Photoshop Shapes - Vectors, Paths and Pixels

The Shape Tools

As we learned in the Photoshop Shapes And Shape Layers Essentials tutorial, Photoshop's various Shape tools are all nested together in the same spot in the Tools panel. By default, the Rectangle Tool is the tool that's visible, but if you click on the tool's icon and hold your mouse button down, a fly-out menu will appear listing the other Shape tools that are available. I'll choose the Ellipse Tool from the list, but everything we're about to learn applies to all of the Shape tools, not just the Ellipse Tool:

Selecting the Ellipse Tool from the Shape tools fly-out menu.

The Drawing Modes

Once we've chosen a Shape tool, we need to tell Photoshop which type of shape - vector, path or pixels - we want to draw, and we do that using the drawing mode options in the Options Bar along the top of the screen.

Near the far left of the Options Bar is a set of three icons. Each icon represents one of the three types of shapes we can draw. The first icon (the one on the left) is the Shape Layers option, and it's the option we choose when we want to draw vector shapes. The second (middle) icon is the Paths option, which is what we choose when we want to draw paths. The third icon (the one on the right) is known as the Fill Pixels option. We choose it when we want to draw pixel-based shapes:

From left to right - the Shape Layers, Paths, and Fill Pixels options.

Drawing Shape Layers (Vector Shapes)

Of the three types of drawing modes, the one we almost always want to be working with is Shape layers (vector shapes). When most people think of drawing shapes, they're not thinking of paths or pixels. They're thinking of vector shapes, the same type of shapes we'd draw in Adobe Illustrator or most other drawing programs.

Photoshop itself is not really known as a drawing program. It's primarily a photo editor, and photos (digital photos, at least) are made up of pixels. When we draw a pixel-based shape by choosing the Fill Pixels option in the Options Bar, we're creating shapes out of the same type of pixels that make up a digital photo, and pixels have major limitations on what we can do with them. The biggest drawback with pixel-based images or shapes is that they don't scale very well, at least not when we need to make them larger than their original size. Enlarge a pixel-based image or shape too much and it will lose its sharpness, becoming soft and dull. Enlarge it even more and the pixels that make up the image or shape can become visible, resulting in a blocky appearance.

Pixel-based images and shapes also depend very heavily on the resolution of your document if they're going to look good when you print them. They may look great on your computer screen, but printing high quality images requires much higher resolution than what your monitor displays, and if your document doesn't have enough pixels to print it at the size you need with a high enough resolution, it will again look soft and dull.

Vectors, on the other hand, have nothing at all to do with pixels. They're actually made up of mathematical points, with the points connected to each other by either straight lines or curves. All of these points, lines and curves make up what we see as the shape! Don't worry about the "mathematical" part of what I just said. Photoshop handles all the math stuff behind the scenes so we can just focus on drawing our shapes.

Since vector shapes are essentially drawn using math, each time we make a change to the shape, either by resizing or reshaping it in some way, Photoshop simply redoes the math and redraws the shape! This means we can resize a vector shape as many times as we like, making it any size we need, without any loss of image quality. Vector shapes retain their crisp, sharp edges no matter how large we make them. And unlike pixels, vector shapes are resolution-independent. They don't care what the resolution of your document is because they always print at the highest possible resolution of your printer.

Let's look at some of the things we can do with vector shapes in Photoshop, and then we'll compare it with paths and pixel shapes. To draw vector shapes, select the Shape Layers option in the Options Bar:

Clicking on the Shape Layers icon in the Options Bar.

Before I draw anything, let's take a quick look in my Layers panel, where we see that currently my document is made up of nothing more than a single layer - the Background layer - which is filled with solid white:

The Layers panel showing the single Background layer.

I'll choose a color for my vector shape by clicking on the color swatch in the Options Bar:

Clicking on the color swatch to choose a color for the vector shape.

This opens Photoshop's Color Picker. I'll choose red from the Color Picker, then I'll click OK to close out of it:

Choosing a color for the vector shape from the Color Picker.

With the Ellipse Tool in hand, the Shape Layers option selected in the Options Bar and red chosen from the Color Picker, I'll click inside my document and drag out an elliptical shape, holding the Shift key down as I drag to force the shape into a perfect circle:

A circular shape drawn with the Ellipse Tool.

Photoshop places each new vector shape we draw on its own Shape layer, and if we look in my Layers panel, we see the shape on a new layer named Shape 1 above the Background layer. Shape layers are made up of two parts - a color swatch on the left which displays the current color of the shape and a vector mask thumbnail to the right of the color swatch which shows us what the shape currently looks like (the white area in the thumbnail represents the shape):

Every new vector shape is given its own Shape layer in the Layers panel.

With one shape drawn, I'll draw a second similar shape slightly to the right of the first one:

A second vector shape now overlaps the original.

Photoshop places this second vector shape on its own separate Shape layer (named Shape 2) above the first one, complete with its own color swatch and vector mask thumbnail:

Two vector shapes, two Shape layers.

At the moment, both of my shapes are red, but we can easily change the color of a vector shape at any time simply by double-clicking on the shape's color swatch on the Shape layer: I'll double-click on the second shape's color swatch.

Double-click on a vector shape's color swatch to change its color.

This re-opens the Color Picker so we can select a different color. I'll choose blue this time:

Choosing blue as the new color of the second shape.

I'll click OK to close out of the Color Picker, and my second shape is instantly changed from red to blue:

The second vector shape now appears blue.

The shape's color swatch on its Shape layer also updates to the new color:

The vector shape's color swatch now displays the new color.

As vector shapes, I can select them in the document very easily using the Path Selection Tool (also known as the black arrow). I'll choose the Path Selection Tool from the Tools panel. It's located in the same section of the Tools panel as the Shape Tools:

Selecting the Path Selection Tool.

With the Path Selection Tool in hand, if I click on the red shape in the document, Photoshop automatically selects it (a thin outline appears around the shape that's currently selected):

The Path Selection Tool selects whichever vector shape you click on. Here, the red shape is selected by clicking on it.

Photoshop also selects the shape's layer for me in the Layers panel (selected layers are highlighted in blue):

When a vector shape is selected in the document, its Shape layer is highlighted in the Layers panel.

I'll click on the blue shape in the document with the Path Selection Tool, and now the blue shape is selected:

Selecting the blue shape by clicking on it with the Path Selection Tool.

And we see that Photoshop has also selected its Shape layer:

The blue shape's layer is now selected.

With a vector shape selected, I could drag it around inside the document with the Path Selection Tool to reposition it (the standard Move Tool would also work), but we can do much more interesting things with vector shapes than simply moving them around. For example, we can combine two or more shapes together to create different shapes! We'll learn how to do that next!