Painting and Drawing - Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 for Photographers - page 340

The Cookie Cutter tool is a two-step feature that crops your pictures in the shape of one of
many 'cookie' designs that Elements is shipped with. The feature is a great way to add inter-
esting edge effects to your pictures.
Cookie Cutter workflow:
1 Open an image to crop and select the Cookie Cutter tool from the toolbox.
2 Click the Shape button in the options bar to reveal the pop-up menu of cookie
shapes. Select the shape to use.
3 To soften the edge of the cookie cutter crop, add a Feather value in the options
bar before you drag the shape.
4 Optional - Select the Crop option if you want the image cropped to the edge of
the shape.
5 Click and drag the tool over the surface of the picture. Let the mouse button go
and click and drag the edge handles to adjust the size of the cookie shape to suit
the picture.
6 Double-click inside the cookie shape or click the tick icon in the options bar to
crop.
Shapes and graphics in the Graphics pane
Recent versions of Elements include a panel that groups together
a range of different graphics and shapes content. The content is
available in the Graphics panel accessible through the Window
menu (Window>Graphics) and also in the Create tab. This is
a central location for storing frames, backgrounds, styled text,
shapes and themes options and is a key place to look for small
picture elements to add to compositions when you are creating
photo creations such as Photo Books and Photo Collages.
You will find a large variety of shapes and graphics stored in the
panel and it is for this reason that I have included details of the
feature here. Both groups of picture elements are vector-based
(resolution independent) and so can be scaled, rotated, twisted
and distorted to fit your compositions with no loss in quality.
Unlike the Custom Shape tool though, you do not need to draw
the shape onto the canvas surface: simply double-click on the
thumbnail of your choice.
You can also draw shapes and add graphics to your Pho-
to Layouts by dragging them from the Shapes section of
the Graphics pane.