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Chapter 14: Shapes and Styles
Adobe Soup
As any longtime user of Adobe products will tell you, things were sure a lot simpler in the old days. You wanted to work in a pixel-based environment, touching up photos and creating artistic images? Photoshop was the only place to be. You wanted to work with vectors, creating object-based art with razor-sharp edges? Illustrator was made just for you. You wanted to create motion graphics for video? Look no further than After Effects, my friend.But now, things are different. Many people actually use After Effects as an image editor, completely ignoring that program's powerhouse animation capabilities and just taking advantage of its immensely flexible effects palette, arguably a better way to work with filters than Photoshop provides. Illustrator is giving bitmap graphics a full body hug now, signified by the fact that pixels are now one of the built-in units of measurement available to you. And although Photoshop's paths have always been vector-based, the shape tools bring all the advantages of drawing with vectors into Photoshop, ensuring that anything you create with them will stay sharp, whether the final destination is a high-end printer or the World Wide Web.And it doesn't stop there; Adobe InDesign has extremely capable vector tools as well; Photoshop Elements can create animated GIFs, just like ImageReady; and After Effects outputs to the Flash format, just like LiveMotion, Adobe's dedicated Web animation tool. Sometimes it seems that all these products will eventually converge into one towering Swiss army knife of a graphics application, and when someone admires your work and asks what program you used to create it, you'll simply answer: "I did it in Adobe Amalgam 1.0."
Until that day arrives, we'll have to take things piecemeal. First up in this chapter are Photoshop's aforementioned shape tools. These permit you to draw object-oriented paths filled with anything from solid colors to gradients to photographic images. Other bitmap image-editing programs may have done it before Photoshop did, but as is so often the case, none has done it better.Next, we turn our attention to layer styles. While the promise of "instant drop shadows and glows" might sound at first like a cheap trick unworthy of inclusion in Photoshop's professional high-end tool set, layer styles have proven to be an invaluable addition. Not only do they give you painstaking control over drop shadows, glows, and bevels, but you can coat layers with gradients, patterns, and contoured wave patterns, as well as trace outlines around layers. When combined with the advanced blending options introduced in Chapter 13, layer styles blossom into a powerful special-effects laboratory, one of the most far-reaching and flexible Adobe has ever delivered. Furthermore, you can save the effects and reapply them to future layers.These features may not be the reason you set out to learn Photoshop in the first place, and there's no question that they'll take time and patience to fully understand. But you'll be rewarded with greater proficiency and versatility in the long run — and you'll be that much further down the road to mastery when the Day of the Grand Adobe Convergence finally arrives.
