How To Use Photoshop’s Levels in Pen Tool Photoshop Tutorial 12: Path & Levels Layer

Pen Tool Tutorial Captions

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Welcome to PEN TOOL Photoshop. In this tutorial, I’ll cover some more things that revolve

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around cutting out, just not the actual pen tool but other tools you can use to assist you cutting

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out. Sometimes, it can be difficult to see visually where there is a line or an edge around an

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object. So, you can use something called the levels, an adjustment layer. It explains it here how

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to get to it. But you can click on the layers pallet, click the little half circle here, and choose

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levels.

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So, what levels does is click the little triangles here and you can drag these triangles to adjust the

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color. So if you want it a bit darker, you can adjust the midtones. Here, you can adjust the

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shadows. In this case, it’s not really the shadows that are the problem, it’s all the midtone

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This region here. You can see this corner is a bit hard to see. It just makes it a bit easier to cut out.

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So, I can leave it like that, and I can turn this layer off and on.

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But it just assists me to see this edge here. So, these tutorials from 12 onwards, a lot of it is

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mostly just practice. I’ll explain things here and there as to where it will be to your advantage to

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understand the day to day working of how you cut certain images out. But most of it, is pretty

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much practice. So I’ll go through cutting this item out and you can just watch on. And I’ll

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probably speed the process up in the video.

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You can see that process took about 2 minutes. Relatively straightforward. Quite a simple

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job to do to cut around things. Just take your time and a bit of precision. The other thing is,

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like I said, it took two minutes. It is a good idea to time yourself when you’re first starting out,

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because it’s really helpful when you come to a cost a job. If someone comes to you with a

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job, it might be a design job or a photography job, and they ask you to cut things out, if you look

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at the images and you think, “I can’t wand that, I’m going to use the pen tool,” then you have

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you to start to think, “Okay, right. This sort of image,” say you have 10 perfume bottles to cut

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out, “Okay, that took me 2 minutes,” so times ten and you can work out your costing. It’s very

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handy that way. It’s a good idea to understand different shapes, different objects, how complex

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they are, where your skill level is and how long it will take you to do. And then, you can cost

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accordingly. At the end of the day, the client just wants a really nice cut out product. So even if it

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took you a really long time, slowly you get better and better at it, and you get quicker. So, that

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was pathing and using levels adjustment layer to see the edge of the item you’re pathing out. And

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I’ll see you in the next tutorial.

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