Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 Studio Techniques

The Pen Tool

The Pen tool, which can be found on the toolbar and looks like the tip of an old-fashioned ink pen, gives you a result that more closely resembles the work of a pair of scissors than anything else we've covered in this chapter. If you're sloppy with it, the result will look very crude. If you take enough time with it, you can end up with a nice, crisp result, but you definitely wouldn't want to use this tool with an object that has a soft or blurry edge.

The Pen tool can be a bit tricky to learn because it doesn't work like anything else in Photoshop. Instead of creating shapes out of a grid of solid-colored squares (pixels), the Pen tool creates shapes from a collection of points and directional handles (Figure 14.73). If you've ...