The pen tool is one of the best tools in photoshop, but often people don’t know how to use it properly. With the variety of settings and tools that photoshop gives you to compliment the pen tool, a newcomer can become very confused. In this tutorial we’ll go over the pen tool and how it is used in photoshop.
On your toolbar at the side of photoshop, you’ll see the pen tool. If you hold down on the pen tool icon, a bunch of other tool will pop up, as shown below.
Lets concentrate on the actual pen tool for now. The pen tool works in a pretty cool and intuitive way, allowing you to create any shape you want to. There are two mode that the pen tool can be in. One will create a new layer with the shape youre creating on it (on a layer mask) and the other will simply create the shape, without the layer and without being filled with a color, known as paths. These two option can be found in the top toolbar. In most cases you’ll be using the option that makes a shape.
Now you may think that the option that doesn’t make a shape isn’t that useful, since you don’t really have a tangible layer to work with after creating the shape. However, there are plenty of stuff that this option is quite useful for, but we’ll get to that later.
So, basically, there are two ways to make shapes with the pen tool. You can use the freeform pen tool, or the regular pen tool. They both have their pros and cons. The pen tool works by creating points on your document, which you can then further manipulate. When you click on the first point that you drew again, it will finish close the shape, finishing it. Think of the pen tool as a way to make shapes, as that’s all it really is.
The freeform pen tool is good if you have something like a tablet, in that you can just draw the shape. Why not try it out for yourself? Grab the freeform pen tool and try drawing something by holding down the left mous button on the document and dragging the tool about. It should be as easy as drawing with the brush or pencil tools, only you’ll have a shape instead of a line. If you’re drawing a shape with the freeform pen tool, and want to draw a straight line somewhere in it, press alt, and let go of the left mouse button, allowing you to draw a straight line. Then click the left mouse button to end this line. Let go of alt to go back to freeform mode.
The freeform pen tool also has a magnetic mode, which basically makes it attach to a whatever you’re drawing around. This isn’t full proof though, and you can sometimes end up with errors. It’s great if you have a high contrasting color against a background though. Why not try it out? Open up this picture in Photoshop and pick up the freeform pen tool. Then tick the magnetic box in the top tool bar
You can quickly trace around the screaming head in the middle and you’ll notice that the points stick to the edge of the shape. As I’ve said, it’s not without its errors, and you might have to go back over and manipulate the points so that they fit perfectly (we’ll get to the manipulation of points later).
The freeform pen tool works by creating a series of points at every turn you make with the pen tool. It’s much faster that the regular pen tool but it also has its flaws. For instance, it’s harder to draw a perfectly curved line. Not only that, but if you’re making an overly complex shape, you can end up with too many points, which can be problematic to work with.
The (regular) pen tool is probably the one you’ll be using the most. Once you have it selected, click anywhere in your document, and a point will appear. You can then click somewhere else and another point will appear. If you hold shift, you can create a completely straight line. When you place a point, you can drag it, and two lines will extrude from it. They’re called anchors, and you can manipulate them to alter where the line is going, but we’ll get to that later. If you want to remove anchors from a point, hold alt and click on that point.
You’ll also notice that there is a box where the “Magnetic” box was when you had the freeform pen tool selected, which now says “Auto Add/Delete”. If this is ticked, it’ll mean that when you click on a previous point it will be deleted automatically. This can be annoying if you’re drawing a small shape with points very close to each other, so you might want to untick it for now.
There are a few tools allowing you to manipulate the points and shapes you’ve drawn:
Changing the color of a shape is pretty easy. Select the layer in the layer palette, and make sure the layer mask is highlighted. Then in the top toolbar, click the block that has “Color:” beside it. Style is right beside the color box. This will be applied to the whole shape, and not individual points.
Removing points can be done by grabbing the Delete Anchor Point tool and clicking on the points you don’t like. If the points are not showing, try clicking on the shape, and they should appear. If you remove a point in the middle of two points, you’ll end up with the line going from the first point to the third point, and depending on the anchors, you might have to alter their positions.
You do this with the Add Anchor Point tool. Just grab it, and then click on the shape where you want to add the point. You can also use the add anchor point tool to move anchor points around, by clicking and dragging them about.
The Convert Point tool allows you to do a lot of manipulation of points. It allows you to alter individual anchors by grabbing them and moving them around, or both anchor at once, by grabbing the point.
You can easily add and remove parts to or from a shape using some of the tools in the toolbar.
There are five options here.
You can alter pre-made shapes by clicking on them with the Convert Point Tool and then altering the points that appear. This goes for all pre-made shapes, such as squares, rectangles, circles, etc.
That about covers it for this tutorial. Hopefully you have a better grasp of the pen tool now than you did before. I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial, and hopefully you’ve all learned something new.
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Comments
thanks.very useful.
good only knows how much trouble i have faced with pen tool… hopefully this will simplify things.. :D
thanx, very usefull tips
Very good article .
Thanx a lot.This tutorial help me a lot.
That’s a great tutorial tells the Pen Tool. Thanx a lot.