20 Creative Tips For Using Mac Markup Tool Shapes

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using shapes in the markup tools on your Mac. So when you're using the markup tools, whether it's in the Preview app or directly with PDFs or images in other apps like Mail and Photos, you can draw a variety of different shapes right onto the content. So you get to the markup tools in Preview by clicking on the Show Markup Toolbar button here. Then you have a variety of different markup tools. The ones we're going to be talking about here are the shape tools. You click on the Shapes button. You have eight different primary tools. That's what we're going to be looking at. And the first one here is a line. If you click that, it will add a line into the middle of the view of your document. You could change where the line goes to and from by dragging one of the blue dots on either end. You can also grab another part of the line, as long as you see the pointer is changed to a hand, and you can drag the entire thing around like that. Now to change the thickness of the line, you want to go to this tool here, which is the Shape Style. You click there. The first set of items are line thicknesses. Let's pick something in the middle, and you can see how it changes the thickness of the line. If you want to change the color, the button next to it, the border color, is how you change the line color. So you can pick from one of these little color squares here, or click Show Colors, and it brings up the entire color wheel and color picker interface. Now you may have noticed that in addition to the blue dots, there's this green dot in the middle. You can change the straight line into a curve by grabbing this dot here, and you could pull it to any location you want, and that will change how the line curves. So you can have the line be a curve in a variety of different ways. You can bring it really close to one of the two points like that, or just something in the middle, anywhere you want. Next to line here in the shapes is another type of line that has an arrowhead at one end. I can select that, and you can see I get a line, but it's got an arrowhead at the other end. This is actually the same shape. You can start with a line like this, and when you select it, notice if I go to the shape styles here, there are left, right, and both arrowheads here that you can select. So you can select one of those, and it changes to basically this shape. You can also select that shape there, and then take away the arrowhead by selecting just a regular line. Once you have an arrowhead here, whether at one end or both ends, it will stay there if you curve the line. It also will change its size based on the thickness of the rest of the line. Now, in addition to these thicknesses, you have some other options for the line style as well. For instance, you can have a dashed line like this. You could also have it drawn in a kind of a crown or ink kind of line here. It's kind of a more playful version of the line. You don't have any options with these. You can't make, for instance, the dashes closer together or anything like that. You do have the option, though, to turn on a drop shadow. If you select that, then there's a slight shadow underneath. If, for instance, you're using markup tools here in a photo, a shadow can make all the difference. A line like this, for instance, stand out a lot more if there's a shadow under it. It kind of separates it a little bit visually from what's behind. So here's with the shadow, and I'll use Command Z to get rid of the shadow. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. Now, another thing you can do with lines is add text to them. So let's use an arrow line here, just starting off right away with an arrowhead at one side. If I were to double-click on this line, notice I have a blinking text cursor now at the other end, the one away from the arrowhead. And now I can type something like that, and it's text that is now part of this shape. If I try to move the shape, notice that the words come with it. I can even drag the end, and you can see the text remains kind of at the end of the line like this. You can go into the text editing tools here, like into text style to change the font or size, or select a different color like that. And it will pick up some of the other properties, like for instance, the drop shadow property will be for the line and for the text as well. So this is a really handy way to quickly label something with a little arrow and some text. In fact, if you just put an arrow like this and then start typing, it instantly assumes that the typed text will go at the end of the arrow like that. Now let's move on to the other shapes. The first one here is a rectangle. And when you draw a rectangle, it has both a border color and a fill. So here, the border color is set to red. We can change it to orange, say. And the fill is set to black. We could change it, say, to white. And notice it obeys the drop shadow from what we had set before with the line. We can change the thickness of the border if we want. Now you can click and drag a shape to move it anywhere you want. Like the lines, there are blue dots that allow you to resize it. So you can grab a blue dot and it will change the location of a corner or a side. There's some tricks you can use here, though. If you hold down the Option key, then the blue dot and the opposite blue dot will move together. So you can make it taller by Option-dragging the bottom or top dot and wider by Option-dragging the left or right dot. If you use any dot in a corner, it moves that dot and the opposite one. So in other words, it allows you to move all four sides by just changing the position of the pointer. Also, Shift works if you hold Shift and you drag. Notice the opposite side holds steady. The other three sides move. But another thing that you could do is you could use Shift to completely square off the shape. So let's say you have a shape like this and you want it to be square. Start dragging a corner and hold Shift down and it will lock to a perfect square. Now this is true of rounded rectangles, which have little rounded corners like this as well. If you hold the Shift down while you drag a corner, it becomes a perfect square. And it's also true of a circle. If you hold the Shift down while dragging one of the corners, it becomes a perfect circle instead of an oval like that. Another thing about any of these shapes, the square, the rounded rectangle, or the circle, is they also can contain text. So you can double-click on the shape and now you're typing in here. So that's really handy for annotations. You can make smaller boxes and put smaller text in them to write little notes that appear on top of the PDF. And both the border and the fill are optional. So for instance, I could go here and say I want no border at all. And you can see the border is gone. In this case, it might help to have some sort of fill like that. So you can see I've now got a borderless shape. It does have the drop shadow though, which I can get rid of like that. I could also have a border like that and have no fill. So now it's basically a transparent shape with a border around the end. If you were to get rid of both, it still works. You still have the shape there. There's just no border or no fill, but the text inside is still there. It essentially becomes the equivalent of a text box. Now let's skip to these two right here. These are very similar. These are stars and regular polygons. So let's start with a star shape here. Notice these two green dots here. The inner one will change the inner corner there. So you could have something be like that or go like way out like that. So you can determine how deep the points of the star are. This other green dot, when you click it, gives you a circle. And if you drag around the circle, you get more and more points. And if you drag to the other way, you get fewer and fewer until you get to three. So you could determine how many points the star has using that. Likewise, the regular polygon works the same way. You've got this green dot here. You drag that to the left, you get a triangle. And to the right, you get a polygon with many even sides. So you can pick what you want there. And both with stars and with polygons, you can type something. Now let's look at a very special shape here. This one, a text bubble. Let's create that. And you can see it looks like a cartoon text bubble. And yes, you can type something in here and change its font and color and all of that. So you could use this as a way to point something out and put it where you want. Now you've got two green dots there as well. So the first green dot will change the location of where the arrow goes outside of the bubble. And you can actually move it to anywhere you want. So you can have this point to any direction and point out something very specific like that. The other green dot will change the width of it. So you can make it a little wider or narrower. This means that you can actually go and make it as narrow as you want. And you just have a line there, which is also very useful for pointing something out. Now let's go look at some things that work with all of these shapes. If you want to duplicate an item, which is very useful, especially when creating a bunch of arrows, you can copy it with Command-C or Edit-Copy. And then you can use Edit-Paste or Command-V to paste another copy of it. It doesn't appear in the exact location, though. It appears kind of next to it. You can also, though, select an item and then Option-Drag. And it pulls out another copy of that item. There is some snapping. So if you do want to actually have the item be in the same spot, it'll snap to it like that. And then in this case, I can drag and have the other end of that arrow point somewhere else. Now there are also layers. So let's create a circle shape here. And let's say that I want this shape to actually be underneath the arrow. You can Control-Click, Right-Click, or Two-Finger-Click on any shape. And you could select Bring Forward, Bring to Front, Send Backwards, or Send to Back to layer the items. So in this case, I could send this to the back. I could have also selected the arrow and then used Bring to Front. It's grayed out here because that's already the frontmost item. You also can see but not manipulate layers using the Inspector. You've got Tools-Show Inspector here. And then the last item here is the Objects Inspector. And you'll see all the objects here. So let's draw a star here. And we have another item here. And we could see we've got these various items here. It shows you the order they're in. Unfortunately, you can't drag these to be in a different order. Now it's also important to note that you can move multiple items at once. I can select this star and then this circle by holding the Shift key down. And now it allows me to select both like that. So now I can move these both together. And this will work to send multiple items backward or forward as well. If you have multiple items selected, you could also copy all of the items that are selected. And then when you paste, you'll get copies of all of those individual ones. The same thing if you Option-drag while there are multiple items selected, you get duplicates of them all. Now one thing that I haven't mentioned at all is the ability to rotate these objects. There doesn't seem to be any tool that allows you to rotate them. But actually, you can rotate them. However, you can only do it if you have a trackpad. So if you've got a MacBook model or a desktop Mac that has a Magic Trackpad, you can use two fingers and you can rotate the selection like that. There's absolutely no way to do this with just the keyboard or with a mouse. You have to do it with a trackpad. Now this next tip doesn't directly involve these shape tools. But it does produce shapes. If you look here next to the shapes, you have two different drawing tools. The one on the right is called Draw, but the one on the left is called Sketch. Select Sketch so you can see it's highlighted there in blue. Now you can draw using your mouse or trackpad. The interesting thing is if you try to draw something that's like a shape, it will give you that shape. So for instance, I'm going to try to draw a circle like that. And when I stop, notice I get a perfect circle. Not the crude one that I drew. And I also get this little control here that gives me the crude one and the perfect circle. And I can select which one I want. So I'll select the perfect circle. It works for other shapes as well. So if I try to draw a square like this, it will give me the square and the option to go back to the drawn version. If I draw a star, even doing it like that, it figures out I want a star and draws a star that's approximately that size. The same thing even happens for the bubbles. If I draw a bubble like this, you can see it figures out what I was trying to do. And it even works for lines like that or curves like that. You can see how it approximates that curve. Or even arrows. If I just put a little bit of an arrowhead at the end like that. So that you know how to use these shapes, it's important to know where you can use them. I've shown you how you can do it here in a PDF in the Preview app. And you can also do all of this here in a photo in the Preview app. But in addition to that, markup tools show up in other places. For instance, here right in the Photos app, without having to go to Preview, you could go to Edit and then click the three dots here and look for Markup. And this gives you markup tools inside the Photos app. And all of the shapes are here and work the same way. But also in other apps, you can markup PDFs and images as well without having to go to Preview. For instance, here I am in Mail composing a new message and I've attached a PDF. I can click on this little button at the top right corner of the PDF icon and choose Markup. And I can markup this PDF with shapes right here inside of Mail. And the last thing I want to talk about is permanence here. You've got a PDF here. If I double click on it, it opens up in Preview. And let's draw an arrow on it like that. Now, if I were to save, close it and open it up again, I can click and control that arrow again, delete it and get back to where I was. However, the same is not true of images. If I double click on this image, it opens up in Preview as the default app. If I were to draw an arrow on this and then save, JPEG images don't have layers, so it saves as pixels on top of the image. If I quick look this image here, you could see the arrow there. And if I double click to go back in, I can't select that arrow anymore. These are now permanently imprinted pixels on the image. So keep in mind if you want to mark up an image file to make a duplicate of it first if you want to preserve the original. So I hope these tips help you get the most out of using shapes in the markup tools on your Mac. Thanks for watching.