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Kris Hunt
Legend
March 10, 2022
Question

Can elliptical paths just act like paths again?

  • March 10, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 191 views

Is there any way to make Photoshop stop treating vector ellipse paths as smart shapes, and go back to the behavior where it treated them as simple bezier curves? When I create an ellipse and the dropdown menu is set to Path, I don't want there to be any bounding box or rotation controls around the resulting ellipse. It just gets in the way. If I wanted to transform the ellipse, I would select it and choose Edit > Free Transform Path. It's like Clippy for Photoshop. "Oh, I see you're trying to draw an ellipse! Let me be ever so helpful and put a bunch of crap on the page!" Please stop dumbing down Photoshop.

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2 replies

Trevor.Dennis
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 11, 2022

As c.p. has said, selecting the Pen T changes the behaviour, and if you delete a point, you even get a warning (if you have not previously disabled it since the last time you reset Preferences.

 

Note: this screen shot was faked for the sake of illustration.

What is interesting is that selecting the Path Selection Tool will bring back the transform controls and bounding box...

...whereas the Direct Selection Tool does not.

c.pfaffenbichler
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 11, 2022

Try switching to the Pen Tool after creating the elliptical Path.