Photoshop pen tool

I was asked about this so I'd thought I'd do a quick deal. As an instructional technologist I hesitate to call this a tutorial. If it needs to go there maybe one of the moderators will move it. Personally I find I don't go there often enough .

Real quick here's the disclaimer. There's a thousand ways to do stuff in photoshop or illustrator. This is just one of the ways I know. If you want to discuss serious methodology PM me. I too am a student of the game.

Here goes:

http://www.58vw.com/af/clr1.jpg

I'm gonna select and color one of the fenders on that little Mini I did the other day. I zoom on in, and get ready.


http://www.58vw.com/af/clr2.jpg

I select the pen tool and make sure it's set to be a path. Note: I started with the free form but changed my mind so make it a path. Preferably not filled ok?


http://www.58vw.com/af/clr3.jpg

I click a starting point (1) and then I click another point (2) about halfway through the curve I'm heading towards. I drag my mouse to the right slowly and the bezier handles show up.

Now, the bezier curves work the same in photoshop, illustrator and freehand with the exception of what you use to make it a corner point.

After I have my 2 points I decided I wanted it to be a corner point as opposed to a curve so I....



http://www.58vw.com/af/clr4.jpg

hold the alt key and click on point (2). This resets the tool to a corner point. It's a tricky thing to figure out when you want to continue on a curve point or when you want to go corner point. The best advice I can give is mess with it. Photoshop has a history pallet you can step back 25 steps by default but you can increase it to 100 steps (file-preferences). So it's not like you're gonna mess it up so much you can't fix it.



http://www.58vw.com/af/clr5.jpg

I went around and clicked a few more points until I got my shape closed.
A little circle shows up on the end of your mouse pointer when you are on the closing point.



http://www.58vw.com/af/clr6.jpg

I held the ctrl key and clicked on the path in my paths pallet. This turns the path into a selection. If your paths pallet isn't open it's under the windows menu.

Here's another little trick: Holding the ctrl key and clicking on any layer selects all pixel information on that layer. Major time saver....MAJOR. Also really really cool because you can ctrl click 2 or 3 layers create a new layer and make whatever as a combonation of 3 other layers....I KNOW!!!


http://www.58vw.com/af/clr7.jpg

Then I filled my shape with my red foreground color (alt-backspace) I kept my selection active and changed my foreground color to a darker reddish and switched to my airbrush. Set it really low...I used 6%. Then I brushed in some darks.

If you keep your selection active no color will go outside what is selected. Very cool.

I switched my foreground color to a pinkish color and made my brush head smaller and threw in som highlights.

Then I made a new layer made a nifty white shape and set the layers property to overlay. I knocked the opacity down to 45% and that makes a cool hot spot.

That's it for now.

I can go deeper, but that should get you guys up and running.

For practice just open a new document and try to draw closed curved shapes with the pen tool. Remember the alt + click to reset the point and you should do just fine.

http://www.58vw.com/af/clr8.jpg

-Lemorris

oh if you save your path or shape theres a little thing that looks like an arrow head under the pen tool. It will allow you to edit the points.

Very very cool.

Lovely tutorial. I have been using PS for about 4 years and the pen tool is still my least favorite.

To be honest I like the pen tool in Illustrator a lot better.

It's real nice to have the vector on fly.

However the pen tool in photoshop grew up in version 5.5 which probably should have been a full upgrade.

You ever use painter?

You ever use painter?

Whats Painter? I use Photoshop, Blender, AutoCAD, AutoSketch, and a few others but I have never heard of Painter.

Painter was a metacreations program. True to life painterly effects on the computer. It's alot harder to use than photoshop in my opinion, but I have seen amazing works done in it.

There's people at http://www.wetcanvas.com that swear by it.

I have version 5 and will probably install it on my daughters computer and see if we can learn it together. I might just let her teach me.