From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Design

The Curvature Pen tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: Design

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The Curvature Pen tool

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- [Instructor] Photoshop's pen tools are the key to creating vector paths to draw shapes, cut out objects or create masks. And the best thing about making vector paths is that they're resolution independent. So we can scale them to any size that we want without losing any image quality. We're going to start with the curvature pen tool which is nested with the other pen tools. And what I love about the curvature pen tool is I can just set down points and then kind of bend those points and pull them into any shape that I want. So when you click with the curvature pen tool you set down a point and when you click for the second time, it will always create a straight line between those two points. Then when I click a third time it'll go ahead and create the curve. And if I need to close the path I can just click over the starting point. The icon will change to have a little circle next to it. And that's how I know that I'm closing the path. Now, in order to reposition a point all I need to do is drag that point to select another point just click on it and then drag to reposition. To add a point just click anywhere along the path. And then you can click to reposition that point. To delete a point, just select the point. And I know it's selected because it's filled with blue where's the other ones are hollow. You can tap the delete key to delete that. If I double click on a point, it will change it from being a curved point to a corner point. So as I double click on all of these will end up with a triangle. Now what we're drawing is called a Bezier path and paths are vector and they can be scaled without any loss of quality. All right, I'm going to tap delete once. And then twice in order to delete that path. Now we're going to draw this pair and we're going to start by just adding four points around the pear. So I'll click once and then again, on the right side, again at the bottom of the pear, and then over on the left side, then we'll close that path. And now if you just think of this as a piece of string there, we can add additional control points in order to bend that string. So I'll click over here on the right side and start bending that in towards the pear. I can add another point down here and reposition that if I need to click on any of the other control points we can do so and reposition them I'll add another point over here in the left side and just drag this out and then I'll need to add a point along this line in order to bring the path in. And then another point in order to create that S curve. All right, we can refine these at any point in time, but for now I'm good with this path. So in order to make the path into a shape or a selection or a mask, I can use the options bar. In this case I want to shape Photoshop will automatically fill that with the foreground color, but I can always double click if I wanted to change the color of the shape, or I could click on any of my swatches in order to change the color, but I want to add a gradient. So from the gradient panel I'm going to select the orange presets and select a red to yellow gradient. Then to make a change to the grading, I'll double click on it in the layers panel that brings up the gradient fill. I'm going to change the style to radial and I'm going to reverse it. So that yellow is on the outside and orange is in the center. Then I can reposition it by just dragging in the image area. All right, now I need to draw the Stem. So let's hide the shape layer. And with that curvature pen tool still selected I'm going to click once. Then I'm going to double click in order to create my first corner point here. Then I'll double click again. Double-click again. And one more time in order to close that point. If you only single click, don't worry. Just double click in order to convert the curve point to a corner point. Now we just need to add the points on the curve in order to bend this string into the shape that we want it. Again, I'll use the options panel in order to create a shape. Although this time I probably don't want a gradient. So I'll use my swatches panel and add a dark brown color. We could also just double-click on the shape layer. If we wanted to refine that. All right, let's make shape one visible and then we'll hide the background that has the template on it. And I think you can see how the curvature pen tool makes it very easy to just push and pull a path into the shape that you want.

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