Making An Empty Circle

An Empty Circle

Yes, I know: What's she on about now?

Well, I was working on a design (for a special event happening later this year) and I wanted to enclose it in a circle. Sounds simple enough, right? In the "old days", I would have just drawn the circle using a compass and that would be that. But it became more complicated than that (as things tend to become).

So off I go to the Photoshop.

Simple enough...you'd think. Just go to the shape icon and click on the shape you want...or so you would think.

Photoshop doesn't offer  Circles, only Ellipses.

So how do you make a Circle?

Hold down the Shift key as you drag the icon shape across the canvas.

Now you have a circle...except that it is a solid shape, not empty.

How do you make an Empty Circle?

Start again.

1. Make sure your foreground colour is white.

2. Click on the shape icon and drag the cursor across the canvas to the desired size.

3. Then go to the fx icon in the Layers Palette and in the pop-up window click on Stroke.

4.  Now you can not only make the circle any colour you want but you can also change how thin or thick you want the line to be. ( I've shown it as an ellipse below).