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 in your Mac. 

So when you're using the Markup Tools, whether it is in the Preview App or directly with the PDF's 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. 

The first one is a line. If you click that you will add a line into the middle of the view of your document. You can 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 has changed to a hand. 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. When you click there the first set of items are line thicknesses. Pick something in the middle and you can see how it changes 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 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 these blue dots there is this green dot in the middle. You can change the straight line to a curve by grabbing this dot here. You can pull it to any location you want and that will change how the line curves. So you can have a 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 has 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 the shape there and 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 can 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 the dashes closer together or anything like that. You do have the option, though, to turn on a Drop Shadow. You select that and then there is a slight shadow underneath. If, for instance, you're using Markup Tools here in Photos a shadow can make all the difference. A line like this, for instance, stands out a lot more if there is a shadow under it. It kind of separates a little bit visually from what is behind. So here's with the shadow and I'll use Command Z to get rid of the shadow. 

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Another thing you can do with lines is to add text to them. So let's use it as an arrow line right here, 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. Now I can type something, like that, and its text is now part of the shape. If I try to move the shape notice that the words come with it. I can even drag it at the end and you can see the text remains kind of at the end like this. You can go into the Text Editing Tools, 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 the drop shadow property will be for the line and 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 start typing it instantly assumes that the typed text will go at the end of the arrow, like that. 

Now let's move onto the other shapes. The first one here is a rectangle. 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. The Fill is set to black. We can change it say to white. 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 you can change the location of a corner or a side. There are some tricks you can use here though. You can hold down the Option Key and 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 a dot in the 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 you can do is you can 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 holding the  Shift down. It will lock to a perfect square. Now this is true of rounded rectangles which have little rounded corners, like this, as well. If I hold the Shift down while I drag a corner it becomes a perfect square. 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, and 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. Both the border and the Fill are optional. So, for instance, I can go here and say I want no border at all. 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 now I have a borderless shape. It does have the drop shadow thought which I can get rid of like that. i can also have a border, like that, and have a 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 and no fill but the text is still inside. It essentially becomes equivalent of a textbox. 

Now let's skip to these two right here. These are very similar. These are stars and regular polygons. So, lets start with a star shape here. Notice these two green dots here. The inner one will change the inner corner there. So you can have something be like that or 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. If you drag around the circle you get more and more points. If you drag the other way you get fewer and fewer until you get to three. So you can 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 and you get a triangle and to the right you get a polygon with many sides. So you can pick what you want there. Both the star and the polygon you can type something in it. 

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. Yes, you can type something in here and change its font and color and all of that. So you can 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. You can actually move it anywhere you want. Have this point in 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 very narrow or wider. This means you can actually go and make it as narrow as you want and just have a line there which is also very useful in pointing something out. 

Now lets look at something that works 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 have the item in the same spot it will snap to it, like that and then in this case I can drag and have the other end of the arrow point somewhere else. 

Now there are also layers. So let's create a circle shape here and let's say I want to have this shape actually underneath the arrow. You can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on any shape and you can select Bring Forward, Bring To Front, Send Backwards, or Send To Back to layer the items. So in this case I can send this to the back. I could have also selected the arrow and then used Bring To Front. It's grayed out here because it is already the front-most item. You also can see but not manipulate layers using the Specter. You have tools showing Specter here and then the last item here is the Object in Specter and you'll see all the objects here. So like let's draw like a star here and another item here. We can see we've got these various items here and it shows you the order they're in. Unfortunately, you can't drag these to be in a different order. It is also important to note that you can move multiple items at once like this star and then this circle by holding the Shift Key down and now it allows you to select both like that. So now I can move these both together. These will work to send multiple items backward and forward as well. 

If you have multiple items selected you can also Copy all of the items selected and then when you paste you'll get copies of all of those individual ones. The same thing if you Option Drag all the multiple items selected you'll get duplicates of them all. Now one thing I haven't mentioned at all is the ability to rotate these objects. There does't seem to be any tool that allows you to rotate them. Actually you can rotate them however you can only do it if you have a trackpad. So if you have a MacBook model or a desktop Mac that has a Magic Trackpad you use two fingers and you can rotate a 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 the trackpad. 

Now this next hint 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. The one on the left is called Sketch. Select Sketch. You can see it is highlighted there in blue. Now you can draw using your mouse or trackpad. The interesting thing is if you try to draw something like a shape, it will give you that shape. For instance I will try to draw a circle, like that. When I stop notice I get a perfect circle. Not the crude one that I drew. 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 drawn version. If I draw a star, even doing it like that, it figured out I want a star and it draws a star that is approximately that size. The same thing even happens with the bubbles. If I draw a bubble like this you can see it figures out what I was trying to do. It even works for lines, like that, or curves like that. You can see how it approximates that curve. Even arrows. If i just put a little bit of arrowhead at the end like that. 

So now that you know how to use these shapes it is important to know where to use them. I've shown you how you can do it here in a PDF in the Preview App. 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 can go to Edit and then click the three dots here and go to Markup and this gives you Markup Tools inside of Photos. All of the shapes are here and work the same way. But also in other apps you can markup PDF's 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. I can markup this PDF with shapes right here inside of Mail. 

The last thing I want to talk about is permanence here. You've got a PDF here. If I click on it it opens up in Preview. Let's draw an arrow on it like that. Now if I were to Save and Close it and open it up again I can click and Control that arrow again 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 it like 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 can see the arrow there and if I don't 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 markup an image file to make a duplicate of it first if you want to preserve the original. 

So hope these tips help you get the most out of using Shapes in Markup Tools on your Mac. Thanks for watching.