Far from secret are the abounding, extensive, and sometimes hilarious capabilities of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is used in many different industries and very often in web design companies such as Websitedzyn.com a web design company. From the everyday touch-ups to the hours of meticulous design, Photoshop is there for you; tireless and dependable. With this familiarity, however, often comes a forgetfulness of just how in-depth Photoshop is, and many may simply ignore some basic features that provide a lot of usefulness. Compound Shape Paths are one of these oft-neglected features.

By thinking a little bit outside the box and clever manipulation of default Custom Shapes, Photoshop can become a seemingly limitless potential for professional, custom shape vectors that you can use anywhere. To fully appreciate compound paths, a good starting point would be learning the capabilities that are provided when joining two paths. When joining (compounding) custom shapes, one shape can add to the shape layer, subtract from the shape layer, intersect shape areas, or exclude overlapping areas with another shape.

When you choose to add to the shape layer, the effect is pretty much as it sounds. While the first shape retains its shape, the second shape only adds to the first shape. For instance, if you have a triangle and then place a square with the add to shape layer option, you will have the silhouette of a house.

The end result from using subtract from shape layer is also quite predictable. The filled-in portion of the first shape will be changed based on the position of the second shape. If you draw a simple circle and then draw a smaller circle in the center of it using subtract from shape layer, you will end up with a ring (the smaller circle provides negative space to the first circle).

It starts to get interesting when you start using the latter options, such as intersect shape areas. With this option, the only visible portion left after both shapes are placed is the area in which they intersect. Let's say you draw a 10 point star with the custom shape tool. If you strategically place a circle frame custom shape over the top of it using intersect shape areas, you will end up with a very simple, very effective machine gear.

The most difficult to effectively use of the compound shape options might be exclude overlapping areas. Pretty much the opposite of the previous option, exclude overlapping areas only shows the areas in which two shapes do not overlap. Now, if we are talking about the effectiveness of compounding shapes, it might seem a bit strange to have an option that only shows areas in which the shapes are not compounded, but it still does have its uses. The option promotes the use of negative space, which is popular in a lot of modern company logos and such. While it does the same thing as subtract from shape layer, it also adds the portion that is not subtracting from the first shape, so this option should be used when one is attempting to join two shapes that must keep all of their shape, while still being combined.

While knowing is half the battle, design would be a pretty droll war if not for the unrestrained imagination of designers such as those working at Websitedzyn.com a New Port Richey web design company. Now that you have been made aware (or reminded) of a very simple-but-useful technique, get back out there and see what you can do with it. Lay down some of your creativity with your technical know-how using intersect shape areas.