How do I slice through a rectangle in Photoshop and turn it into two shapes?

I guess I'll check that. The whole thread is getting confusing lol

maybe it's just because there's too much multitasking to do

(I'm listening to something)

Sigh.

Anyway.

Yes, it is a shape.

A vector shape.

Bye again

P.S. well I was tired so I decided to scribble all over the computer and make a big mess of my desktop lol

I'm going to assume you are a very new beginner based on your frustration and question. You want to divide a rectangle on the diagonal into 2 triangles:

Use the polygonal lasso tool. Once you have your selection, cut and paste it into a new layer.

This is assuming you didn't create a shape - if you did, you need to rasterize the shape first.

Maybe you should post an image of this rectangle. If you're asking what I think you're asking, though, why can't you just duplicate the layer?

I agree that Illustrator would be the program to use, but in Photoshop you can do it using a panel available on the Exchange for free, Toshiyuki Takahashi's PathFinder for Photoshop. It gives much of Illustrator's Pathfinder functionality,  with the main limitation being it uses Photoshop's less extensive path operations.

You would start with two separate Shape layers:

You need to make duplicates of both. I would suggest making them a group, and duplicating that.

Select two of the Shapes, open the Pathfinder panel, and click on the Intersect Shapes icon. You will get this:

Select the other two shapes, and in the Pathfinder panel, choose Exclude Overlapping Shapes:

Use the Direct Selection tool to select the extraneous points, and delete them, to get this:

Again, this would be much easier in Illustrator.

Rectangle select half, Cut, Paste, move  your done. Select 100% width 50% Height, Ctrl+X cut, Ctrl+V paste, Ctrl+A select canvas align layers to top of canvas. Two layers not shape layers raster layers shaped layers need to be filed with a pattern, solid color or a gradient.

fireydeath4  wrote Because your dumb slicing tool can only divide the picture into rectangular sections. :/

Hi Firey Death,

The slicing tool is intended for breaking a large image into smaller images so they can be optimized seperately as gifs or jpegs and put back together as a table using html. It is rarely used now that tables have been replaced by divs in xhtml, but the tool has not been taken away. All pictures are rectangles.

How did you create your big solid rectangle shape? With the rectangle tool? Or is it an image?

In Illustrator, I would draw the rectangle, lines, curved lines, and other shapes, then select them all and then use Divide from the Pathfinder.

~ Jane

If you are talking about plain color-areas I wonder if you might not be better served by doing this in Illustrator.

As Grant H mentioned it can be done in Photoshop for pixels but it could also be done with Shape Layers that could provide vector output, but that would be less comfortable.

(add:) you can use your pen tool and then convert to a selection.

create a selection and then cut to new layer.

/G