- [Glyn] Hi folks, Glyn here and in this short video,
I just wanna take a few minutes to talk about the Pen tool
or as it's commonly called, the Dreaded Pen tool,
because if you're anything like me,
when you first encountered the Pen tool,
it just seemed really confusing, it was intimidating,
I used to get frustrated with it to the point
that for a long time, I avoided using the Pen tool,
but if you're around this kind of stuff long enough,
all this kind of retouching stuff in Photoshop,
you'll hear it all the time,
people telling you that the Pen tool is the ultimate way
to make crisp, clean, sharp selections,
now I'm not talking about making selections
on things like hair, you know, flyaway hair,
because within Photoshop, we have so many ways
that we can use to make great selections of hair,
for example, the Refine Edge and Refine Mask
does a brilliant job most of the time,
when I come to talking about the Pen tool,
we're talking about making selections of things
that have got straight lines or curves in them,
you cannot get better than it,
so my goal by the end of this very short video,
is just to give you a couple of pointers,
that I'm really hoping will help clear up
a few of the questions and frustrations,
that you have about using the Pen tool.
Now there's a lot you can do with the Pen tool,
you can make shapes, you can make paths
and all kinds of stuff, but all I want to do
in this short video is talk about
using the Pen tool for making selections.
So when you first open up your Pen tool from the Toolbar,
make sure in the Options at the top here,
you have it saying Path, you can either say Shape,
Path or Pixels, we're gonna choose a Path,
now when you started using it,
you realised that you could put dots down
and the Pen tool would just join them together
and that's pretty damn good, but that's no different
to using something like the Polygonal Lasso tool,
the Pen tool comes into its own,
when we start making curves,
but that's where the confusion comes in,
because we know again, we put a dot down, another dot down,
then we start being able to pull these handles out,
when we're going round a particular object,
but it's pulling these handles around,
that starts to make things go all kind of funky and weird
and we kind of lose track of where we are,
so we end up deleting it and just carrying on
using another method of the Pen tool,
once we've got frustrated with it.
So, one thing I want you to do,
before you start using the Pen tool,
come over to your Toolbar and in the Toolbar,
choose the Path Selection tool,
that's got a keyboard shortcut of A,
now when you go to that, in the top,
you'll have some options available to you
and it all depends what version of Photoshop you're using,
now I'm using Photoshop CC,
people who are using CS6 also might notice
that the Constrain Path Dragging,
which is the one that we wanna look at here,
there's no tick in the box, if you're using CS5 and beyond,
sorry, before then, you'll probably notice
that it already is ticked, well, we need it to be ticked,
in the newer versions, they've stopped putting a tick
in there, which changes things
and makes them go a little bit funny,
so before you do anything, put a little tick
where it says Constrain Path Dragging
and that's gonna make a massive difference now
to how you use the Pen tool.
So for example, recently I did this picture
of an Aston Martin and I've done a couple of videos,
you might have seen them on my YouTube channel,
where I've done like this cartoonish kind of look,
but another one where I showed how I put in the sky
and to do the sky, which wasn't the original sky
in the picture, I had to make a selection of the car,
not an easy thing to select,
I couldn't use the Quick Selection tool
and the reason being is it made a pretty good selection,
until it got to the roof line, 'cause the contrast
between the sky and the roof was pretty similar,
so it did struggle to do it,
so the Pen tool is the way that I went with it.
So look, here's how we're gonna do it,
we know we need to know when we're using the Pen tool,
two keys on your keyboard, that's all I want you to know
and whether you're using Windows or Mac,
the first key you need to know is the Command or Control key
and the other key, Alt or Option key,
those are the only two keys that you need to know,
whoops, turn that off, only keys that you need to know
be able to master the Pen tool,
it's also worth knowing how you can kind of step backwards,
if you do something wrong, so know the keyboard shortcut
or you can just come to the menu at the top here
and go the long way round be able to step backwards,
but here now is how I'm gonna make a selection
of this roof line, which is slightly curved,
but make it easy using the Pen tool.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a little dot
just at the bottom of this aerial
and I'm gonna choose a part on the roof line here
and experience will tell you how far along you can go,
but I'll choose maybe around about here,
so before I let go, I need to tell Photoshop
which way to go, because when we're using the Pen tool,
we're in control, Photoshop wants to be clever,
but we're gonna tell it exactly where we want it to go,
so before I let go, I'm gonna tell Photoshop
we need to move over, carry on coming this way,
we need to come to the right, so what I'm gonna do
is drag out just a small line to tell Photoshop
this curve carries on going round to the right-hand side,
now once I've done that, obviously
if I look at the line I've laid down,
it's virtually straight
and it doesn't follow the line of the roof,
but to make it follow the line of the roof,
all I need to do is hold down my Command or my Control key
and click on the line and then drag upwards
and you'll notice that it starts to curve,
what you'll also notice is over on this side here,
this bar is extended, now that's what you would have done,
if you were very familiar in using Photoshop,
you'd have just put that dot down and dragged that out,
got another dot, dragged it out
and you'd do it automatically,
so this is like a way you can learn to see
how those bars affect the curve
by us clicking and dragging up in the middle of it,
so once you've done that quite a few times,
you'll move on and just start dragging out these bars here,
so that you can create your curves a lot, lot quicker,
but let's just carry on making the selection
of the roof line, so I've done that little curve there,
I'm gonna choose maybe over here and then before I let go,
I'm gonna tell Photoshop we're gonna carry on
going this way to the right-hand side,
again that bar there needs to be curved
to follow the line of the roof,
so I'm gonna hold down my Command key,
click in the middle and drag it upwards
and you can see that it starts to curve
and those bars on the dots the other side of it
come outwards, so let's just carry on
making the selection of this roof line,
so I'm gonna click, Photoshop needs to go that way,
drag it in the middle, click up and drag
and I'll just carry on working my way round like this,
now I'll just keep going,
keep going round to the right-hand side,
click in the middle, pull up to make it curve,
I'm gonna carry on coming all the way down,
until I reach the wing mirror, so click, drag it,
tell it we're coming down this way here,
that line needs to be made to curve just a little bit,
hold down my Command or Control key,
click in the middle and drag it upwards,
until eventually it follows the line of the roof,
all the way down here, it's not too curved now,
but I'm gonna still keep telling Photoshop
which way we're going,
click in the middle, drag it up to curve it,
until eventually we're gonna come
to the bit at the bottom here,
now, where the wing mirror is, there is no curve,
this line here needs to take a sudden turn to the left,
so that we can go upwards, so now I need to tell Photoshop,
right, hold on a second, we've got to make a sharp turn here
and this is where we use Alt or our Option key,
so rather than us dragging off
the direction of the curve, we need to say,
right, put your brakes on, hold down your Option key,
click on that dot and tell it,
we're not gonna go down that way,
we're gonna come round this way
and you can see when you hold down
your Alt or your Option key,
you can create very, very sharp turns,
so again, I'm gonna bring it round to tell Photoshop
we're gonna continue up this way, up the wing mirror,
so I only need to drag just a little bit like that,
I've come up a little bit further on the wing mirror,
I'll say right, click there
and the curve continues round the wing mirror
to the right and just up a little bit like so
and again, I can come in with my Command or Control key,
click and move this curve out and that's all you need to do,
just take control of Photoshop
by dragging out a little bit on these lines here
to say which way your curve's gonna continue to go,
then use your Command or Control key
to click in the middle and drag it upwards,
so that you can line it up exactly where you want it to be,
something like that.
Okay, so just to recap then,
we know that when we're using the Pen tool
to keep things nice and simple,
we just need to know two keys on our keyboard,
the Command or Control key and the Alt or the Option key,
now when we're using the Alt or the Option key,
we know that we can create really tight corners now,
so if I hold that Alt or Option key,
click on the little point,
we can tell it we need to make a sharp turn,
we know when we use the Command or Control key,
I can use that if I hold it down,
I can click on the line and change the curve
and just map it to where I'm trying
to make a good selection around,
another use of the Command or Control key
is if you find that you put a dot down in the wrong place,
you can hold down your Command or Control key,
click on one of those dots and you can reposition it,
so that's really, really handy
and a flexible and easy way to work.
Now let me just make a very, very quick path around here,
just to join these two ends up
and just to say that whenever you make a path
around an object within Photoshop,
that path will show up in the Paths panel
over on the right-hand side here,
when you've got the default layout within Photoshop
and just like in layers, you can double-click on the name
and you can rename it,
now if you wanted this path here
to be turned into a familiar selection,
where you have those marching ants,
just at the bottom of the Paths panel here,
we've got this icon, the third one from the left-hand side,
if I click on that,
you'll see that it becomes the familiar marching ants,
now as a little side note, the great thing about that
is if you're the kind of person,
that only works on JPEG images
and you like to save your images as a JPEG,
if you want to make sure that any time
that you've spent making a selection is nice and safe,
you can actually save your selections in the JPEG,
now you're not normally able to do that,
however, if you do make a selection,
like you've got the marching ants now,
you then come to the Paths panel
and then click on the fourth icon from the left-hand side,
that'll turn your selection into a path
and you can then save that
in your JPEG file for use later on,
so you can also work non-destructively
in your JPEG images.
So there you go, just a quick video, hope that's handy,
any questions you have for me, drop me a line
to Glyn at GlynDewis.com, otherwise I'll see you next time.
Oh and before I go, don't forget if you haven't already,
make sure you click on the big Subscribe button now,
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Right, I shall see you next time.