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

978 Tracing an object with the Photoshop Pen tool

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

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978 Tracing an object with the Photoshop Pen tool

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- Hey, gang. This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to "Deke's Techniques." Today, I'll show you how to trace a highly graphic but sloppy-looking image detail using the Exacting Pen tool inside Photoshop. And it's all in the name of tracing the four standard suits associated with standard playing cards. Here's the idea. Photoshop ships with custom vector-based shapes that include each of the familiar suits. But, gee, how can I put this kindly? They look like trash. Here, I'll bring up some center guides. See how the top of the diamond drifts to the right and the bottom drifts to the left? The bottom of the club isn't flat, and the clovers aren't round. Compare those to the industry-standard designs championed by Bicycle Brand Playing Cards. They're all symmetrical. The sides of the diamond bend inward slightly, and the other suits include these rounded divots that give the shapes definition and make them easier to read. Problem is, I don't have vector definitions of the bicycle designs, just these imprecise up-sampled pixels, which is why I decided to trace each and every suit using Photoshop's wicked-precise Pen tool, starting with the heart. The Pen tool makes all shapes possible. Plus, many more. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here we are inside Photoshop, looking at these playing cards, and so notice the three of hearts-- if I were to zoom in on the heart itself, you can see that it's pretty mushy. It's got these glumpy edges right here, and that's a function of the fact that I up-sampled this heart, that is to say I enlarged it as pixels. And let me very quickly show you what that looks like. I'll go ahead and switch over to this image right here, which comes to us from the Dreams Time image library, and I'll zoom in on this central heart up here near the top of the 10 card. And I'll select the heart all together automatically using the Object Selection tool, which is a great tool inside Photoshop. It does an awesome job of selecting things like a red heart against a white background. So notice I just marquee around it, and it selects automatically. And now I'll press Control + C, or Command + C on the Mac to copy it. Then I'll switch back to my composition and press Control + V, or Command + V on the Mac in order to paste it. And so hopefully, you can see this new heart in front of the old one. If not, I'll go ahead and fill it with black by pressing the D key, in order to instate my default colors so the foreground color is black and then I'll press Shift + Alt + Backspace, that's going to be Shift + Option + Delete on the Mac, in order to fill just the heart so we're not affecting the transparent pixels with that foreground color, which is black. All right, now I'm going to scale the heart by going to the Edit menu and choosing Free Transform, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + T, or Command + T on the Mac. And now I'll move this guy upward so it snaps into alignment with the existing heart, and then I'll go ahead and drag this corner handle right here. And I came up with width and height values, notice that they're linked together, of 128 percent, by the way. And now I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, in order to apply that change. Now, notice that my interpolation setting is Bicubic Automatic by default, which when up-sampling, sets it to Bicubic Smoother, which attempts to smooth the edges. It actually kind of fails, by the way. But I'm going to go ahead and apply it anyway by pressing the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, and then I'll turn off the original heart of pixels layer right here. And you can see that we have these very glumpy edges, so the heart is unsmooth, as it were. And if I were to turn heart of pixels back on and turn this new layer off, then you can see if I zoom in here, you might be able to make it out in the video, that we have all kinds of jpeg artifacts going on inside this bright red heart. And so in other words, we have what I consider to be a pixel base fail. So what I prefer to do is trace this heart using a vector-based path outline. And to that end, I'm going to go ahead and select the Pen tool, which you can get by pressing the P key. And notice that by default, it's set to Create A Path Outline. You can see that over here on the left side of the control panel. That's going to work out just fine for our purposes. And so, tell you what. I'll start at the bottom of the heart by dragging like so in order to create this anchor point with the long control handle. I think I might actually be zoomed in too far, so I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit. And then, I'll drag right here, at the center of the bowl of the heart, on the left hand side, so I'll go ahead and drag upward like so while pressing the Shift key, by the way, in order to constrain the angle of the control handle to exactly vertical, like so. Now what that does is it shows me that the previous control handle is not in the right position. And so, I'll go ahead and press the Control key, or the Command key on the Mac, in order to access my white arrow tool on the fly. And I'll go ahead and drag this control handle down like so, to let's say, right about here. And then, with the Control key still down, that's the Command key on the Mac, I'll drag this control handle, the one associated with the new anchor point, upward a little bit. And you can be as fussy as you like, you can drag these guys back and forth. Again though, you need to have the Control key down, that's the Command key on the Mac, in case I wasn't clear about that. All right, now this guy's too high, so I'll drag it down. I still have the Control or Command key down by the way, but I'm also adding the Shift key so that I'm constraining the angle of this control handle to exactly vertical. And now I'm going to release those keys, finally, we're done with them, for a moment anyway. And now I'll drag from the center of the lobe of the heart. The center at the top, that is to say, and I'll go ahead and drag like so, and I'll press the Shift key once again to constrain the angle of my drag this time to exactly horizontal. And now, I've got a control handle. This control handle right here is too long, and so I'll press the Control key, Command key on the Mac, and drag this guy over while also pressing the Shift key. So I'm still constraining the angle of this control handle to exactly horizontal. (laughing) How exciting is that? All right, now I'll go ahead and zoom in a little bit (laughing) I'll drag down, like so. Gosh, I amuse myself. It'll create a smooth point with a control handle, like so. You can move the anchor point around, by the way, by adding the space bar. However, if you have the Shift key down at the same time, you're going to constrain the movement of that anchor point. I don't want to do that so I'll just go ahead and move that without the Shift key down. I do have the space bar down, by the way. So a lot of keys involved here. And now, I'll release the space bar, and I'll once again press the Shift key to constrain the angle of my drag to exactly vertical, like so. All right, now I'll press the Control key, or the Command key on the Mac, and drag this guy upward while also pressing the Shift key, very important, so I'm maintaining vertical control handles. And now, I'll go ahead and zoom in even farther here, and I'll drag right here at the base of this kind of dip. This little loop here at the intersection of the two lobes of the heart. And by the way, I had the Shift key down to constrain the angle of that drag to exactly horizontal. So everything's looking awesome, problem is, I'll go ahead and zoom out here a little bit, that I want to create a symmetrical heart so I want to take my path outline so far which I'll select using my black arrow tool, which Photoshop calls the Path Selection tool even though its keyboard shortcut is A for "arrow." Notice that goes ahead and selects the entire path outline. I want to flip it horizontally and then fuse it into a single shape. Problem is, that is not something that Photoshop is capable of doing. Not the way things are presently arranged, anyway. But it is something that I can do in Illustrator, and I'll show you how that works in the follow up movie. But first, before we go any farther, I want to save the work I've done so far. And you can do that by going to the Window menu and choosing the Paths command which brings up the Paths panel right here. Notice that I have a new Path called "Work Path." That's no good, by the way, because that is a temporary path outline that Photoshop will absolutely throw away at its earliest convenience. So what you want to do is double click on this item to bring up the Save Path dialog box and just go ahead and call this guy "half a heart," or something along those lines, and then click OK. And you have now saved the path outline for future use. And by the way, if you want to make any more modifications, then you want to switch from the Path Selection tool to the Direct Selection tool, that is from the black arrow to the white arrow. And you can also do that by pressing Shift + A, by the way. A for "arrow," I want to emphasize. And so I'll go ahead and click on this anchor point because it's a little out of alignment, it seems to me. And I'll press the left arrow key a couple of times to nudge it to the left. And then I might drag this control handle upward so that I get a better match with that red pixel base heart. And by the way, because you went and named this path outline, Photoshop is automatically updating that path outline on the fly. And that is how you trace at least half a playing card suit, in this case a regal heart, using a vector-based path outline drawn with the very powerful Pen tool here inside Photoshop. All right, that's about all we can do inside Photoshop which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow up movie in which we take the half a heart we've created so far and turn it into a full, professionally rendered, absolutely symmetrical heart inside Illustrator and then bring it back into Photoshop. And really, have an absolute cross-application blast. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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