From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Drawing curves with the Pen tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Drawing curves with the Pen tool

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- [Instructor] While creating straight line paths just requires clicking the mouse, creating curved paths takes a little bit more practice because you need to click and drag. Now I want to make sure that we don't have any paths selected. So in the Paths panel, I want to make sure that Path 2 or Path 1 is not selected. So we'll just click in that gray area. Then I'll use the View menu and then Show because I want to show some guides that are going to help us to draw these paths. I'll use Command + 1 in order to zoom in and navigate over to the curved path area. Now when you're drawing curved paths, you actually have to click/drag without letting go of your cursor. So I'll tap the P key to select the Pen tool, and I'll click/drag up to start the curve. in the upwards direction. I can hold down the Shift key if I want to constrain that to a vertical line. Then I'm going to click and drag down because I want the next path to go down. So we'll click and drag down. Again, you can hold down the Shift key if you want to constrain it. So this direction line is starting the next curve going down. So I want to click and drag up on this last one. I can select the Path Selection tool if I want to modify the entire path or the Direct Selection tool if, for example, I just want to move an anchor point or reposition a direction line or select one of the line segments and then reposition it. All right, I'll use Command + Z once, twice, and again in order to undo that. Now this path is still active, so in order to stop the path, I'm just going to click away from the path. Then we can scoot over to this next template. I'll tap P to select the Pen tool. And again, I want my first path to start going up, so I'll click and drag up, holding down the Shift key. Now this path is going to go up, but then it's going to go up again. So instead of clicking and dragging down, I need to click and drag up with the Pen tool, and that's going to create this wavy line. Now the direction line for the next path is going up, so again, it'll go up, but I need to click and drag up in order to create that shape. All right, now we could switch tools to end this path, but I can also just hold down the Command key or the Control key on Windows and click in order to end that path. All right, let's move over to the circle. Again, I have the Pen tool selected. I want my first direction line to go up to start the curve of the circle. Then we can click and drag down, and then all I need to do is click on the starting point in order to create that circle. All right, let's go ahead and save this. We'll just save this as Path 3. Then I'll choose File, Save As. I'll append this with an 02, and save it to The Pen Tools folder as a Layered Photoshop Document.

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