Photoshop Shapes: Create Your Own Photoshop Custom Shapes

Step 16: Double-Click On The Shape Layer's Thumbnail To Change The Shape Color

There's no need to worry about the color of your shape when you're dragging it out and adding it to your document. Photoshop will automatically fill the shape with whatever color you currently have selected as your Foreground color, but if you want to change the shape's color at any time, just double-click on the shape layer's thumbnail. Not the shape preview thumbnail on the right (which is technically called a vector mask thumbnail). You want the thumbnail on the left, the one that looks like a color swatch with a little slider bar underneath. Double-click on it to change the shape's color:

This will bring up Photoshop's Color Picker. Choose a new color for your shape with the Color Picker. I'm going to choose a brown color for my gingerbread man:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the Color Picker, and the new color is applied to your shape:

You can change the color of your shape whenever you need to, and as many times as you want!

Step 17: Resize The Shape If Needed With Free Transform

Color isn't the only thing you don't have to worry about with shapes. One of the great things about working with shapes in Photoshop is that they use vectors instead of pixels, which means you're free to change the size of them whenenever you want, as often as you want, without any loss of image quality! If you decide you need to make your shape larger or smaller at any time, simply select the shape's layer in the Layers palette, then use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+T (Win) / Command+T (Mac) to bring up Photoshop's Free Transform box and handles around the shape. Resize the shape by dragging any of the corner handles. Hold down Shift as you drag the handles to constrain the proportions of the shape, again so you don't accidentally distort the look of it. You can also hold down Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) as you drag the handles to resize the shape from it's center:

To rotate the shape, simply move your mouse anywhere outside of the Free Transform box, then click and drag your mouse to rotate it:

Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) when you're done to accept the transformation and exit out of Free Transform.

You can add as many copies of your custom shape as you like to your document, changing the color, size and rotation of each one as needed. Each copy of the shape will appear as its own separate shape layer in the Layers palette. Here, I've added several more copies of my Gingerbread Man shape to my document, each one set to a different color, size and angle. Notice how no matter what size you make them, they always retain their sharp, crisp edges:

And there we have it! We've created an initial shape by tracing around an object with the Pen Tool. We "cut out" little details in our shape using a combination of the Pen Tool and the Ellipse Tool, both set to the "Subtract from shape area" option in the Options Bar. We saved our shape as a Custom Shape using the "Define Custom Shape" option in the Edit menu. We then created a new Photoshop document, selected the "Custom Shape Tool", selected our shape from the Shape selection box, and dragged out our shape inside the document. Finally, we saw how to change the color, size and angle of the shape any time we want!

That covers the basics of how to create and use Custom Shapes in Photoshop, and that brings us to the end of Part 1 of our "Custom Shapes For Digital Scrapbooking" tutorial. In Part 2, we'll look at how to gather up multiple shapes we've created and save them as Custom Shape sets!