[Guide]How to use pen tool in Adobe Photoshop

[Georgekiato15]

Written By Steve Patterson

 

When it comes to making selections in Photoshop, there's really two types of people - those who know how to use the Pen Tool, and those who struggle.

 

Most people put off learning how to use the Pen Tool for as long as possible, while others never get around to learning it, believing it's just too confusing, too complicated, and just plain unnatural. Ultimately, their work in Photoshop suffers for it, since they're stuck relying on the Lasso Tool for just about everything they can't select with the Rectangular or Elliptical Marquee Tools. In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to put an end to the suffering. We're going to learn just how easy it really is to make selections with the Pen Tool.

 

Now, when I say "easy", I don't mean you're going to read this tutorial and be instantly transformed into a Pen Master. Learning how to use the Pen Tool is a lot like learning how to ride a bike. Once you've learned, it will seem completely natural and you'll wonder how anyone could possibly not know how to use something so simple. But getting to that point requires a little practice and effort, and while reading every book there is on how to ride a bike may teach you the fundamentals of how the pedals, gears and brakes work, it's not until you're on the bike struggling to keep your balance that the real learning begins.

 

One of the great things about the Pen Tool is that it's not something that's exclusive to Photoshop. Far from it! Virtually every popular photo editing, graphics and page layout program uses the Pen Tool in one form or another , so once you've learned how to use it in Photoshop, you'll already have a good understanding of how to use it in lots of other programs as well!

 

Where Do I Find The Pen Tool?

 

Before we start talking about what the Pen Tool is or how to use it, we should look at where to find it in Photoshop first.

 

 

You'll find the Pen Tool in the Tools palette, grouped in with the Shape Tools, the Type Tool, and the Path Selection (the white arrow) and Direct Selection (the black arrow) Tools (see the image on the left).

 

Of course, this may raise the question of why, if we can make selections with the Pen Tool, is it not grouped in with the other selection tools (the Rectangular Marquee Tool, the Elliptical Marquee Tool, the Lasso Tool, etc.) at the top of the Tools palette? Why is it down there with those other tools which are clearly not selection tools?

 

That's an excellent question, and there just happens to be an equally excellent answer to go with it, which we'll get to in a moment.

 

Why Is It Called The "Pen" Tool?

 

One of the first stumbling blocks to learning how to use the Pen Tool, as with many other things in Photoshop, is its name, since after all, if there's one thing that everyone who's ever tried to use it knows, this thing is not a pen. At least, not the sort of pen you'd normally think of when you hear the word "pen". Try writing your name with it in the same way you might sign your name on a piece of paper with a pen and you'll probably end up with a twisted, tangled mess and things looping all over each other (of course, I suppose that could very well be how you sign your name).

 

 

So if it doesn't act like a traditional ink pen, why is it called the Pen Tool? The Pen Tool has actually been called several things over the years, and by that, I don't mean the sort of things you may have called it in moments of frustration. You may have heard it referred to as the Bezier Pen or the Bezier Tool, and that's because it was created by a man named Pierre Bezier (that's him on the left), a French engineer and all-around smart guy who came up with the fancy math that powers the tool while working for the Renault car company (the Pen Tool was originally created to help design cars).

 

You may also have heard the Pen Tool referred to as the Paths Tool, and that's really the most appropriate name for it. The Pen Tool is all about drawing "paths". To make selections with the Pen Tool, we simply convert the path or paths we've drawn into selections. It always begins, though, with a path.

 

What Is A Path?

 

A "path" is, quite honestly, something that may seem a little out of place inside a program like Photoshop. The reason is because Photoshop is primarily a pixel-based program. It takes the millions of tiny square pixels that make up a typical digital image and does things with them. Paths, on the other hand, have absolutely nothing to do with pixels, which is why I said they may seem out of place in a program that's used mainly for editing and drawing pixels.

 

A path is really nothing more than a line that goes from one point to another, a line that is completely independent of and cares nothing about the pixels underneath it. The line may be straight or it may be curved, but it always goes from one point to another point, and as I mentioned, it has nothing at all to do with the pixels in the image. A path is completely separate from the image itself. In fact, a path is so separate that if you tried to print your image with a path visible on your screen, the path would not appear on the paper. Also, if you saved your image as a JPEG file and uploaded it to a website, even if you saved the image with the path visible on your screen in Photoshop, you won't see it in the image on the website. Paths are for your eyes and Photoshop only. No one else will ever see them, unless they happen to walk past your computer while you're working.

 

We always need a minimum of two points to create a path, since we need to know where the path starts and where it ends. If we use enough points that we can bring our path back to the same point it started from, we can create different shapes out of paths, which is exactly how Photoshop's various Shape Tools work. The Rectangle Tool uses paths, connected by points, to draw a rectangular shape. The Ellipse Tool uses paths, connected by points, to draw an elliptical shape, and so on. It's also how Photoshop's Type Tool works, although Photoshop handles type a bit differently than it handles regular shapes, but all type in Photoshop is essentially made from paths. In fact, you can convert type into shapes, which then gives you all of the same path editing options with type that you get when working with shapes.

 

You may also have heard paths referred to as outlines, and that's a pretty good description of what a path is, or at least, what a path can be. We can draw a square path, and if we do nothing else with it, as in we don't fill it with a color or apply a stroke to it, then all we have is a basic outline of a square. Same with a circle or any other shape we draw. The path itself is just the outline of the shape. It's not until we do something with the path, like fill it, apply a stroke, or convert it into a selection, that the path actually becomes something more than a basic outline.

 

You can select an entire path using the Path Selection Tool (also known as the "black arrow" tool), or you can select individual points or path segments using the Direct Selection Tool (the "white arrow" tool). A path "segment", or "line segment" as it's sometimes called, is any path between two points. A rectangular path, for example, would be made up of four points (one in each corner), and the individual paths connecting the points together along the top, bottom, left, and right to create the shape of the rectangle are the path segments. The actual path itself is the combination of all of the individual path segments that make up the shape.

 

That can be a little confusing, so let's see what I mean. Open a new document inside Photoshop. It doesn't matter what size it is. I'll choose the 640x480 size from the list of presets, but as I said, it doesn't matter what size you choose. Select your Pen Tool from the Tools palette. You can also select the Pen Tool simply by pressing the letter P on your keyboard.

 

Photoshop Tutorials:The Two Pen Tool Modes

Now, before we continue, we first need to make sure we're working with paths, and that's because the Pen Tool actually has two different modes it can work in, and by default, it uses the other one. With the Pen Tool selected, if we look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen, we'll see a group of three icons:

 

 

I know I said there's two modes the Pen Tool can work in and yet, as if to make things more confusing, there's three icons, but the icon on the right, which is the Fill pixels icon, is grayed out and not available when working with the Pen Tool. It's only available when working with the various Shape Tools, so there's really only two icons we need to look at.

 

The icon on the left is the Shape layers icon, also known as "not the one we want", and it's the one that's selected by default. If we were to work with the Pen Tool with that icon selected, we'd be drawing shapes, just as if we were using any of the various Shape Tools, except that instead of drawing a predefined shape like a rectangle or an ellipse, we could draw any shape we wanted. As I said though, that's not what we want. We want the icon beside it, the Paths icon, so go ahead and click on it to select it:

 

 

With the Pen Tool selected and the Paths icon selected in the Options Bar, click once anywhere inside your document. Don't click and drag, just click. When you do, you'll add a small square point. I've enlarged it here:

 

 

This first point we've just added is the starting point of our path. Now at the moment, we don't actually have a path. All we have is a starting point. The "point" is technically called an anchor or anchor point, and it's named that because it anchors the path into place. This first point will anchor the beginning of the path to this spot inside the document. As we add more points, each of them will anchor the path into place at that location.

 

Let's add another point. Click somewhere else inside the document. Anywhere will do. I'm going to click somewhere to the right of my initial point:

 

 

I've now added a second anchor point, and look what's happened. I now have a straight line joining the two points together! That straight line is my path. As I mentioned earlier, we need a minimum of two points to create a path, since we need to know where the path starts and where it ends, and now that we have both a starting and an end point, Photoshop was able to connect the two points together, creating our path.

 

Let's add a few more points just for fun. Click a few more times at different spots inside the document. Again, don't click and drag, just click:

 

 

In the image above, I've added seven more anchor points by clicking at different spots with the Pen Tool, and each time I added one, the length of my path increased because a new path "segment" was added between the previous point and the new point. My path now consists of nine anchor points and eight path segments. I could continue clicking around inside the document to add more anchor points and path segments, but what I'd really like to do now is close my path so it forms a complete shape.

 

Closing A Path

 

To close a path, all we need to do is click once again on our initial starting point. When you hover your mouse cursor over the starting point, you'll see a small circle appear in the bottom right corner of the pen icon:

 

 

That circle tells us that we're about to come "full circle" with our path, finishing it off where it began. To close it, simply click directly on the starting point. We can see below that my path has become a closed path and is now a basic outline of a shape:

 

 

ven though this path was drawn just for fun as an example of how to draw a basic path with the Pen Tool , I can easily turn this path into a selection. For that, we need Photoshop's Paths palette, and we'll look at that next.

 

Turning A Path Into A Selection

 

So far, we've looked at what a path is and how to draw a basic path with Photoshop's Pen Tool. But how do you go about making a selection from the path?

 

Easy! There's a couple of ways to turn a path into a selection, including a handy keyboard shortcut, but before we look at the quick way, let's look at the official way. The "official way" involves using Photoshop's Paths palette, which you'll find grouped in with the Layers palette and the Channels palette:

 

 

 

 

At first glance, the Paths palette looks very similar to Photoshop's Layers palette, and Adobe purposely made it like that so you'll feel more comfortable using it. We can see a thumbnail preview of the shape of the path we just created, and by default, Photoshop names the path "Work Path", which is basically a fancy way of saying "temporary", as in if you were to create a different path now without renaming this path to something else first, this one would be replaced by the new path. You can only have one "Work Path", so if you want to keep it, you'll need to double-click on its name in the Paths palette and name it something else before creating a new path.

 

Since my path looks a bit like a crown, I'm going to double-click on the name "Work Path", which with bring up Photoshop's Save Path dialog box, and I'm going to rename my path "Crown":

 

 

I'll click OK when I'm done, and now if I look in my Paths palette again, I can see that sure enough, my "Work Path" has been renamed "Crown":

 

 

By renaming it, the path is now saved and won't disappear on me if I go to create a new path. Also, any saved paths are saved with the Photoshop document, so now, if I save my document, the path will be saved with it and the next time I open the document, the path will still be there in the Paths palette.

 

Saving a path is not something you need to do in order to turn it into a selection. In most cases when using the Pen Tool to make selections, you won't have any need for the path once you've made a selection from it, so there won't be any need to save it. If you did want to save it though, just rename it to something other than "Work Path" and it's saved.

 

To turn the path into a selection, if we look at the bottom of the Paths palette, we can see several icons. These icons allow us to do different things with our path. The first icon on the left is the Fill path with Foreground color icon, and as its name implies, clicking on it will fill our path with our current Foreground color. Interesting, but that's not what we want. The second icon from the left is the Stroke path with brush icon, which will apply a stroke to our path using whatever brush we currently have selected. This is a great way to create interesting effects in Photoshop, but for what we're doing here, turning a path into a selection, it's not what we want either. The one we want is the third icon from the left, the Load path as a selection icon:

 

 

As soon as I click on this icon, my path inside my document becomes a selection, as if I had created it using any of Photoshop's more common selection tools: