First off, were many of you aware that Photoshop has tons of custom shapes which you can use to your advantage?
Lets crate a document (Default Size).
Now, choose the custom shape tool from the Photoshop Menu.
In the above toolbar, we will click on the shape dropdown menu.
Do this:
If you have no custom shapes you personally made, you can press Yes to the below message:
Now, you will see a huge amount of shapes, look at that! How many shapes!
This is one of the features you can clearly use to your advantage, as there are tons of shapes you don't have to draw/make now.
It is rather simpler to choose one of the topics from the dropdown list, instead of viewing "all shapes", they are shown below.
You can choose any of the categories below like this:
This is using the Shape dropdown, please note the above image has been modified, there are more options when you click the ">" but it would make the image too long (vertically), so without further delay, here are the classified shapes:
Animals:
Arrows:
Banners:
Frames
:
Music:
Nature:
Objects:
Ornaments:
Shapes:
Symbols:
Talk Bubbles:
Tiles:
Web:
Now, to demonstrate how simple modifying these shapes can be, I will make a pretty basic golden star:
First, using the basic star shape (its classified under shapes) make a star of your size. Press and hold shift while making the star to make it proportional.
Mine looks like this:
A nice and big star. Now, we will apply some simple blending options:
With this gradient:
Last, rasterize your layer (the one with the star). It should look something like below:
This is just to show you that you can play with shapes as you can with anything in Photoshop for that matter :).
Now, I will show you something rather cool, using your paintbrush, so select it, and use the below brush:
Remember that after choosing the star brush, you will also choose 80px as it's size.
Now, make sure you are in the same layer as the star, and brush around a bit. Cool eh?
More Tutorials: 
