From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

The Curvature Pen tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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The Curvature Pen tool

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- [Instructor] Photoshop's pen tools are the key to creating vector paths, to draw shapes, cut out objects and create masks. And the best thing about making vector paths is that they're resolution independent, so we can scale them to any size without losing image quality. Now we're going to start with the Curvature pen tool. And what I love about the Curvature pen tool is that I can just set down points and then kind of bend those points and pull them into any shape that I want. So from the toolbar, I'll select the curvature pen tool. I'll click once to start the path. I'll click again to set down a second point. And this path will always be straight, but when I click again, it will go to a curve. In order to close the path, I'll click on the initial control point. And if I want to reposition the path, I can just click and drag. I know that this control point is the targeted point because it's filled with blue, unlike these that are hollow. Soon as I select one, it'll highlight it. If I want to add another point, I can just click along the path. Or to delete a point, I can tap the delete key. In order to change or toggle a curve point to a corner point, I can double click on a point. So we can quickly go from a circle to a triangle. Alright, I'm going to tap delete once and then again in order to delete that curve. And now we're going to draw a curve around the pear. So I'm just going to start at the top and then put down a number of points along the pear. I can always add more later or take them away so it doesn't matter exactly how many points you have. But now we can select any of the anchor points and then just refine its position. So the right side is looking good. The bottom, I'm just going to move this down a little bit. That might make you need to go back to the point before that and just make slight adjustments, but that's easy to do. I'll pull this up, come over here to this side, bring this one here, and then let's add another point here. And then just reposition this one. It's almost like there's a piece of string going around the pear, and that's the path and that's what we want to push and pull to make it fit. Excellent. Once we have our path, I can change the path into a shape by clicking on the shape icon. Then I want a gradient in here instead of a solid color. So I'll choose my gradient panel and click on the yellow to red gradient, but I want to make changes to the gradient. So I'm going to double click on the thumbnail for the shape layer. And that's going to bring up the gradient fill. Now we can change this to radial. We can also choose to reverse it, and I can click and drag in the image area to put the red area down in the lower right. Let's hide that shape layer for a moment. And now we're going to draw the stem with a pen tool I'll click once, twice, and then again at the bottom, and then complete the path. Now in order to change these into corner points, I'll just double click on them. I'll double click on all four of these, and then I'll click to add a new point and drag it over. Do it again on the other side. And once more at the top, I'll go ahead and choose shape. And it's going to take on the attributes of the last shape that we made. So I'm going to switch to my swatches and just select a green. All right, let's hide the background and then turn on the shape. If you're seeing transparency here, it's because I went to the preferences or the settings, transparency and gamut, and I just toggled off the grid size so that I don't see that checkerboard. Excellent. I think you can see how the curvature pen tool makes it very easy to just push and pull a path into the shape that you want.

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