Variety of Shapes tool

[Nancy6107]

In Affinity Photo the Shapes tool, which is beside the Type tool, only has 21 geometric shapes. Are there more hidden away somewhere? Photoshop, and Photoshop Elements, have several categories of shapes that can be accessed, and so I am wondering if I just haven't discovered them in AP. They can be very useful.

Thank you,

Nancy

[gdenby]

Hi, Nancy6107,

The Affinity shapes tool create are for "parametric" shapes. These are geometric primitives, and can be manipulated in various ways. Stars, for instance, can have any number of rays. The speech callout has quite a few variations similar to shape d-loads I've seen for Photoshop.

Affinity has an "assets" library that can be used to save any number of pre-made shapes to drop into a document as needed. These seem to be like what Photoshop calls "shapes." There is a  default category called icons that has a few shapes that are like what I recall from Photoshop. While there are quite a few user created brushes and object layer styles available, I don't know of any icon assets at this time.

Also, the Affinity suite will load d-loaded .svg shapes, thousands out there, which could be saved as an asset as you like.

[v_kyr]

AFAIK no, there aren't any other hidden shapes available. Affinity Designer (but not APhoto) offers Assets handling where you can add own shapes and the like.

[Alfred]

 

[Nancy6107]

Thank you. It's a great video and I have played with these shapes--although not as artistically as the video-maker. In Photoshop there are animals, flowers, nature, and a lot of design elements that would be very difficult to create myself, and that is what I was looking for. If I manage to make a shape that I like, would I just save it as an afphoto file so that I could still manipulate it, and then bring it into a document when I wanted to use it? It sounds as if this would be able to be saved as an asset in Designer, but not in Photo.

Cheers,

Nancy

[Nancy6107]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

AFAIK no, there aren't any other hidden shapes available. Affinity Designer (but not APhoto) offers Assets handling where you can add own shapes and the like.

Thank you. That's what I was afraid of. Maybe that feature will be added in the future. 

Nancy

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, Nancy6107 said:

In Photoshop there are animals, flowers, nature, and a lot of design elements that would be very difficult to create myself, and that is what I was looking for.

In that case, Nancy, this is probably the way to go:

1 hour ago, gdenby said:

Also, the Affinity suite will load d-loaded .svg shapes, thousands out there

 

[v_kyr]

16 hours ago, Nancy6107 said:

Thank you. That's what I was afraid of. Maybe that feature will be added in the future.

Well that's just a comfort feature for keeping and arranging them app internal and having them inside the app available/accessable. Of course you can always do as alfred suggested and load in whatever external file shapes you like, as far as those are available in a by the Affinity import option supported file format.

[Nancy6107]

That's good to know. It's not something I need, or even use often. I just keep discovering new features in AP and so I thought I'd ask in case they were there and I hadn't come across them yet. The flexibility of the shapes that are provided does allow for a lot of creativity.

Nancy

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

you can always do as alfred suggested and load in whatever external file shapes you like

Credit where credit’s due! It was @gdenby who suggested that.

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

Credit where credit’s due! It was @gdenby who suggested that.

Ah Ok so @gdenby get's the price!

[R C-R]

On 10/25/2018 at 2:35 PM, v_kyr said:

AFAIK no, there aren't any other hidden shapes available.

 

(To let the cat out of the bag, click here)

Edited October 27, 2018 by R C-R
added some tiny type ;)

[firstdefence]

Adobe PS Custom Shapes.svg

[R C-R]

Yet another source for pre-made shapes is decorative fonts like Zapf Dingbats, Webdings, or Bodoni Ornaments, although there may be copyright restrictions on their use.

[Alfred]

20 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Yet another source for pre-made shapes is decorative fonts like Zapf Dingbats, Webdings, or Bodoni Ornaments, although there may be copyright restrictions on their use.

Sites such as DaFont.com offer large collections of dingbat fonts, but they’re often only free for personal use. Open-source fonts such as those released under the SIL OFL are free to use for any purpose, including the creation of modified versions of the font files.

Font vendors usually include some free fonts in their catalogues. If you search for dingbats on a site such as MyFonts.com and sort the results by price (low to high) you can easily find some interesting freebies.

[Nancy6107]

Thanks for this link. Can I import these shapes individually into AP in some way? Are they like fonts? I opened the file and they are all on the same page. I haven't seen this type of file before.

Thank you,

Nancy

[Alfred]

12 minutes ago, Nancy6107 said:

I opened the file and they are all on the same page.

Although they are all on the same page, each shape is on its own layer. So you can easily copy individual shapes and paste them into another document.

[R C-R]

15 minutes ago, Nancy6107 said:

Thanks for this link. Can I import these shapes individually into AP in some way? Are they like fonts? I opened the file and they are all on the same page. I haven't seen this type of file before.

For svg files like the one mentioned by @firstdefence you can open the file in Affinity Photo & select individual items from the Layers panel, copy them to the clipboard, & paste them into another Affinity Photo document.

EDIT: @αℓƒяє∂ beat me to it!

[Alfred]

Just now, R C-R said:

For svg files like the one mentioned by @firstdefence you can open the file in Affinity Photo & select individual items from the Layers panel, copy them to the clipboard, & paste them into another Affinity Photo document.

Snap! 

While I’m still here, I might as well take the opportunity to mention that OpenClipart.org has a huge collection of free SVG files (about a hundred and fifty thousand when I checked just now).