Sunday Helper - Cutting Photos Into Shapes

Good morning!  Hope you are enjoying a nice relaxing Memorial Day weekend.  When creating our layouts, sometimes we get stuck in a rut when placing our photos on a page.  Usually it's in a square, rectangle or circle shape.  I rarely use the cookie cutter tool, so I thought I'd investigate how that tool works and experiment with different custom shapes.  It's amazing to explore all the shapes that are loaded with your Photoshop software.  If you click on the cookie cutter button, then click on the shapes button on the top row, you'll get a listing of all the arrow shapes I've selected.  To find more shapes, click on the double black arrows and all your shapes will be displayed.  You can use these shapes to create elements or to create a mat or background shape for your photos.

Here's a photo I wanted to cut into different shapes.   First I tried the crop shapes and chose a mask.

That cut my photo like this.

Here's a puzzle shape. 

And here's a heart shape.

You can cut your photos into custom shapes using the cookie cutter tool, or you can use the custom shapes tool to first create a shape on your page then clip a photo to it.  So your homework is to go check out all the custom shapes you have preloaded in your software.  If you need more shapes, you can always do an internet search on "Photoshop custom shapes" and you'll find tons of free custom shapes to download.  Have some fun experimenting with your shapes this week.  Enjoy the long holiday weekend!