time with Photoshop, which ships with hundreds of pre-drawn custom shapes.

Designers and nondesigners alike have projects, presentations, and mockups that require graphics. Programs like Adobe Photoshop help you create graphics quickly—in time for your next meeting—with no drawing necessary. This course is all about custom shapes: representative icons, figures, and silhouettes grouped by the dozens in the Photoshop Shapes panel. But just because Photoshop provides hundreds upon hundreds of custom shapes doesn’t mean that you’re going to find the exact one you’re looking for. In this course, Deke McClelland teaches you how to create your own custom shapes using the Custom Shape tool, refine and reshape to shapes perfection in Adobe Illustrator, and even trace a photographic element using the automated Image Trace feature. Deke also explains how to shave away unwanted anchor points with the Simplify command, and add an elaborate custom shape—of your own making—to a piece of vector-based artwork. The best part is, you never need to draw a single line.