More about Custom Shapes in Photoshop and where to find them.

By Jennifer Farley | Sep 4 2008 |

Last week I posted a tutorial about how to make speech bubbles in Photoshop. A few readers asked about how to add additional custom shapes to Photoshop. So this post is about how to load them up and also where to find more custom shapes. If you haven’t used them before, it can be a little bit confusing about where to put them, but it’s easy once you know how! Shapes are great because they are vectors rather than raster (brushes in Photoshop are rasters). Once you draw the shape you can fill it or stroke it with whatever colours you like.

Loading custom shapes into Photoshop.

So let’s say you find some cool shapes on the web, now you have to make them available to Photoshop. Download the shape file, which has an extension of .csh and save it into the custom shapes folder.

The custom shapes folder is inside the Photoshop/Presets folder. Here’s the path on my computer;

Once you’ve copied the shapes file into the correct folder, open Photoshop and pick the Custom shape tool from the toolbox.

On the tool options bar, click on the drop down arrow beside the shape. Then click on the small triangle in the top right of the shapes drop down box.

This opens up another dropdown box and from here choose Load, then select the .csh file that you had downloaded.

You can choose to replace the existing shapes in the box or append them. It doesn’t really matter because all of your shapes are still safe in the custom shapes folder.

Where to find custom shapes
DeviantArt is probably the best place to start. This site is falling down with shapes (and lots of other Photoshop goodies that the good people of deviant art like to share). Here’s some that I particularly liked, found useful or funny.

The Skyline Collection Hebedesignis definitely one of my favourite places for shapes. There is an eclectic collection of shapes - everything from the Pope to Revolutionary figures - perfect for when you’re planning a coup and need to make some posters! Here you can see the Skyline Collection by hebedesign are a very nice set of shapes.They include the skylines of New York (with twin towers), Seattle, San Francisco, London and Sydney - plus separate Statue of Liberty.

Luke Roberts, Photoshop Shapes Luke Roberts also has a good collection of shapes. I’ve used the World Maps several times. Other shapes include skateboarders, guns and aircraft.

Yolks Emoti are a set of very cute, hand drawn emoticons with personality.

Kiddy Stuff Stuff Kiddy Stuff by hikaridrops is a nice set of kiddy style drawings of objects. There are 72 in the set.

Sunbursts Photoshop Shapes Backflip offers a set of 30 Sunbursts. Useful for backgrounds on the web and print.

Outside deviantArt, check out the following;

Biorust Logo Biorust is a design community with tutorials, tips and resources. They have a small section dedicated to shared Photoshop shapes. You’ll need to sign up (for free) to download them.

My Photoshop Brushes - specialises in …. Photoshop brushes, but they also have a small section dedicated to shapes with some nice stuff in there.

Adobe Photoshop Exchange has a mixture of free and paid-for shapes on just about every topic you can think of.

Comments

5 Responses to “More about Custom Shapes in Photoshop and where to find them.”

Zhu on September 4th, 2008 3:23 pm

Thanks for sharing your resources!
Jennifer Farley on September 4th, 2008 6:19 pm

You’re very welcome Zhu!
Tracey Grady on September 12th, 2008 11:41 am

Well done for putting together a post on this topic - I haven’t seen anyone look into this before. Also, I haven’t been to any of these sites before - I’d better change that soon!
Jennifer Farley on September 12th, 2008 1:57 pm

Hi Tracey

Thanks. There seems to be more of a fixation on brushes as opposed to shapes, but shapes are so handy because they’re vectors.
Doug C. on October 3rd, 2008 2:29 am

Jennifer, thanks for sharing. The links are great. Not a big fan of DemonArt, but they do have some useful items. I make a lot of my own shapes, but it never hurts to have some extras lying around.

Doug C.s last blog post..Characters Welcome