From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

969 Curving a vector-based line segment in Photoshop

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

969 Curving a vector-based line segment in Photoshop

- [Instructor] All right now we're going to take that straight, vector-based arrow and we're going to bend it in order to better match the curvature coming out of that cursive letter W. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch to our image in progress and zoom in as well. And then I'll twirl open this group, at the top of the stack, which I've named type with arrow. So I'll go and click on the twirly triangle in order to expand the group and I'll make the color panel a little smaller so that I have more room to work. And I'll go ahead and click on this vector-based shape layer called arrow. And you can see the outline of that arrowhead, in my case represented in blue. Now, what you want to do is click and hold on the black arrow tool. The one that Photoshop calls the path selection tool and select the direct selection tool aka the white arrow tool, which allows you to select and modify independent anchor points. And so I'll go ahead and select this first one right here and then I'm going to convert this point from a corner point, without any control handles, to a smooth point by clicking and holding on the pen tool and selecting the convert point tool from that fly-out menu. Now, what you want to do is just drag from that first anchor point, like so, in order to convert it to a smooth point with two symmetrical control handles which is going to bend that segment like so. Now, you're probably going to get an alert message telling you that this is going to turn the live shape into a regular path. Where lines are concerned that literally doesn't matter at all. Just go ahead and click yes. You're not going to lose any functionality. Now notice that we actually have two curving segments and that's because whenever you draw an arrowhead with the line tool, Photoshop expresses it not as an open path outline but as a closed one. And so what we need to do is just marquee that lower segment like so in order to select it independently of the rest of the path then press the Backspace key or the Delete key on a Mac to get rid of it. All right, now you want to switch back to the white arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the A key, A for arrow, and then click on this anchor point right here. And I want you to notice if I drag it away that the top anchor point belongs to the arrowhead not the line segment going into it. And so what I'm going to do just to make sure everything aligns the way I want it to is press Control + Z or Command + Z on a Mac to undo that change once again just to make sure that anchor point is selected, I'll click on it and then I'll press Shift + Down Arrow one, two, three, four, five times in a row in order to scoot that guy down so I can focus my attention on this other anchor point, the one that belongs to the line segment. Now you want to switch back to the convert point tool and then instead of dragging on that anchor point, which will turn it into a smooth point and we'll end up bending the inside edge of the arrowhead. That's not what I want. So I'll undo that change, instead just drag directly on the curving segment like so and that will draw forth a single control handle. At which point go ahead and move it to right about here along this dark edge. And now switch back to the white arrow tool. Again, you can get that tool by pressing the A key and now click on this control handle and drag it up. At which point you want to match the curvature coming off that curly loop of the W. Now in my case, I'll zoom in a little farther, it looks like the edge isn't exactly matching. And so I'm going to click in this line weight option up here in the options bar and take it up from 15 pixels to 15.5 pixels and then press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac and that gives us a little additional thickness. Now select that anchor point and press the Down Arrow key in order to nudge it down just a little bit. And then I'll add some more curvature by dragging this control handle. And so notice now we have this nice smooth curve. All right, now I want to put this point back where it belongs. And so I'll click on it to select it and press Shift + Up Arrow one, two, three, four, five times in order to put it right back where it was. And now I'll click off the path outline to de-select it. I'll press Shift + F in order to switch to the full screen mode and I'll zoom out just a bit. And if that doesn't look exactly right, you can click on that point right there with the white arrow tool and you can try nudging it just a little bit to the left by pressing the Left Arrow key. And to me, that looks a lot better. And I doubt if you were to zoom out to a hundred percent that anybody's going to perceive any difference between the curvature of the cursive W and the curvature of that hand drawn, vector-based line segment here inside the wonderful versatile world of Photoshop.

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