Transcript:
Hello. I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial today we’re looking at rotating shapes around a path in Photoshop. This is also a way of evenly spacing shapes along an open path. If you want to do that now before I start the video. Let me tell you where you can find additional training. I have hundreds of classes at Skillshare. Comm. There’s a coupon in the description below, which includes an offer at least as good as the current Skillshare offer and often generally better. If you sign up for Skillshare, you’ll get access to thousands of classes there, including over 200 of mine, please feel free to share this coupon with your family Friends and coworkers back to Photoshop here we’re going to start with the shape that we’re going to rotate along the path, so I’ll choose file new, and I’m going to make a document 200 pixels by 200 pixels in size. Let’s zoom in, I’m going to make a star, so I’ll go to the Polygon tool. Set the sides to 5 from the drop-down list here. I’m going to set it to a star with indented sides by 50% Now it’s important at this stage that you’re working with a shape, so make sure you select shape there and let’s do it on a brand new layer so that we can get a transparent background in a minute. That’s pretty crucial as well. The fill for my shape is going to be red. I’m going to make a red star, so let me just drag out the star. Hold the spacebar as I move it down, so it’s taking up most of this document. It’s now a filled shape, it’s on a separate layer, so I’m going to turn the background off. I’m going to create this as a pattern with edit and define pattern. And I’ll call this red star. I can Trash this document because I don’t need it any longer. And we’ll create a new document to work in this one’s going to be 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels, RGB color mode. You can make yours whatever size that you like to zoom it out at full size ctrl or command 0 going to add a new layer because I’m going to work on new layers. That’s a really good idea because it’s going to keep your star call or your star shape away from the background and allow you a bit more flexibility when you’re working with this document, I’m going to create a path upon which to put my shapes. I’m going to the ellipse tool and this point it’s really critical that you choose path, so we’re being careful about whether we’re creating paths or shapes In this case, it’s a path. I’ll drag out a circle holding a shift key as I do and just sort of Center that up inside the document. If I go to the path’s palette, I’ve got a work path and when I click away, it disappears because it’s a work path. Let’s go back to the layer’s palette, click on the new layer and we’ll choose edit and then fill from the contents Drop-down list. You’ll choose pattern and then from the custom pattern Drop-down list, you’ll want to select the very last pattern, so if you’ve got a lot of patterns, you’ll have to scroll to the end to pick up the pattern you just created. Then you’ll enable this script option and from the drop-down list here, choose place along a path and then click. OK, this dialog allows you to set up. How things are going to look? Unfortunately, it’s not really a hundred percent indicative of what’s going on so. I’m going to show you some of the things that won’t be the same when you put them around the shape and one of them is the size it’s really hard to determine exactly what size the pattern is going to be. This is not correct, so there will be some experimentation, which is why we’re working on a separate layer as well. You’ll adjust the scale of the pattern that’s going to be how much scaling will be applied to the original pattern and adjust the spacing, which is the spacing between the stars. Now, in theory, adjust spacing to fit should ensure that over a circle that your stars are going to be evenly placed around the circle and there won’t be too far away from each other, too close or overlapped at the end now in practice. I’ve had some really really bad results here, and I found in some cases when adjust spacing to fit, doesn’t work and things don’t space out correctly. Turning it off, makes it work just fine, so there is no rule to this, so if you find that when you choose adjust spacing to fit, which should the right setting to use and if that doesn’t work, then go back and try again and disable it, so that’s just a heads up. Everything else is set to zero and either that or turned off, so let’s click. OK, well, things have worked correctly this time, but as I said, it won’t always be the case, and these stars are evenly spaced around this circle When I click away, you can see them now. I had rotations set to zero, so these stars are all traveling really nicely round the circle. If that’s the effect that you want, then that was the setting to use, but let’s go and try a different setting. I’m going to turn off this layer and I’ll turn on a brand new layer. Let’s go to path, select our work path. Make sure that we have it selected and go to edit fill. I’ll just click OK because I want the same original settings, but this is what I’m going to change. I’m going to change the angle from path from 0 to 90 degrees this time and click. OK, this time the stars are going around the path, so it’s different to the previous iteration, so these stars aren’t all exactly in the same place showing that the Stars are rotating around the path. This time and you can just decide which of these two looks is the one that you want to achieve and then choose the setting that will give you that look now. The exact same thing is going to work. If you have a path that is not a circle, but for example, a path that is a line, so let me just get rid of this path and let’s make a path that is aligned. I’m going to use the pen tool and making sure that I have a path selected when I’m drawing it. I’ll select over this shape. Let’s go to the layer’s palette. We’ve got a brand new empty layer. Edit, fill, click. OK, let’s have the. Stars follow the path and for that, we’ll set an angle of 0 and click. OK, and the stars are now placed along that path. So you can use this technique. This fill script to place objects evenly along a pathway, the path be an open path or whether it be something like a circle, draw the shape to use and save it as a pattern that’s critical And then you can place this pattern object along your path. I suggest that you work on separate layers for each of these iterations because it makes life a whole lot easier and make sure that when you’re drawing your path that you’re actually using the path option up here and not shape because it just doesn’t work the same way. I hope that this video has been of help to you and you’ve learned something about Photoshop of which you were previously unaware. If you did enjoy the video, please give it A thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and press the notification bell. So you’ll be alerted when new videos are released until next time. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here at my Youtube channel.