Adobe Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques

Creating Paths with the Pen Tool

The Pen tool 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 your time, you can get 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 pixels, the Pen tool creates shapes from a collection of points and directional handles (Figure 9.141). Before we get started creating paths, look in the options bar (Figure 9.142) and make sure that the Paths icon is active ...