From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Pen tool basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Pen tool basics

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- [Instructor] While I find that Photoshop's curvature pen tool is excellent for creating shapes, when I need the most amount of control, say for example, I'm trying to cut out an object from the background, then I'll typically switch to the traditional pen tool. So in the toolbar, let's select the pen tool. I'll right-click on the icon to reset the tool to be sure that we're all going to be drawing a path. Then I'm going to zoom in on the template, and navigate to the upper-right. So every time you click with a pen tool, you're laying down what's called an anchor point or a control point. And if you click again, you will create a line segment. And if you click and drag to create a curved point, you'll create what's called a direction line. And at the end of the direction line is a direction point. So the direction lines aren't part of the path, but they actually control the curvature of the path. All right. Let's move to the first drawing part of this template for drawing straight paths. I'm going to click once to set down my first anchor point, click again and that will create a line segment. We can continue clicking along the path, adding a straight segment every time we click. Now, unlike the curvature pen tool, you can't reposition a path or a point with the pen tool unless you hold down a keyboard modifier. So the easiest way to end a path is to just choose another tool. Here I'll select the path selection tool. Now there's a path selection tool, and a direct selection tool. The path selection tool will enable me to reposition the entire path at once. If I change to the direct selection tool, now I can click on an individual anchor point. It becomes filled, telling me that it's the active or targeted anchor point while the others are hollow, and then I can reposition this point. Now, if I don't want to switch tools, I can keep the pen tool, and hold down the command key on Mac or the control key on Windows, and then I can click on a anchor point in order to reposition it. I can also click on a line segment or shift-click to select more than one path, and then reposition that segment. All right. Once you create a path, you'll have a work path in the paths panel. You can click off the path, and then click on the path again, and it'll still be there. However, if you click off the path, and you start drawing another path, then that work path will disappear. So let's click back on the path, and then double-click in order to save the path as path one. Now let's scoot over, and we're going to create a closed path. If I start drawing the path now, because Path One is targeted, it's going to add it to it. So I'm just going to click off the path in the paths panel and we'll start creating a new work path. I'll click once. Twice. Three times. And then to close the path, I'll position my cursor over the first anchor point. We see the circle icon next to the pen, and we can click to close the path. Now to add a point, we can click anywhere on the path, and Photoshop will add a point. But if I click it again like we did with a curvature pen tool, instead of being able to reposition the point, it subtracts the point. So I'm going to click to add the point again, and then I'd use the command key on Mac, control on Windows, and then I can drag to reposition that anchor point. I'll go ahead and click again in order to delete it. There is an exception. If you have your mouse down still, so let's say I'm adding a point, and I keep the mouse down, I can then hold down the space bar if I want to reposition that before I release the cursor. All right, I'll undo that. And let's go ahead and save this path by double-clicking on it in the paths panel. And let's take a look at what we can do with a path. So if I have a path selected, we can convert that to a selection. We can add a feather to it. And when I click okay, you can see we have the marching ants. All right, let's deselect that, and then we'll select the path. We can also convert this path into a vector mask. So now we have a vector mask on the layers panel, and only the area inside that path is visible. I'll use command + Z in order to undo that, and we can convert our path into a shape by clicking on the shape. And now we have a shape layer in the layers panel. Again, I'll undo that. On the path panel, we also have the option to fill and stroke a path. If the path is difficult to see, you can use the gear icon, and increase the thickness or change the color of the path. All right. Let's do a quick file, save as. I'm going to append this with an underscore O1. I want to save it as a Photoshop document back in the pen tools folder, I'll click save. And there you go. A quick overview of how to draw straight paths in Photoshop.

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