Adobe Photoshop CS3 Tutorials
Drawing / Edit Paths
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS3 / Drawing / Edit Paths)
Now that we've experimented with the pen tool and gotten a feel for how it works let's talk about how to actually fix things or tweak things because one thing I always notice is when I'm teaching people how to use the pen tool they try to be perfect with their lines and its really a waste of time because you can always go to these tools here as well as the tools here to fix how your path looks and works. So first of all let's talk about these guys in here. First of all we know the pen tool creates the path and the free form pen does the same thing but allows you to actually draw the pen tool. If you decide that you need more uh detail and you want to add some more points click on the add anchor point tool. Now we can click anywhere on our path and when you see a little plus sign you click and you can add points to this shape. Likewise we can also delete anchor points if you have way too many and it makes your artwork a little unwieldy. So we can go ahead and get rid of points the same exact way, just put your mouse on the point you wanna get rid of until its gone. Let me undo that a couple of times and now we can also use this tool which is very convenient and it works in a weird way. It's the convert point tool. So let's say we have this point here, this is called a smooth point because its round and it, it's got a nice curve going on here and we also have a control handle. So if I'm gonna make this a corner, I'm gonna click one time and look at that it is now a corner, it's a sharp curve there. I can go ahead and do the same thing with all these guys and turn all these guys into sharp uh corners. Now you might be asking how in the world do I get the curves back, well this is where the tool comes in handy because it works in a strange way. You would think that if you click on it again it would change it for you, no. What you have to do is click and then drag and there you go you get the handles back so you click and you drag and you click and you drag and slowly but surely you're able to get the nice smooth corners or curves back. Alright, so we have our curves back. I'm only gonna do a few of them. Now let's talk about how to move these guys around. How do we manipulate these points? Well that's where these tools come in handy. If you want to move the entire path as one group then click on this tool here and this will allow you to move the entire path, ok. If you want to manipulate individual points you have to choose the direct selection tool and you'll find the same exact tool in Adobe Illustrator, the white arrow we call it. What you do is you deselect the shape, its you know what I recommend, you click somewhere else and then click on the path itself right on the edge and now the points are active and I can move them around. When they're hollow you can manipulate them. When they're not, let me go ahead and grab this tool again, the path selection tool, when they're all dark like this you cant grab one. So once again remember the black arrow gives you black points, the white arrow gives you hollow. That's the best way to think about it. So you could also click on one point like this as well and then grab the handles and you could pull the handles and change how the curve is going to work as far as its tangency. So you can change how that works by grabbing on the control handles and moving them around. You can move the whole thing and you can move them like this and you can also pull them in and stretch them out. So you can have a lot of control. Now you notice the corner ones don't have them, so once again we're gonna grab this guy and we're gonna click and we're gonna convert them to nice smooth curves and we're gonna grab our direct selection tool and move them where we want to put them. So once, once again let me deselect this, click on the edge grab one of the hollow points and I can slowly but surely change the shape of this until I'm happy with it and that is how you edit these crazy curves that you create with the pen tool in Photoshop.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33782 |
| ISBN: | 1-933736-98-4 |
| Release Date: | 2007-08-02 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 161 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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