Generate Shapes In Pages And More With Apple Creator Studio

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new Generate Shapes features in the Apple Creator Studio. 

So there is a fairly new feature for Apple Creator Studio subscribers that works in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. It's the ability to generate shapes using AI. Now I'm using the latest version of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (that's 15.3.1) and if you look under What's New you'll see this new feature listed, Generate Shapes. So this is only for Apple Creator Studio subscribers. What you get is when you use the Shape Tool here you create a shape. You can do the standard shapes like circles, and squares, and triangles. You can use all the previously available shapes, create lines and also Draw With Pen, all like before. But in addition to that you've got this new Generate Shape Button here. Click that and it takes you to an interface that looks a little bit like the Image Playground Interface. Here you can describe a shape and it will generate it for you. So the idea here is that Apple is using AI to generate these shapes. These aren't images like you typically see generated by AI. These aren't going to be the cartoony or semi-realistic things that you see a lot of. These are the shapes that we've always had in Pages, Numbers, & Keynote. But instead of having to draw custom ones yourself you can at least start off by having AI generate that shape. So instead of being stuck with just the list of animals, say, that are available in the preset shapes you can now ask for any animal. 

For instance here I'll ask for one of Colorado's iconic animals which of course is not something that is normally included in the preset shapes. But thanks to this feature if I'm doing a presentation on marmots I can have a nice marmot shape to put on the initial slide or the first page of my document. Its first attempt really gets it perfectly right! But I've got some other variations here as well. You can see it gives me four and I can go through them and pick the one I want. So let's go ahead and like this second one here. I'll insert it and close the interface. Here I've got my little marmot shape here and I can use it like a regular shape, just like one of these others or if you go to Content Hub and you look at the animals here. These have been available in Pages for years. You've got all these animals but no marmot. 

Now as a reminder, what shapes are are basically an outline with a Fill. So you could go over to the right Sidebar and go to Style and choose one of the other styles here, just to set it to a quick color. But can also go to the Fill Section here and choose your own color. Choose, really, any color you want using the Color Picking Tools here. In addition to Fill you've got Border and you can set the border to say a line. Like here a black line. You can set its size. You can the change the color of the line if you want, to anything. Shapes also allow you to do things like have shadows. Let me do a drop shadow behind this shape. You also have some line options here. Like a dotted line or like a drawn line, like that. You've also got options for Fill as well. You can do color fill but you can also do a gradient fill from one shade to the next. Change lots of the properties of it, you can do in advance to gradient fill, like this. These fills can be radial as well as linear. You can do an image fill to fill with a pattern or an image. Advance image fill as well to tint the image. These are all standard things that have been around for a long time.

The real change here is the ability to basically ask for anything. Of course, if it is going to be difficult to represent as a shape you may not get great results. But if it is something simple, like I wanted to do a curved arrow to point at something, I can just ask for that and see what it comes up with. So you can see that's kind of not what I wanted there but this might be more similar or this is actually kind of what I was thinking. But if wanted to try again I simply press this button here and it will create even more variations. Of course I can just edit the prompt and ask for something a little different. So here's a bunch of different variations it is giving me that I can use and I was actually thinking of more along the line maybe of this might be good. So I'll insert that here and then I can use this shape. 

Here's another example. Say I want to put like a splash graphic on a page. If I did this using standard AI image generation I would get something that would look realistic or maybe cartoony. But here I can get just a shape that I can use as something on the page. Like maybe this is exactly what I want to add something like this to a document. Once you generate this, these are just regular shapes as if they had been part of the preset shapes to begin with or you hand drew them using the hand tool. That means you can do a lot with this. For instance you can break this apart when the shape has multiple pieces to it like this. You can go to Format and then Shapes & Lines and Break Apart will actually break it so each piece is its own individual shape now. So if you want to get rid of some of these it is pretty easy to do or perhaps move some of these around like that. Or you could also go to Format, Shapes & Lines and choose Make Editable. This gives you every point in the shape. It's just a normal shape. So you can drag a point and you can change its curve and all of that. You can combine these in different ways. For instance I like to go in and look at the Preset Shapes and one of them is a Tee Shirt. By adding the tee shirt shape here, let's make this larger, and then let's move this to the front and make it the color where we can see, we can create a tee shirt, like this, but these are two separate shapes. I can actually select both of them and then go to Format, Shapes & Lines and combine them in different ways. So since one if overlapping the other I would make sense to subtract them. It basically breaks a hole in the shape. It's just one shape now. If I were to make it editable, I'll just Control Click on it here to make it editable, you can see that this is actually a hole now cutout from the shape here. 

Another aspect of shapes is that you can put text in them. They work as textboxes. Now for some shapes it doesn't make sense to do that. But a lot of shapes are specifically built for that. So here I'm going to as for a rectangle with a fancy frame-like edge. Let's see what it comes out with. I like this very first thing it came out with and it demonstrate this very easily. So I can take this very unique shape here and if I double click on it I can now type some text and I can alter the text. Make it larger like that. 

Another thing you can do with shapes is you can put an image in them. You can do the same with a shape that you generate. I'll create a simple cloud here. I'll pick just, say, the first one here it gives me and I can use this as a picture frame as well just dragging an image into it. It frames the photo and you can still go and add a border to the shape with the image now acting as the fill. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 3000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

Let's switch over to Keynote here. A place where you may usually want to use a lot of photos in a presentation. But sometimes on an intro slide you want to introduce the topic with just a shape, some sort of colorful graphic. Or maybe you want to have some sort of background, like for instance let's go ahead and generate a shape here that's a city skyline. I get a few variations on this. So some pretty nice things. I can insert this and I can now stretch this out and have this now, you know, part of the background of this shape. You can even go to Arrange here and turn off Constrain Proportion so that if I shrink it down it doesn't necessarily do it evenly in all dimensions. Let me demonstrate how you can combine Shape Generation and Editing to get exactly the image you want. So I'm just going to give it a really simple prompt here and say I'm doing a presentation on Backpacks. It would be nice to have a graphic there on the first slide. So here I've got a few to choose from right away and I want to choose this one right here. So I'll insert it in and it is almost exactly what I want. But then I decide I don't like the shape of the hat right there. Well, I can Control Click on it. Make it Editable. Zoom in a little bit more and let's select some of these points here and get rid of them until I'm satisfied with the shape of the hat. So, maybe something like that. There we go. Remember too since you're in Keynote you can animate things and there is an Animation that is especially for shapes. Since this is just a normal shape once it is generated you can use it with it. So with it selected I'm going to go to Animation and Built-in and Add an Effect and choose Line Draw. You see how it draws the shape like that. 

So a few last tips starting with that even though you need Apple Creator Studio to generate these shapes, once they are generated they are just regular shapes as if you drew them yourself. So you can give this document to somebody else that doesn't have Apple Creator Studio and they'll be able to use the shape just fine. Or you can open it up say on a different Mac that doesn't happen to have Apple Creator Studio and you'll still be able to work with the image just like it was a regular shape. 

Now I showed you Pages and Keynote and this is available for Numbers as well. It has the same shape functionality as those two. But it is not available yet in Freeform. However Shapes are available in FreeForm so eventually this will be added to it. In the meantime you can create shapes, like this one here, in Pages or Keynote and then you can go to FreeForm and paste that shape in. It is there as a real shape. You can go in and, for instance, make it Editable so they can see the dots and stuff here. But the full feature is also available in the latest Pixelmator Pro 4.3. You can go to Insert and you can Generate Shape here and define a shape. Like this and then select this one here, insert it in, and now this is a vector shape inside of Pixelmator Pro. 

Finally, you should note that when you go to Shapes you'll see your most recently used shapes which include the generated ones. If you go to Browse Content Hub here you'll see these recents as well. If you go all the way down to the bottom you'll see your generated shapes here. You can click Show More and go even further back. So I think this is a really interesting use of AI from Apple that is different than anything else that is offered out there. Instead of using AI to create images that look somewhat realistic or cartoony you're using them to basically expand the number of shapes available in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and more from the limited set that Apple gives you to basically anything you want. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.