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

How vector-based shape layers work - Photoshop Tutorial

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

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How vector-based shape layers work

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how vector based shape layers work inside Photoshop. Now the first thing you want to know is that like text layers, vector based shape layers are resolution independent. So you can scale and rotate and otherwise transform them as much as you like and you'll get no degradation in quality. And so, for example, you can see over here inside the layers panel that we have a total of five layers. One is an image based layer at the bottom of the stack. Then we have a couple of text layers that represent this text around an ellipse and then we have these two shape layers. And you can tell that they're resolution independent vector based shape layers by the appearance of these squares adorned by corner points in the lower right corners of their thumbnails. And those shape layers, by the way, represent these greenish pointing fingers. You might just be able to make them out in the corners of the image as well as this purple crown. And incidentally, each and every shape layer gets one fill and one stroke. Now you create shape layers using the shape tools which begin with the rectangle tool and end with the custom shape tool. And they have a keyboard shortcut of U which is the second letter in the word custom. But what may interest you more at this point is why we're looking at such a very tiny document and to give you a sense of how big it is, I'll go ahead and click on this information in the lower left corner of the screen. And you can see that the image has a width of 170 pixels and a height of 110 pixels. Which means we have a total of 18,700 pixels and that is it, inside this document. But it shouldn't really matter because we're working with vector based objects. Now if you're familiar with the traditional vector drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator, then you know you can zoom in on your path outlines and get greater clarity. That is not the case inside Photoshop. If I zoom beyond 100%, my pixels are going to just grow as we're seeing here, until we eventually see the pixel grid at 600%. And that's because Photoshop is incapable of doing anything but growing pixels beyond 100%. It doesn't matter whether the layers are pixel based layers, text layers or shape layers, you still see pixels on screen. However, you can scale this artwork if you like by first going back out to 100% which I'm doing by pressing Control + 1 or Command + 1 on a Mac, and then I'll go up to the image menu and choose the image size command or I could press Control + Alt + I or Command + Option + I on the Mac, and as you can see, I've stretched my image size dialog box so it's taking up the entire screen. But my preview is very small indeed. Alright, what you want to do if you're working along with me, is make sure the resample check box is turned on. And then you want to set your width and height units to percent. And now I'm going to go ahead and change either value 'cause they're linked together, to 500% like so. And it really doesn't matter what you set the interpolation to. For example, I might set it to something just horrible like nearest neighbor, which is just going to blow up the pixels. At least that's what I'm seeing here inside the image size dialog box. The thing about the image size preview is that it doesn't take into account resolution independent objects inside Photoshop. So at this point it's not providing us with an accurate preview. The only way we're going to see things for real is to click OK and let Photoshop do its thing. And not only did that take no time at all, you can see that while the pixel based image layer didn't fare too well, everything else scaled beautifully. And you can do that as many times as you want. So I could go ahead and return to the image menu and once again choose the image size command and I will again enter a width value of 500% we are once again seeing big pixels here inside the preview but as soon as I click OK we get nothing but absolute wonderful clarity as you're seeing here. So everything is super sharp including our editable text and our vector based shape layer. Alright I'm going to go ahead and press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on a Mac to center my zoom and you can now see that we've gone from this tiny little itty bitty document in the middle of the paste board to an image that's taking up my entire screen at the 25% view size. And if I were to click on this information in the lower left corner, you can see that the width of the image is now 4,250 and the height is 2,750, meaning that we now have a total of 11 million, 687 thousand, 500 pixels. Which means we're looking at 625 times as many pixels as we were at the beginning of this movie. Now things get even better if we had been working with a smart object. So take a look at this document right here. It's the same image except instead of having a pixel based image at the bottom we have a smart object with a ton of information inside of it. And so that means, if I return to the image menu and choose the image size command or I would normally just press Control + Alt + I or Command + Option + I on a Mac, then I could just go ahead and increase the width value to something like 2500%, which is 500 times 500, so the same operation we applied last time. It looks of course terrible here inside the preview, to the point that we really can't even read the text. However, if I click OK in order to apply that modification you can see that everything is looking absolutely great. Including that smart object in the background. And so now if I press Control + 0 or Command + 0 on a Mac, we have a stunning looking image.

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