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I am lowkey panicking.
The new polygon tool does not handle rounded corners the same way and I have found it impossible to mimic the old way it used to work, and that fat puffy star shape that the old polygon tool could make is at this point a pretty essential part of my artistic brand.
Is there any way to get the legacy polygon tool back?
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What exactly is missing? Could you post a screenshot of one of the »old« stars?
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I should have done so last night but was on my way to bed, sorry.
So here's an example of the old way the polygon tool handled this shape (in black, fetched out of an old file and made into a brush in the meantime) and the new ones (in purple). I have been playing with the indent, ratio, and corner options for an hour+ and I cannot mimic the old way the polygon tool handled curving off the points. It has affected a "doily" shape I often make too but that one is easier to mimic with a static brush shape so it's less urgent--but it's the same issue with the way the curving inner part of the points are handled. Even if I set the rounding very high and play with the ratios the "puffy" quality of the old star does not return.
I've managed to get *close* to the old shape but you can see clearly when I overlay it (in blue) over the old shape that the straight lines make it not such a "cute" shape.
If I am just missing the mark on how to tweak the settings to get the old shape that would also be fine with me, it's just very annoying to have to use a rasterized brush to achieve this now.
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Are you using the options in the Properties panel?
Set the blobbyness radius with my green highlight, and its depth with my red highlight.
I am not sure if you can get the star's valley to anything but a sharp corner
Does this help at all? If not any more information that will put us on the right track?
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Yeah, that still just yields a shape similar to the purple one as seen above.
The problem isn't so much the ratios and corner roundness--it's that the lines running from the center of the star to the points no longer creates a convex curve no matter what the settings are. You can see this if you overlay a straight line from the inner corner to the outer corner--the purple star, using the new tool, is a straight line. The black star, using the old tool, has a curved one.
You can see a clear example of how this drastically changes the shape if you try to make a "doily" shape with a many pointed, soft polygon. This is another shape I use in my art a lot, so I'll post an old one here vs me trying to imitate it with the new tool, as well as the straight line problem:
The brownish one is from an old drawing I did using the old shape tool. The blue one was overlaid using the new one.
You can see from the zoomed in bits that once again the problem is that the shape is a straight line from the center to the corner, whereas in the old one it gently curved out to meet it in a rounded way. I've highlighted the curve in yellow--that's what's missing.That is also what's making the stars less "puffy" and cute.
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The roundness is limited in the current version as the depth is increased. I don't know a way around that with the current tool, outside of making the shape, using the pen tool, as a single section then repeat transforming it into the polygon shape.
You can raise feature requests at the link below , where they will be seen by Adobe staff.
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family
Dave
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Do you have Adobe Illustrator?
I drew this with the Star tool in Illustrator. The red outline is around your shape, then I copied it and scaled and rotated the copy.
~ Jane
When you copy from Illustrator and Paste to Photoshop, you have four choices. Choose the one that best suits your needs.
~ Jane
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This is great advice but unfortunately I don't use Illustrator.
At the moment the best solution for me is still to just use a brush tool, it's just slower going than being able to place shapes that I can rotate on the fly as I go. Thank you for this though, I hope it helps someone else who is having my same issue but has a better workflow for it!
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In the newer versions of Photoshop, they introduced the rounded corner widget that has been in Illustrator for a long time, but did not do it as well. In Illustrator, you can multiple-select points with the Direct Selection tool and round just the selected points, leaving the unselected ones alone. Right now the widget in PS works on every anchor point.
If you make a feature request to the product developers with the link given by both @davescm and @c.pfaffenbichler , be sure to say how you want it to work.
~ Jane
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You may want to post a Bug Report over on
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If you still have an older version of photoshop you could save the Shapes and then load them into photoshop 2021.