From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

977 Precisely sizing a vector-based shape layer

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

Start my 1-month free trial

977 Precisely sizing a vector-based shape layer

“

- [Instructor] In this brief movie, I'll show you how to precisely scale a vector-based shape here inside Photoshop, specifically one of these playing cards. Now, as you may be aware, a standard playing card measures two and a half inches wide by three and a half inches tall. And if you will forgive the imperial measurements, but that's how it works. And so, I'm going to switch over to this green felt background, and I'll go ahead and select the rectangle tool from the shape tool fly out menu. You want to make sure that the word shape appears on the far left side of the options bar, so that you're creating an independent vector-based shape layer. Now, instead of dragging with the tool, just go ahead and click in order to bring up this dialog box. Now I want this guy to be two and a half inches wide. How in the world do I express that? Well, I happen to know that the resolution of this image is 300 pixels per inch. So I could enter 2.5 times, so Asterisks 300, like, so, and then press the Tab key and I'll get 750 pixels or for the height which I want to be 3.5 inches tall. You could just enter 3.5 I N like, so, and then press the Tab key. Photoshop will not convert the unit on the fly. It'll just enter a space character before the I N but notice when I click, Okay I do indeed get a three and a half inch tall rectangle. And if I were to go to the Window menu and choose the properties command in order to bring up the properties panel right here, you can see that its height is 1050 pixels, which is the same as 3.5 asterisk 300, and then I'll press the Tab key. And you can see that I get 1050 pixels once again. Now I want to round off the corners. And so I just came up with around this value of 40 pixels notice because all the corners are linked into alignment with each other as a function of this chain icon right here that all of the corners round in kind. And now I'll go ahead and hide the properties panel. Now, at this point it's a little difficult to see what's going on. And so I'm going to switch back to the rectangular marquee tool which has a keyboard shortcut of M and that should be enough to hide all of those handles. The problem is I can't change the fill and the stroke with a marquee tool selected. So I'll switch to the black arrow tool. The one that Photoshop calls, the path selection tool even though it has a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow. And once again, I'm seeing those handles don't have to, however, if I just click off the shape, like so the handles will disappear and I'll still have access to the fill and stroke options up here in the options bar. And so I'm going to click on the color swatch for the stroke and change it to none. And then I'll click on the fill for the swatch notice that have made the card disappear by the way. So it does need to have a fill. And so I'll go ahead and click on this rainbow icon right here to bring up the color picker dialog box. I want to leave the hue and saturation value set to zero but I am going to take the brightness value up to 90% and then click, Okay in order to create this bright gray card. All right, now I'll go ahead and rename the layer card. Now I want to set it off from its background and I'm going to do so using a couple of drop shadows. And so the first thing I'm going to do is switch to my move tool up here at the top of the toolbox which you can also get by pressing the V key. Then I'll just go ahead and drag this guy over so I can preview what's happening. And then I'll click on the FX icon down here at the bottom of the layers panel and I'll choose drop shadow, and I'll go and move this guy over so I can better see what I'm doing. Notice that the color is set to black. The blend mode is multiply. I'm going to take the opacity value up to 50%. And then with the use global light checkbox turned on very important. We'll see why in just a moment, I'll change this value to 135 degrees, and then I'll tap my way down to the distance value, set it to 20 pixels and tab down the size and set it to 10 pixels like so. I'm going to leave the spread value set to 0%. All right, that does a pretty good job of offsetting the right-hand and bottom edges of the card. However, if I had two cards on top of each other this isn't going to work out so well I'll show you what I mean, I'll click Okay. And then I'll create a duplicate of this card by pressing the Alt key or the option key on the Mac and dragging it over to the right. And so notice that the left edge is just merging into the car to the left of it. That's not what I want. I want some clear definition, like so and so what I'm going to do is press Control Z or Command Z on the Mac a couple of times to undo those changes. And I'm going to add another drop shadow by double-clicking on the existing one here, inside the layers panel. And then I'll click on this little plus sign right there in order to add a second drop shadow and I'm going to change its settings. So first I'm going to crank the opacity value up to a hundred percent and then I'm going to change the angle value. But before I do, I need to turn off use global light because otherwise I'll change the angle of the other drop shadow as well. So turn that checkbox off and then change the angle to 45 degrees so that the drop shadow is going in the opposite direction that is down and to the left. And now I'll tab to the distance value and set it to six and then I'll tap to the size value and set it to six as well. So that we have this nice definition on the left-hand side of the card, and then I'll click, Okay. And to show you what that looks like I'll Alt or option drag the card over to the right so that you can see that we have these nicely defined playing cards. All right, now let's say you want to put a King for example, inside the card then just go ahead and undo the duplication of that card. Twirl closed as well. Switch over to this image right here, King of diamonds dot JPEG, and I'll press the M key to select the rectangular marquee tool. And I'll just drag basically inside this blue edge like so. In order to select the King and a little bit more and then I'll press Control C or Command C on the Mac to copy it, I'll switch back to my composition and progress and press Control V or Command V on a Mac in order to pace that card, I'll go ahead and this layer King like so and then we'll clip it inside the card by pressing the Alt key or the option key on the Mac and clicking that horizontal line underneath the King layer. So between King and card and notice that goes ahead and clips the King like so. I'll press the V key to switch back to the move tool and drag the King into a better location. And then I'll use the arrow keys to nudge the King so that I'm not seeing those blue outlines. And finally, I want to burn the King into that light gray card by changing the blend mode from normal to multiply. All right, now I'll go ahead and select both of these layers by clicking on one shift, clicking on the other, click on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner of the layers panel and choose new group from layers. And I'll call this guy King of diamonds, let's say and then I'll click Okay. And now if I wanted to duplicate both the card and the King, I will press the Alt key or the option key on the Mac and drag with my move tool in order to create this effect right here. All right, so I promise this was going to be a brief movie. It went a little bit long, but gosh, it was worth it because I was able to show you how to precisely scale a vector-based shape layer here inside Photoshop.

Contents