Learn Photoshop fast by learning the Pen Tool first. Learn Photoshop Pen Tool basics in this tutorial
Video Tutorial Outline
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Welcome to PEN TOOL Photoshop. In this tutorial we’ll cover working with paths, anchors and lines.
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Once again, press P. Always press P to start off with, and we’ll cover how to move a path, anchors or
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lines. So if you click on the path in the paths palette, and like the previous tutorial, select the lines you
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hold down the command key and click and drag over the line. So at this particular point we are going to
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move it up to here. Hold down command you can see it’s filled in with black, and these anchors are
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hollow. So if I command, click and drag, I can drag that into place. So with this example down at the
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bottom here I can command, click and drag over this part of the path. Instead of clicking on the anchors,
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I usually click on the line and drag the line. To drag it, hold down the shift key. That will constrain it. With
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the circle at the top, command, click and drag over the circle, then hold down the shift key, I can drag
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it back into place. So lets say I just dragged it to there and I was close. I can actually nudge it as well. So if I hold down
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the shift key and click on the arrows, if I click on the arrows by themselves, it nudges really precise. If I hold
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down the shift key it nudges by 10. So you see it’s 10 pixels at a time, so you get to like there and nudge
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it into place, really precise movements. So at the bottom path, it says exclude overlapping area of
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a path. So in this path I can command click over that anchor. Click on it to activate the path. Hold down
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the shift key to constrain, then click on this point here to close off that square shape. So to exclude the
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inside area, as long as I’ve selected this paths, If I’d clicked off of it and started clicking it will make a new
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path. As long as I’ve got that path selected, hold down the shift key and hit cut out that inside part. So
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even though you can’t see it here, and I go through it in detail later how you can actually check the path,
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to see how it looks visually in the latest tutorial, this inside path automatically reverse out of
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this path here. So as long as you got the setting up here, exclude overlapping shapes. That will exclude.
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So I’ve got points four and five, I’m talking about separating a path. So at the moment all these paths are
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on the exact same path. So if I want to separate these paths out, there are a few ways you can do it. So in
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this option here I can hold down the command key, click and drag over those paths, and I’ve selected all
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those points. You can see there are all solid. I can press command X to cut it. I have to click off that path
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in the paths palette and command V. It will paste a new path in as a working path which I can double
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click, save it as a path. Same with the other paths. Command, click and drag over them, command X.
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Click off. I can make a new path this way, and paste if I wanted to.
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The other way of doing it, sometimes it’s hard, because the paths are close together it’s hard to select
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the points without selecting other paths that you want to keep. So the second option here, No.5, the
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other way of doing it, is I can just duplicate this path so I’ve got two copies. So in this one here I would
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command and then I hit delete once, and you can see it’s deleted that line. You can hit delete again until it’s a
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whole path. So on the copy, I can do the same for the top one. So rather than having to select the whole
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thing, I can just select part of it, hit delete once, delete again. And all the anchors that were connected to
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that line are initially deleted. That would delete for the second time, and you would have to rename it.
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So that really depends on whether you can actually get to the path you want to remove. Otherwise you
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can just cut and paste it into a new path.
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Pen Tool itself is relatively basic. There are some work flow things later on in the other tutorials about
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how to work with it more efficiently. If you get to understand the basics of the Pen Tool, the more
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advanced areas we’ll cover later will be a lot easier for you.
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So that was working with paths, anchors and lines, and I’ll see you in the next tutorial.