Hello and welcome to this tutorial brought to you by Adobe Nic Nacs. And in this tutorial for beginners, we’re going to look at how to create simple shapes in Photoshop. And it's one of the questions I get asked a lot when people have just got Photoshop, how do I make a box, how do I make a circle and the truth is there’s tons of different ways of doing it but I'm going to cover my preferred way and the alternative way which lots of other people use. So I'm just going to create a new document and it doesn’t matter what size because we’re just drawing shapes.

And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to create a new layer and I’ll start off by showing you my preferred way. Okay, if I want to create a box, generally I would use rectangular marquee tool, which is located here. If it shows this one, you just click hold on the bottom. You’ll see a little layout comes, choose the rectangular marquee tool.

You can just drag out a box and there’s a couple of hot keys you can hold if you want to alter the way that box draws out so you can hold shift if you want to constrain it to proportions. You can hold Alt if you want to drag it out from the center and you can hold both of them if you want constrain proportions and drag out from the center. So what this throws you out is something called a marquee. It's a walking ants effect but it's showing a selection and has many uses but you don’t really need t know them for what we’re doing here.

If you want to get rid of this selection, you can hold Control and press D on your keyboard, that’s Command D for Mac users or you can go select/deselect the hot keys quicker. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to draw a very simple box. I'm just going to draw it out and let go. Now of course it's got no color on and so what you’re going to do is choose a color above this one. You just want make sure you know that you should always draw every single new element on a different layer. So get in here to your color pickup. The first color here is your foreground and background.

When you’re filling a color, you generally want to change the foreground color. So just, click on this and you get this huge color picker come up. And you can type in some values and do it that way or you can use it the easy way and just choose a color here. So I think I'm going to go with a blue. Pick a color press OK. And then the easy way of filling something, well the long way is to go edit and choose fill, the easy way is to hold Alt and press backspace then you can hold control and press D to get rid of that scorchy ends I think that we’re looking at. And you had you’re box, it's on a separate layer so you can switch it on and off and you have your box.

I'm going to create a new layer and we’re gonna do the same with here but we’re going to change it to an elliptical marquee, constrain proportions drag from center to about the same heres so we’ll do a little some a of this. You can also drag the selection the selection around which is useful and I'm going to fill it perhaps with a purple. Hold backspace to fill Control D to deselect and we have our circle. So the ways I generally use for creating shapes, I'm just going to turn them off.

The other way you can use is you have the shaper tools down here. And if you bring out the pop out by clicking and holding, you’ll see there’s tons of shapes. Here we got a rectangle, round, ellipse, polygon, line to accustomed shape tool but we’re just going to stick with rectangle and ellipse. So grab the rectangle, now there’s three ways you can draw out a shape on this. The way and you choose these buddies three buttons up the top here in this bar. Now the one on the far left is draw it as I shape layout. Personally, I hate this shape layout. I mean, I know that they are vector so if you need it be vector this is probably what you want to do; but since I'm rarely ever working on vector I don’t really use it but just to show you how it works you can just drag out your shape, you have this shape and down here on your layouts palate, you see it's created a new layout for you or it's turned the layout on into shape layout and it's completely vector so you can scale it as much as you like and there’s no pixilation, alias edges, etc. so I'm just delete that layer and create a new one.

The second method is this, where you draw it as a path. Now for beginners you want to stick at paths, they’re a little tricky to use. It is possible to use paths to create shapes but we’re going to stick clear of that one completely. And then the final one, which could be quite useful, is fill pixels. We draw it out and it comes with these normal pixels like that and just drawing it out like this, skip the whole process of having to draw out a marquee.

Why I like using the marquee is that I can drag it around before I make it. I can chop it soft, etc. and just to show you how I chop that off, if you hold the Alt key once you go to selection and then click and drag, you can chop parts off and if you hold the Shift key click and drag you can add stuff in. choose your color, fill it and you’re done. The same works for the circular shape too or the ellipse as you meant to call it. And the constrained proportions drag from center where keys are exactly the same this way. So they’re pretty similar, shape tool, cuts out the need for a marquee but the marquee is more editable, changeable and you get more choice before you actually confirm to filling in those pixels.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial for beginners. If you like it, please comment, rate and subscribe but other than that thank you for watching.