Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Photoshop Vector Sunburst

I have been using sunburst in many of my works. But having to make them repeatedly, led me to see up a tutorial on vector sunburst. In most searches, I landed up here http://www.slicktutorials.com/vector_sunburst. Though it is a good way, but transforming each end of the flower shape is quite tiring. Suddenly, I came across a tip that helped me to create it much easily and faster. So here it is:
  1. Open Photoshop and a new document. I took 400 x 400 pixels.
  2. Set the foreground color to #ff9900 and background to white. Fill the background with white.
  3. Select the Polygon Tool and draw a triangle from top with one edge at the center of the document. Transform (Edit > Free Transform or ctrl + T) the triangle to look like a sunray. See my image below:
  4. Select the Path Selection Tool (A) and click on the vector layer. All the three edges should now have the anchor points.
  5. With the anchor points on, we will transform the layer (Edit > Free Transform or ctrl + T). You should see the bounding box with nine reference points and the middle one selected.
  6. Drag the middle reference point to the middle of the bottom border. Changing the reference point will actually move the center of the object to the new position.
  7. In the set rotation text box, enter 20. Now your shape should have rotated 20 degrees clockwise with the center of the shape at bottom middle border. Hit enter twice to apply the transformation.
  8. Keep the anchor points selected and press ctrl + shift + alt + T. This should create a new set of triangle with a further 20 degree rotation. Repeat ctrl + shift + alt + T, till you complete a circle and get your Sunburst.
  9. Now, you can unselect the vector shape and apply any blending options that you want to apply.
In this method, by keeping the anchor points selected and then doing a transform, you are adding to the vector shape within the main layer itself. This will help you in easily saving the shape as a custom shape.

Alternately, you can just transform & rotate without selecting with the Path Selection Tool, hitting ctrl + shift + alt + T to get individual duplicated layers.

Another beautiful realistic sunburst tutorial I found is here.

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