Subtitles of the Movie

Now some of these tools that you're seeing me use here and some of the shapes I've made may not make a lot of sense to a beginner, so I've created this one movie just to show you some basic examples of how the Pen Tool, the Direct Select Tool and the Points can be very useful in your day-to-day work. First of all, let me just choose the Pen Tool and draw an abstract shape like this. Doesn't really matter what it is here. I'm just going to come in, click there. Now, what would you use something like this for? Well, it's a frame. You can drop an object in it. So I'll just choose a photograph here, drop it in and it takes on that shape. I'll just hit this button to resize it proportionately here and once we've done that we can come over to our Direct Select Tool and change it. Now all our points are selected here so I'm going to have to hold down the Shift key to deselect it so that I can just move one like that. I can bring these down and if I need to change the direction of the point I can hold down the Cmd-Option or Ctrl-Alt to change it like that and then we can have the other point like this. So this can be very useful, just to have a shape that you want and make some adjustments to it, like that. Looks a little bit like Mickey Mouse ears there, but anyway, let me move to the next page where I've got a couple of examples here and with this one here I can select it, come over and let's say I just wanted to see the plate. I could add Anchor Points here, coming in. Let me just go back to my Direct Select Tool, move over, add an Anchor Point here, here, here, here and I'm not really going to do this properly but just do it really fast like that. Then I can come in, Direct Select Tool, select this, move it down, drag this one down like this and so on and so forth till I'm just showing the plate. Obviously, if I were doing this in real life to use it I would be taking a lot more care than I'm doing at the moment. Drag that one in, I double-clicked and that changed everything. That was a mistake. Let me undo that a couple of times, then I can come in, just change this one, one down here like that. So, very rough but you get the idea. Another way I could do exactly the same thing is just come in, choose an Ellipse Frame Tool here, draw a basic shape the size of the plate. I can come in, resize it like this. Let me just get this stroke here black so that we can see what we're working on and that way I can zoom in here, Ctrl-, Cmd-Spacebar. Then I could go to my Direct Select Tool, hold down the Shift just to click on one node, drag this one out like that, again, very roughly here. Drag this one in, till we get basically the shape of the plate and then what I can do is I can select this photograph, cut it - Ctrl- or Cmd-X - select my frame, this time I'm just going to turn the stroke off, but when I go Edit, Paste Into, look at that. We've created a mask around it. Now you can do this in Photoshop, of course and then we could just come in here and edit this till we get it right. Let me zoom out. Cmd- or Ctrl-zero, like that. And I'm just going to move down to one more page to show you one more little effect. Text can be curved as well. So at the moment this is text and I know we haven't dealt with text yet, so bear with me, but I can convert this to curves. So we can pull down the Type Menu and choose Create Outline, Curves, same thing and we'll zoom in on it again, that way I can go to my Direct Select Tool here. I can select a couple of nodes, pull it down like this, select this one, move it out and create some pretty dramatic shapes with the nodes I have out here, like that. And this is pretty horrible, what I'm doing at the moment, but I think you get the idea of how you can use these points and these curves that we've been dealing with in this chapter to create some very dramatic effects. You can create this as a mask and put photographs in it if necessary, so this is a sort of great things you can do.