From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

Adjusting the roundness of a rectangle - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

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Adjusting the roundness of a rectangle

- [Narrator] Now our first project is a relatively basic one in which we'll create a total of four shape layers as you can see over here inside the layers panel. Including this dotted border, these six scissors, this five pointed star and this custom gear. And we're going to start things off in this movie by drawing a rounded rectangle and editing the roundness of each one of its corners. And so I'll go ahead and switch over to the starter document and then I'll click and hold on the Active Shape Tool to bring a fly up menu that begins with the rectangle tool and ends with the custom shape tool. And you can see that we've got a keyboard shortcut of U which is the second letter in the word Custom. And so if you tap that key, you're going to select the active shape tool and then if you want to cycle from one shape to the next you press shift u. Now because we want to create a rounded rectangle, you might draw it with the rounded rectangle tool, that's just fine but you can just as easily draw it with a standard rectangle tool which is what I'm going to do. Now notice up here in the options bar this first pop up menu by default it's set to shape and that's exactly what we want. That way we'll automatically create a vector based shape layer. You can also choose path which allows you to create an empty path outline inside the paths panel. And we'll see what that looks like at length in the pen tool chapter in the Mastery course. And then we have this third option, pixels, which is just going to modify the pixels on the active pixel based layer. Obviously that's not what we want. So, go ahead and select shape and then draw a rectangle that's about yay big like so. And you should know there's a few keyboard tricks you can take advantage of. If you press and hold the shift key, then you will draw a square as I'm doing right now. And you want to press the shift key after you begin dragging not before. By the way, if at any time you release the shift key, you will return to an unconstrained rectangle. The other thing you can do is press and hold the alt key or the option key on the Mac at which point you'll create the point from the center outward. If you want to create a square from the center out, then you press and hold both the shift and alt keys. That's shift and option on a Mac. However, I'm going to release all those keys because there's one other key trick that is probably the most useful of them all and that's that you can press the space bar in order to move the shape on the fly. And that way you can get it more or less where you want it and then release the space bar to continue scaling the shape. And then after you finish, go ahead and release in order to create a new shape layer as we're seeing over here inside the layers panel. Now, by default the second you release, the properties panel will spring up on screen. If that's not what you want and it can get a little tedious at times, then go ahead and click on that fly up menu icon on the upper right corner of the panel and turn off this command, "Show on Shape Creation." And that way if I now hide the properties panel and draw another rectangle which will appear on its own independent shape layer, I'm not seeing the properties panel. And I want you to see that Photoshop is smart enough to automatically name the shape layers. And so in my case, I've got rectangle one and rectangle two. I don't really need rectangle two so just press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. It's not working for me, however, and that's because I'm working in Windows and the last pop up menu I touched is sticky and so any time that happens to you, just press the Escape key and then try pressing backspace or delete again and this time it should work. All right, now I'm going to go ahead and rename this layer, "Border," because that's what it's going to be. And then I'll go to the window menu and choose the properties panel in order to bring it up on screen. Now notice down here in this midsection that we can adjust the roundness of each and every corner independently. Now, by default the four values are locked into agreement with each other and so let's say I changed any one of these values to 100 pixels, then that would change the roundness of all four corners in kind. If that's not what I want, if I want to adjust one corner independently of the others, then you want to turn off the link icon at which point it appears without a square around it and then, I will once again change the same value for the bottom left corner to zero like so and I have one sharp corner and three others round. So you have that level of control. All right, now let's say I really want to change the roundness radius of all the corners to 36 pixels. Then I'll go ahead and turn the link back on and change this value to 36. But if I do, and now press the enter key or the return key on the Mac, you can see, I just went ahead and added 36 to all three of the other values. And so if you want to reset things so that we have parody, then notice these numerical entries right there. This big string of rounded corners. If I click right there in front of the one that's just 36 instead of 136, and enter a one and then press the enter key or the return key on a Mac, then I change that one value independently even though the four values are technically linked into alignment. And then, now that I've done that, I can go ahead and select any one of these ones right there and press the backspace key or the delete key to get rid of it and then press the enter key or the return key on a Mac. And as you can see, that forces all four of the values to update in kind. Now let's say I have some specific values that I want to enter here. For example, right now I've got a width value of 1516 pixels, that's a little high so I'm going to go ahead and take that value down to 1512 pixels and then I'm going to tab over to the height value and I'm going to change it to 684 pixels like so. And notice that that resizes the shape with respect to its upper left corner, the location of which is indicated by X and Y coordinates. All right, having done all that, I'm going to go ahead and hide the properties panel. And that's how you draw a rounded rectangle with either the rounded rectangle or standard rectangle tool and adjust the roundness of each one of its corners from the properties panel. In the next movie I'll show you how to trace this shape with a dotted border.

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