From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Design

The Curvature Pen tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Design

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The Curvature Pen tool

- [Instructor] Photoshop's pen tool are the key to drawing vector paths to draw shapes, cut out objects, create masks and the best thing about making vector paths is that they're resolution independent, so I can scale them to any size without losing any image quality. Now, we're going to start with the curvature pen tool. And what I love about the curvature pen tool is that I can just set down points and then kind of bend those points and pull them into any shape that I want. So before we get started, I'm actually going to choose the path selection and under the Select area, I want to make sure that it's set to all layers. Then I'll choose the curvature pen tool. And then the way that it works is that you just click in order to start making the path, click again and that will set down a second point and that path will always be straight until you click on the third point, then it's going to curve the path and when you position your cursor over the starting point you get the icon with the zero which will close the path, so clicking will do that. Now, if I want reposition a point, all I need to do is click and drag on that point. If I want to add a point, just click anywhere on the path and then you click and drag in order to reposition. In order to delete a path if it's selected, meaning that the anchor point is solid blue, just tap the delete key. If I want to toggle between a curved and a corner point, I can double click on any of the points, I'll double click on that one and that one, we can see now, that we have the corner points there as opposed to the curve. The reason that we selected the direct selection tool and then set the option in the Options vars to all layers is because this double click behavior won't work if it's not set to all layers. So what we're drawing is called a Bezier curve and the path that we draw are going to be vectored. And the beauty of that is that they can be scaled without any loss of quality. All right, I'm going to delete that first point and tap again in order to delete the second point. So we're going to use this template file of the pear. And I'll start by just clicking and putting down a few points around the edge of the pair. And I'll close that path. Now, all I need to do is click and drag wherever I need to add more points to change the path. So I like to think about this as if I have a piece of string and all I'm doing is bending that string around. So, for example, I might not need the path at the top there and that way I could move this point over and then we can make that shape. So it's really just moving the points, clicking in order to add another point and then refining the position of the points that you have. And it doesn't have to be perfect here, I just want to get the general shape of the pear. I'll add another point there and bring that in and then maybe just move this one out a bit and that one too. All right, I'm fine with that. So what we've drawn is this Bezier curve or this path, but I want to make it into a shape layer. So on the Options bar, I'll click shape, that's going to fill it with my foreground color, but I want to change that to a gradient. So from my gradients panel, I can click on a gradient and that would change it. But, this is giving me a linear gradient so I'm going to double click on the thumbnail for the shape layer and just switch this style to radial. I might want to reverse that. And with all of the gradients in Photoshop, when you're applying them like this, you can click and drag in order to change where the gradient is set. And I can also come in here and scale it larger or scale it smaller. So I'm going to leave it about 144 and click OK. Now, let's hide that shape, while we draw the stem. So here we have a mix of corner and straight points, so I'm just going to double click each time I set down a point and that's going to give me straight lines. Then, I can click anywhere, on any of those lines on the path and just add another point and make them curved like that. Again, I'll click on shape, now it's going to load it with that gradient but from my Swatches panel, I'll just select a brown color, we can show the shape layer and then we can hide the background layer.

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