Adobe Photoshop 7 Tutorials
Vector Tools / Path Palette
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop 7 / Vector Tools / Path Palette)
In this lesson, I want to talk about how you can work with your paths in the paths palette. Notice that I have 2 paths here, one's called path1 and the other one is called work path in italics. If you want to see how your path looks on your image, all you need to do is select its name or click on the thumbnail here. And you can see that the path will be activated on your image. Of course, it's not activated as a selection, it's just showing you the path. If we wanted to edit this path's anchor points, I would need to further select this targeted path with one of my selection tools - such a the direct selection tool. All I need to do is click right on the path in order to make these anchor points visible. And now of course, I could go and edit the anchor points. Notice that the path underneath path 1 says work path in italics. If it says work path in italics, that means that the next path you make will replace this one. So if you wanted to save this path, I need to rename it. So, I'll just double click on it and give it a new name. Type whatever name you want here, and click ok. And now this path will not be replaced with a new work path. And just to show you how that will work, I'll just create a quick path here. And notice it was added to the collection of paths in my paths palette. I'll go ahead and choose a different tool, and deselect this path by clicking somewhere where there are no paths in the paths palette. And now if I go and add or start to create a new path, notice that my work path is being replaced with my new path. So if you want to keep your path, be sure to rename it. We can activate any path as a selection quite easily by selecting the path on the paths palette, and then clicking on this icon which will activate it or load it as a selection. Another way we could load a path as a selection is to drag it down to the activate path as selection icon at the bottom of the paths palette. I'm going to deselect that, and show you another option that we have with paths. So I'm going to select my first apple path and from the path palette menu, we have several options available to us, and these are all fairly basic. We could of course make a selection this way as well. Delete the path, and if you wanted to delete a path, all you need to do is drag it down to the trashcan - that's another way of deleting a path. Create a new path, and another way to do that is to click on the new path button at the bottom of the paths palette. Or with a selected path, I could also make this a clipping path. And with a clipping path, the clipping path will clip the outside information around the path, so that it is not visible when it is saved as an EPS file format and imported into a page layout application. So all you need to do is choose the path name that you want to make a clipping path and say ok. And notice how it changes the name to create this outlined name effect, indicating that this is a clipping path. I'm going to deselect that path just by clicking down where there are no paths, and show you another way you can use paths. You can actually convert any selection into a path by clicking on this icon, or you could also go to the paths palette menu and choose make work path. And it immediately converts it into a vector-based path. Finally, another helpful feature of paths is the ability to export the path by itself. Under the file menu choose export, and one of your options is paths to illustrator. And you just give this path a name, and choose the path you want to export, and click save. And it will save that out as a vector-based graphic, which can be imported into most vector-editing applications, certainly into Adobe Illustrator. So there is a lot you can do with paths.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop 7 |
| Author: | Andrew J. Hathaway |
| SKU: | 33329 |
| ISBN: | 1889347272 |
| Release Date: | 2002-09-05 |
| Duration: | 11 hrs / 152 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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