Part One of a Series.
Basic lessons on taking control of your Photoshop paths.

Working with the pen tool can be frustrating for the inexperienced user. Like most features in Photoshop or with any other applications in general, all it takes to master paths are Patience and Practice. Once 'tamed', paths can unleash more of Photoshop's capabilities - from making custom selections, to illustrations to clipping paths.

You can toggle to each of them by pressing the key P several times. So after pressing P to choose the pen tool, pressing P again will select the Direct Selection Tool, press the P again and it will select the Add Anchor Point Tool, and so on.

Create a document with a white background in Photoshop.

To make closed objects-like a box, create an anchor point (click the pen tool on the document), Pressing the SHIFT key, create another anchor point to the right of the first one youve created. Still holding the SHIFT key, create another anchor point below the 2nd point (Fig.2), then another to the left of the 3rd anchor point. To close the box, you click on the first anchor point. you will see a small o beside the pen tool icon meaning this will close the path. And there you go, a box!

Save this document as a Photoshop document named 'Box'.

Experiment making different objects, from triangles to polygons, using the techniques described above.

EDITING PATHS

Open the Photoshop document 'Box'. Make sure the Pen tool is the current tool selected. Go to the Path pallette and select the path 'Box'.

Press-hold the cmd/ctrl key and the Direct Selection Tool will appear. Click on the upper right anchor point and drag it in any direction once. Undo by pressing cmd/ctrl-Z. Now youve learned how to change a path.

Try this: Press SHIFT-cmd/ctrl and drag the same anchor point to different directions. Notice how the movements gets snappy. The same thing when creating anchor points, SHIFT constrains the movement of our paths.

Close the document 'Box' and dont save any changes.

Open the document 'Box'. Select the pen tool. Go to the path pallette and select the path 'Box'.

Deselect the path by presing cmd/ctrl and clicking anywhere in your document. We are going to move the path up and there are a couple of techniques to do this. But first we have to select the path, not just one point in the path but the whole thing. With the pen tool as the current tool, press-hold cmd/ctrl and enclose our path with a box by dragging the mouse (Fig.4). Youll know youve selected the whole path when the anchor points (all 4 of them) are darkened.

The cmd/ctrl still pressed, drag the path up the page by grabbing it on one of its sides. You can grab the points too but its not recommended for beginners.

Press cmd/ctrl-SHIFT, do the same thing as above only downwards. You'll notice this time it moves our path in a straight direction. Move it way down the document.

The second technique to move a selected path is with the arrow keys. This is very useful when we need to move a path one pixel at a time.

True not only with paths but also with images, pressing the alt/option key while dragging copies a selected 'object'.

Go to the path pallette, youll notice both boxes are in the same path Box. Let's separate them.

Select the upper path (it should be selected after copying but if it isnt, press-hold cmd/ctrl and drag your mouse to enclose it with a box to select the whole path). Cut the path by pressing cmd/ctrl-X (Edit>Cut). Deselect the path 'Box' in the Path palette (an important step) by clicking outside the Path name. Then Paste our path in the document - cmd/ctrl-V (Edit>Paste). (Fig.5) Rename the new path 'Box2'. You should have two separate Paths in the Path pallette.

Save the document.

Open Photoshop document 'Box'. Select the path 'Box2' from the Path pallette. Make the Pen tool the current tool selected.

We are going to extend the path Box2. Press-hold cmd/ctrl-SHIFT then drag the right side of our Box. Extend it as long as you want.

How about shearing our box? Press-hold cmd while dragging downwards on one side - in this case the right side of our box (Fig.6).

Experiment by dragging out other sides of the box. Make it taller by dragging the horzontal sides. Why not making it narrow?

Save the document.

EDITING PATHS PART III

So far we've been working with anchor points. You know, points we created when we click on the pen tool. In those anchor points we can drag out 'Direction Points' which determines the direction of a curve in a curved path. These can be very handy when editing curves and this chapter will be your first introducion to this feature.

Open the document 'Box'. Select the path 'Box2'. Make the Pen tool the current tool.

Bring up the Direct selection tool by pressing cmd/ctrl and select the lower right anchor of our Box by clicking on it (the anchor point will be darkened).

In Windows: Press P four times to select the Convert Anchor Point tool.
In Macintosh: Press control-option to make the convert Selection tool appear.

Using the Convert Selection tool, drag out the direction points about 45 degrees downwards to the left (SW direction). (Fig.7) This makes our corner into a curve. With the Convert Path tool as our current tool, click on the anchor point. This brings it back to a corner.

You can still use the Direct selection tool by pressing cmd/ctrl to adjust the anchor point and the direction points to edit the curve.

Experiment and play around, trying it on other anchor points and editing the shapes of the curve either by dragging the Direction points or the Anchor points.

Close the document and dont save any changes.

ON USING KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS. A lot of the tools and commands can be accessed through a menu but I found that learning to use the keyboard shortcuts right at the start makes things efficient in the long run when working with Photoshop. And this technique will be especially useful when we begin working with curved paths and images.