Photoshop Tutorial for Beginners
Learn Photoshop fast by learning the Pen Tool first. Learn Photoshop Pen Tool basics in this tutorial
Video Tutorial Outline
- Select the Pen Tool: Press p
- Moving Path Anchors & Lines: Activate the Path (see Lesson 3), with CTRL/⌘ held down Mouse Click and Hold directly on top of an Anchor or Line and drag into place or use the Keyboard arrow keys to incrementally nudge, holding down Shift will nudge by a factor of 10.
- Excluding inside areas of a Path Shape: With the same Path selected Path around the inside shapes. As long as Exclude Overlapping Shapes is selected in the Path Tool Presets (see Lesson 2) the inside shapes will automatically reverse out
- Separating Paths Option 1: Select a Path, hold down CTRL/⌘ and click and drag over the Path you want separate, press CTRL/⌘ X to Cut. Deselect the current path by clicking into a blank space in the Paths Palette and press CTRL/⌘ V to paste
- Separating Paths Option 2: Duplicate an existing Path by drag it onto the New Path Button at the bottom of the Path Tool Palette, Select and hold down CTRL/⌘ click and drag over the Paths to want to remove and hit the delete key twice to remove all the Anchors. Take care not to select the Path you want to keep
Click here or the image below to download the exercise file
Pen Tool Tutorial Captions
1
00:00:01,718 –> 00:00:05,685
Welcome to PEN TOOL Photoshop. In this tutorial we’ll cover working with paths, anchors and lines.
2
00:00:05,685 –> 00:00:10,592
Once again, press P. Always press P to start off with, and we’ll cover how to move a path, anchors or
3
00:00:10,592 –> 00:00:16,216
lines. So if you click on the path in the paths palette, and like the previous tutorial, select the lines you
4
00:00:16,216 –> 00:00:20,157
hold down the command key and click and drag over the line. So at this particular point we are going to
5
00:00:20,157 –> 00:00:23,998
move it up to here. Hold down command you can see it’s filled in with black, and these anchors are
6
00:00:23,998 –> 00:00:29,206
hollow. So if I command, click and drag, I can drag that into place. So with this example down at the
7
00:00:29,206 –> 00:00:34,455
bottom here I can command, click and drag over this part of the path. Instead of clicking on the anchors,
8
00:00:34,455 –> 00:00:40,081
I usually click on the line and drag the line. To drag it, hold down the shift key. That will constrain it. With
9
00:00:40,081 –> 00:00:49,061
the circle at the top, command, click and drag over the circle, then hold down the shift key, I can drag
10
00:00:49,061 –> 00:00:53,565
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
11
00:00:53,565 –> 00:01:01,187
the shift key and click on the arrows, if I click on the arrows by themselves, it nudges really precise. If I hold
12
00:01:01,187 –> 00:01:07,109
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
13
00:01:07,109 –> 00:01:13,613
it into place, really precise movements. So at the bottom path, it says exclude overlapping area of
14
00:01:13,613 –> 00:01:20,467
a path. So in this path I can command click over that anchor. Click on it to activate the path. Hold down
15
00:01:20,467 –> 00:01:25,803
the shift key to constrain, then click on this point here to close off that square shape. So to exclude the
16
00:01:25,803 –> 00:01:30,530
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
17
00:01:30,530 –> 00:01:39,621
path. As long as I’ve got that path selected, hold down the shift key and hit cut out that inside part. So
18
00:01:39,621 –> 00:01:43,465
even though you can’t see it here, and I go through it in detail later how you can actually check the path,
19
00:01:43,465 –> 00:01:49,231
to see how it looks visually in the latest tutorial, this inside path automatically reverse out of
20
00:01:49,231 –> 00:01:53,861
this path here. So as long as you got the setting up here, exclude overlapping shapes. That will exclude.
21
00:01:53,861 –> 00:01:57,747
So I’ve got points four and five, I’m talking about separating a path. So at the moment all these paths are
22
00:01:57,747 –> 00:02:03,512
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
23
00:02:03,512 –> 00:02:08,609
this option here I can hold down the command key, click and drag over those paths, and I’ve selected all
24
00:02:08,609 –> 00:02:13,606
those points. You can see there are all solid. I can press command X to cut it. I have to click off that path
25
00:02:13,606 –> 00:02:19,543
in the paths palette and command V. It will paste a new path in as a working path which I can double
26
00:02:19,543 –> 00:02:24,839
click, save it as a path. Same with the other paths. Command, click and drag over them, command X.
27
00:02:24,839 –> 00:02:28,947
Click off. I can make a new path this way, and paste if I wanted to.
28
00:02:28,947 –> 00:02:33,625
The other way of doing it, sometimes it’s hard, because the paths are close together it’s hard to select
29
00:02:33,625 –> 00:02:39,057
the points without selecting other paths that you want to keep. So the second option here, No.5, the
30
00:02:39,057 –> 00:02:43,607
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
31
00:02:43,607 –> 00:02:47,233
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
32
00:02:47,233 –> 00:02:51,792
whole path. So on the copy, I can do the same for the top one. So rather than having to select the whole
33
00:02:51,792 –> 00:02:56,053
thing, I can just select part of it, hit delete once, delete again. And all the anchors that were connected to
34
00:02:56,053 –> 00:03:00,223
that line are initially deleted. That would delete for the second time, and you would have to rename it.
35
00:03:00,223 –> 00:03:03,946
So that really depends on whether you can actually get to the path you want to remove. Otherwise you
36
00:03:03,946 –> 00:03:05,678
can just cut and paste it into a new path.
37
00:03:05,678 –> 00:03:09,379
Pen Tool itself is relatively basic. There are some work flow things later on in the other tutorials about
38
00:03:09,379 –> 00:03:13,004
how to work with it more efficiently. If you get to understand the basics of the Pen Tool, the more
39
00:03:13,004 –> 00:03:16,118
advanced areas we’ll cover later will be a lot easier for you.
40
00:03:16,118 –> 00:03:19,926
So that was working with paths, anchors and lines, and I’ll see you in the next tutorial.
