Urgent PS query

[rubric]

I need to draw some boxes in Photoshop CS with coloured outlines but no fill. The boxes must be resizable, and it'll be good if I can specify the thickness of the outlines too. How can this be done? Please help as I need to know urgently for work, preferably by today. Many thanks!

 

[justyn]

Hi
Depends on which version of Photoshop you are using, but in CS2 you can use the Custom Shape tool. There's an empty square/rectangle tool in there which just gives you a colour border.

If not then I would suggest using a separate layer then:
Draw the box with your rectangle marquee
Fill with colour
Go to Selct>Modify>Contract and reduce the size of the square by however many pixels you want
Delete

There you have an outline box... If you keep it on a separate layer then you can always use the Scale command to change it's size

Hope that helps
J

 

[justyn]

One more thing...

If your office has Illustrator then I would do it in Illustrator frist and then export to PS
J

 

[catchlights]

draw these boxes in a layer, go to layer style, chose stroke, you can specify the color and thickness of the outlines, and able to resize the boxes anytime still maintain the same outlines.

Hope this help.

 

[theRBK]

1) Draw box with rectangle tool
2) Go to blending options of the layer, change Fill to 0%,
3) In blending options window, select Stroke option at the bottom left of the window.
4) In the Stroke window that appears, adjust the stroke size, "Position" change to "Inside" if you want sharp corners.
5) Change colour to choice.

And you have the outlined box. As the rectangle tool draws the box in a vector format, ie. the points are mathematically defined, you can resize the box to any size and proportion as much as you want without causing deterioration to the shape. Should be able to use this in any recent version of PS

 

[rubric]

Wow. You guys are the best! Thought I knew quite a bit about PS but couldn't even do something so simple :embrass: Thank you so very much!
By the way, is this kind of topic ever covered in most PS books--I thought it's 'too simple' a technique--or did you find out yourself?