

Remember, the fewer points, the smoother a path will be. The pen tool is the way that you add these points and the way you drag the tool as you create the points determines how they will look.

You don’t just draw on the page, you have to add points and manipulate them to create your shapes. This is because unlike the pencil tool, you are creating your shape with points and handles. It’s not, unfortunately, a very natural process, especially to anyone who grew up drawing with markers or crayons. That’s because its almost identical to the pen tool in other Adobe apps like Illustrator, Indesign and Flash. When it comes to actually creating a path from scratch, the pen tool is the most common option. This is called “filled or selected” you can now modify this portion of the path. Notice as you click a point it changes color and becomes black.
#Adobe photoshop drawing and editing tools series#
A path is a series of curves joined together. Here are all the different parts that make up a curve. A Bezier curve’s direction and angle is determined by the position of little anchor points that lie nearby They’re named after their French creator, Pierre Bézier, who came up with a clever way to make computer-drawn lines bend to their will. In Photoshop (and other Adobe programs), the mathematical name for the lines that determine vectors is Bézier curves. Vectors also work great for text and box heavy designs such as postcards, because the edges will print nice and sharp. Vectors are great for when you have to change a design many times because you get no degradation each time you change something. Other times you might prefer to use Photoshop’s vector tools are for a large poster, because you can create it small and then scale it up huge without losing any quality. The pen tool is great for these kinds of cutout tasks because of the clean, controllable, reusable nature of vectors.

Check out the car, vectors were used to cut it out. Most commonly vectors are used for cutting something out from its background in a photograph. But be grateful that Photoshop offers this feature it can come in handy in a number of situations. It uses vector elements and stores them in layers and as paths. Photoshop can’t create entire vector documents. It might seem odd to find vector-drawing tools in a pixel-pushing program like Photoshop vector drawing is usually associated with very different programs, like Illustrator and Freehand. At that point, you can specify the circle’s color, line thickness, and so on. If you want a shape like a circle, your job is to simply draw the circle Photoshop defines the center point and the radius to create a circle. You don’t need to know any math it’s all done for you. Vectors are lines, whose curvature, thickness, and length are determined by mathematical formulae. See it in action: Extracting photos with the pen tool video tutorial But Photoshop is also handy with the other important family of computer-graphics building blocks: the little guys called vectors. Step 1 Vectors and paths explained Vectors ExplainedĪs you know, Photoshop is primarily known for its ability to manipulate pixels, those tiny building blocks that join together so tightly that they seem to form a smooth image, usually a digital photograph. With a little know-how and practice, it will be your ally for the rest of your career. The pen tool is very powerful and accurate. It seems that one of the most requested and under-explained things is using the pen tool in Photoshop.
