Creating Custom Shapes in Photoshop

You don’t need to buy, or even download for free any custom shapes to use in Photoshop, it’s so easy to create your own custom shapes to use as watermarks or just generally use in your Photoshop adventures.

What are custom shapes?
Custom shapes are generally used for all types of Photoshop applications to save the hassle of creating or drawing shapes that you may use frequently or infrequently when using Photoshop.
These custom shapes could be arrows, letters of the alphabet or copyright symbols, some of which come loaded with Photoshop.

Free downloads are available but are usually limited in their use and the number you can download free of charge.
If you need full sets you will doubtless have to pay and although these custom shapes are not that expensive, why pay when you can create your own and use them free of charge.

Thirdly, right click on the folder and click on Extract Here.Open Photoshop.

If I download, how do I install custom shapes?
Installation of downloaded files is a simple task and instructions usually come with the downloaded .zip file.
I will go through the procedure just in case you didn’t get the instruction file.
First of all, if you downloaded a .zip file. Create a folder on your desktop called Custom Shapes.
Secondly, drag the .zip file into the folder.

1. Open Photoshop
2. Make sure that “Custom Shapes” is selected. Custom shapes is located on the Toolbar under the Rectangle tool. Click on the small drop down arrow and choose “Custom Shapes”
3. When this tool is selected you will see the selections for the custom shape tool in the tool bar across the top of the screen.
4. In this toolbar click on the drop down arrow to the right of the “Shape” icon.
5. In the screen that appears with the shapes on, click on the arrow to the right of the screen.
6. From the context menu that appears select “Load Shapes”
7. In the navigation screen that appears, navigate to the folder that you unzipped the downloaded file to and select the .csh file.
8. The shapes you downloaded will be placed in your Custom Shapes.
9. You should be able to see them immediately.
10. You can delete shapes from this screen by simply right clicking and choosing “delete”

Okay, back to my original content which was;
How to create your own Custom Shapes.
Firstly, the easiest form to create a custom shape from is to use some of the text fonts that are already on your computer.
A handy font for shapes, besides the normal fonts which will give you a selection of useful text shapes, is the font Windings.
This font will give you a selection of arrows and other useful shapes.
I recommend that you have a peek at some of the fonts before we proceed with our shape creation.
Below are the Windings and Zapf Dingbats shapes available.
Feel free to download a copy of the pictures for reference.

Also remember that even “normal” fonts often produce symbols and special characters when you add in the Option/Alt key.

Any of these shapes can be used to create custom shapes in Photoshop.
Here’s how to produce a custom shape from a symbol or, for that matter, any type character:

1.Start Photoshop and create a new document image of any size. Fonts and custom shapes are vector based so the image size is irrelevant as they can be re-sized later.

2.Select the Type tool in the Toolbox and in the Options Bar, select your symbol font. Remember that the font size should be compatible with the size of your new document. You want the character to fit completely within the document, but it need not fill the canvas.

3. Type in a single character. I used the font Webdings and the letter lower case h

4. Confirm the text entry. You can do this in several ways,  by clicking the check mark button at the right-end of the Options Bar. Switch tools in the Toolbox or, on the keyboard press Command-Return (Mac) or Control-Enter (Windows).

5. Use the menu command Layer> Type> Convert to Shape.

6. With the newly-created shape layer still active in the Layers Palette, use the menu command Edit> Define Custom Shape.

7. Give the new shape a name and click OK.

The next step is optional but I recommend you do it anyway.

When you you’ve created a number of new custom shapes, you’ll probably want to save them for future use and while these user-defined custom shapes appear in the Custom Shapes palette from day to day, they’re not really saved until you record them separately.

Use the menu command Edit> Preset Manager.

In the dialog box, Shift-click on the new shapes you’ve created.
Click the Save Set button.
Give the set a name and pick a location, then click OK.

Don’t forget you should save all your custom shapes, as well as Actions, styles, swatches, etc., in a folder outside the Photoshop folder.

This reduces the risk of inadvertently losing your collections should you ever need to re-install Photoshop.

Ken Trueman