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Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns

Lesson 29 from: 30 Days of Photoshop

Dave Cross

Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns

Lesson 29 from: 30 Days of Photoshop

Dave Cross

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Lesson Info

29. Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns

Next Lesson: Day 18: Selecting I

Lessons

Class Trailer

Day 1

1

Class Introduction

19:04
2

Overview of Days 1-15

54:32
3

Overview of Days 16-30

1:11:53
4

Preview of Content, Part 1 - Layers, Comps, Styles, Masks

49:10
5

Preview of Content, Part 2 - Smart Objects and Paths

30:33

Day 2

6

Day 1 Introduction

13:31
7

Day 1 Exploring Photoshop

16:51
8

Day 1 Realistic Expectations

27:26

Day 3

9

Day 2: Best Practices I Part One

33:28
10

Day 2 Best Practices I Part 2

25:59

Day 4

11

Day 3: Lay of the Land

55:16

Day 5

12

Day 4: Best Practices II – Working Non-Destructively

47:57

Day 6

13

Day 5: Layers I

58:50

Day 7

14

Day 6: Layers II

44:51

Day 8

15

Day 7: Layers III - Masks

1:01:47
16

Bonus Video: "Layers"

09:05
17

Bonus Video: "Vector Masks"

05:54

Day 9

18

Day 8: Getting Images In and Out

55:51

Day 10

19

Day 9: Resolution, File Size, Resizing

1:00:42
20

Bonus Video: "Free Transform - Warping"

07:54

Day 11

21

Day 10: Cropping (Straightening)

49:38

Day 12

22

Day 11: Adjusting

56:22

Day 13

23

Day 12: Smart Objects & Smart Filters I (Introduction)

48:52
24

Bonus Video: "Copying Smart Filters"

02:11

Day 14

25

Day 13: Smart Objects & Smart Filters II (More Advanced)

56:34

Day 15

26

Day 14: Retouching I (Replacing, Removing, Moving)

55:10

Day 16

27

Day 15: Retouching II (Fixing, Portrait Retouching)

1:01:28

Day 17

28

Day 16: Quiz & Review

53:05

Day 18

29

Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns

49:56

Day 19

30

Day 18: Selecting I

1:05:47

Day 20

31

Day 19: Selecting II (Compositing)

1:02:01
32

Bonus Video: "Green Screen"

08:21

Day 21

33

Day 20: Type

1:03:45

Day 22

34

Day 21: Color

54:54

Day 23

35

Day 22: Painting & Brush Options

59:15

Day 24

36

Day 23: Automation I (Built-In, Not So Obvious)

58:04

Day 25

37

Day 24: Automation II (Actions)

1:00:05
38

Bonus Video: "Actions"

04:20

Day 26

39

Day 25: Presets

53:47

Day 27

40

Day 26: Video

1:03:01

Day 28

41

Day 27: Finishing Touches

1:05:08
42

Bonus Video: "Sharpen"

16:26

Day 29

43

Day 28: Tips and Tricks

52:22

Day 30

44

Day 29: Quiz, Review, Projects

1:01:30

Day 31

45

Day 30: Project, Strategies to Continue to Get Better

48:41

Lesson Info

Day 17: Shapes, Paths, and Patterns

hello there today we're gonna talk about another interesting topic in photo shop and that is the world of patterns past and shapes now pass and shapes were kind of the same thing but using different ways and patterns is in a unique part of photoshopped that allows us to do things from a graphic standpoint patterns come in two flavors ones that are built in and once that you create yourself once they're in photoshopped you use them the same way and then shapes and pass or a little bit different we'll talk about that in more detail in terms of where you khun get shapes and how you use them and different options including creating your own shapes out of things from adobe illustrator but first let's talk about patterns now in typical photoshopped fashion there are bunch of patterns that cum built into photo shop and they range from the very interesting to the somewhat odd and probably not terribly practical and as we talk more about this you'll find that when you look at the built in optio...

ns much like when we talked way back when about layer styles the styles that are built in our little bit iffy but there's a lot of ones that are available from a pull down menu that are actually quite interesting but before we talk about making patterns let's first of all talk about how to use patterns so I just got a blank document here and want to talk about how we can apply a pattern so I would of course typically make a new layer first and let's just say if it's a garden that I want a pattern here so I've made a selection on this new layer and the first way to apply a pattern is under the phil uh command so edit phil and you'll see the typical options are four round color background color etcetera I'm going to choose pattern and here is where we see some of the built in patterns now I have added a variety of others were just to give you an idea of the weird patterns that are available like bubbles pattern this is a repeating pattern that will fill up this square unfortunately there's no preview here so you have to kind of do a bit of guesswork if you have patterns that looked like some of these it's kind of hard to even really tell what it is until you click okay and I'm goingto turn off this scripted phil for now and when I click okay you'll see the pattern this repeats over and over again so before we go any further let me describe the symbols way can think of to describe using a pattern in photo shop is just like if you were going to redo your kitchen or bathroom with square tiles you put down a tile and then repeat the tile and hopefully they match up nicely so the pattern repeats evenly and you would see a bit of a seam in between because that's the nature of tiles and grow in photo shop we're gonna try to do the same thing the differences the tile doesn't have to be square it can be it can also be little skinny rectangle or anything you want but it will repeat over and over again and depend how you apply it you may or may not have any control over the size of which the pattern is applied so that's kind of the theory of it and we'll see in a little bit how we could try to take a pattern that you would normally see a definite tile appearing and make it so that's not so obvious but back to our story here this is the one example of a pattern which is ok a little unusual and the problem we solve with the phil command is when you go to choose a pattern you don't really know what you're going to get so here's a pattern that I previously created that is a mate belief and right now it's pretty darn hard to tell from this little tiny icon what I'm going to get out of this so I hit okay and it says all right I'll repeat this pattern a number of times and it repeats it exactly at the size at which it was created we also have another option for applying a pattern which honestly I don't use anywhere near a cz much but it is an interesting possibility underneath the clone stamp tool is the pattern stamp tool and in here you would also choose the pattern you want to apply that has other options typical of most brushing type pools like brush eyes but really all it means is wherever I paint I'll see this pattern applying and it's in that repeating style of depending on where the tile would be in that tiling the floor example so it's okay but it still doesn't really help me a whole lot and frankly to me it would be just a whole lot easier to make a selection and then fill it with something so the third option and the one that I probably used the most because it gives me the most options is to use a layer style so right now I have a blank layer here and if I attempted to do a layer style like pattern overlay nothing's gonna happen because a layer style is applied on top of whatever pixels air on your layer and right now there are no pixels on this layer so this is not going to work yeah so one of the typical ways we do that is to fill this layer with some color and I'm going to fill it with red just so you can see that I'm doing that so I filled the whole layer with red then I go to my layer styles and choose the one called pattern overly and you'll see depending on the pattern the color of your layer may not even matter because in this case it's overlaying or covering up our color with this pattern the reason that I probably used this style of applying pattern more than the other is the only place where you can scale the pattern so if you decide you want a really small little pattern or a bigger one you can do that of course like anything in photo shop scaling a pattern up is not gonna look very good because we're making it bigger than it was intended to be but the other advantages you can see this one has a preview so as soon as I start clicking on different patterns that I've created you can see that it's giving me a preview so I can see what's happening here now for example this may believe pattern has the pattern had a transparent background so therefore we're seeing the color of red and if you don't want that will have to deal with that in one second but again in this example you can see how it has the advantage where aiken scale the pattern down to a smaller size then currently was available when I click okay it says well here's your layer filled with red and I want the pattern over like if I don't want the color there that's where I use this member of this thing we did talk about called phil opacity that means keep the layer style but hide the fills my lower the filled to zero now I'm back to having a transparent pattern and sometimes in photo shopped like in this case you have to really look closely what's what's happening because you're thinking well it looks like my layers filled with red well it is except from a phil opacity now it really well isn't so that's one of the simplest ways if you want to apply a pattern on a layer is at a new layer fill it with some color and then put the fellow passing zero that's going to make that layer see through to whatever layers underneath in this case I have a white layer underneath but if I were to take this white layer and fill it with black you'll see my pattern now is applied to the black underneath so at any time the advantage of doing it this way unlike the phil command or the pattern stamp where it's just kind of painted on there is I could look at this and like anything else where you see an editable option like this I can say well I'm not sure about that pattern overlay let's put it a little higher and maybe lower the opacity little bit or whatever we want so that's one of the advantages it gives us we have the option of editing the pattern in this way so that's how we apply a pattern to an image let's now talk about how we define a pattern well the bottom line is it's actually in theory very simple anything you can select in photoshopped you could turn into a pattern the reality of it is though on a regular photograph it would then have a very noticeable edge that if he repeated you would just see that edge repeat over and over him so often people make patterns like in this case with my mate belief I took that out of a photo and floated it by itself so that there was nothing else with it so let's start off with a fairly simple example of creating a pattern so I'm going to make a new document and for the sake of argument time is going to go for hundred by four hundred pixels and what I want to do is just simply make a pattern of dots the simplest way to do that would be to just make a document with a new layer I'm gonna take my elliptical marquis tool with the shift key held down and I'm going to draw a nice big circle and then fill it with a color and let's just choose some color and say yes that's exactly the color that I want some of the press option to leader all back space to tell it to fill with that color but I don't want the circle just arbitrarily off to the side I want it to be centered so I'm going to take my move tool and just going to go to the selectmen choose select all that's going to select the entire canvas now I can click center and center so now I know it's in the center the space you have here around the circle will determine how much extra how much space there will be between your daughter if you want the dots really close together make your circle bigger so let's do that let's make our circle even bigger like this so now the pattern the certainly sorry the dots will be very close together right now because I've added a blank layer it's saying well do you want transparency or not right now if I defined a pattern it would have a white background so if you want to create a pattern that's like an orange dot on a white background then include the background if you want to be orange on black you could include black but personally I tend to make my patterns on a transparent background because then as we saw with the mate belief I could go in and say all right if I put that on a using that pattern overly layer style that I can decide what color background do I want so now we just simply go edit define pattern notice I didn't have to select anything because by nature is going to assume the whole image unless I tell it otherwise so I click okay now I could actually close this we're going to keep it open for now now I could go back to this example and say all right let's try my other pattern it will always be the last one you just created so there it is and you'll see there's a space between my dots and now I can start to make a little small dot pattern like this or again I don't typically want to go much bigger than the original but by making a pattern that's fairly big and scale it down now I've got a really cool little thing happening and that was just one circle that I put on a layer by itself and said edit pattern or defined pattern now the nice thing about this kind of thing is when you do create a pattern that doesn't have a noticeable edge you'll see examples of what I mean or you do see you knows well ej that's how now it doesn't matter how big I made this document I made a document that was four thousand pixels wide this pattern would just keep repeating as many times that needed to fill in the entire image so that's kind of a nice idea now the only thing that you cannot do is if you said well I really love this dot pattern like this but I wish the dots were a different color well you can't do that directly because we've already defined the pattern you'd have to go back and redefine it so there's two schools of thought here one is to say wants you to find a pattern you don't really need this shape anymore the other one would be well what if I do decide to change my mind to make a different color so maybe I would preserve this psd file as kind of the contents if you will off my pattern so it's a personal choice depending on the situation you may be able if you're doing a pattern overlay you might be able to say well let's actually do a sorry wrong menu let's do a color overlay who says on top of the pattern I want to darken it using this shade so I was able to make it look like red dots on a background but that frankly work because of the circumstances where I had the right color scheme and I chose the right blend moto it is possible to potentially change the pattern once you have applied it using this pattern overlay concept now let's grab another photograph or a photograph and see the challenge that we face when we try and make a pattern out of the photo so I'm going to use this one just open that up now let's say that all I said is all right I'm just gonna arbitrarily we can't do it with a use of ten gator one I'm going to say let's make a pattern out of this so I go to edit and I choose defined pattern there we go so it looks like it's all set to go the problem is if I now go back to my pattern overlay and try and use this brick wall pattern you can see it's very obvious that there's a repetition and if I make it bigger it's actually not horrible but it's not great either you can kind of see it just looks a little too rough you khun see the repetition between them now in order to try to make a pattern that doesn't look so obvious there's a serious of steps involved and how should I say this easily well it takes a bit of effort and you may find you get three quarters the way through this effort go okay this still isn't working so it's one warning out front the concept of this is a pretty good one in terms of how you can try and take a photograph and turn it into that seamless repeating pattern but there's still going to be some repetition just by the nature but we could try to make it a little easier so here's how we do that what I tend to do just because it's easier is pick kind oven areas okay and to start up here and hold down the shift key because I want to make it a square and I'm kind of paying attention to say okay I started on the the grout between the brakes and I want to kind of in that way at least a little bit just to give myself a better chance of this working I'm goingto coffee those pixels and then create a new document whenever you copy something it automatically creates a new document in that same side so I click okay and I choose paste now once again if I just defined this pattern it would probably work okay but we'd see for example this edge is gonna line up with this edge and this ad's gonna line up with this edge so that if you did it it may or may not work let's just try it missy just so you can see defined pattern and go back here sorry here could find my document eventually and let's find that pattern that I created and it's okay but again you khun see fairly clearly there is some repetition going on and in this case in fact it's worth pointing out you can see part of the problem sometimes is not as much the photograph itself are not as much the objects in the photo but the shading of it you can see here it went from kind of light to dark and that's part of the challenge that we face but you can see when we look closely you don't get bricks that long so that's that's part of the problem with this particular pattern that I'm working so the theory of how to try this and again warn you in advance it can take a bit of trial and error for this to work so this image is six seventy eight so of course I chose a nice uneven or not easy to do the math but that's like three hundred forty ish if I half so I can use a filter called under other called offset and what I do is put okay three forty and three forty which puts the basically what it does it takes the edges and move them to the middle and takes the top and moved to the middle so what I really really have done is move things around so set of the edges here unm matching now the edges will match up but the middle part is where the problem lies so now if I were to make a pattern at least this edge and this edge match up perfectly it will be a nice continuation but now this middle part is the problem so what we need to do is address this middle part and tried to get rid of any really obvious problems like this brick that kind of changes halfway through doesn't make a lot of sense so the kind of thing we end up doing is and this is where the work is involved is saying all right let's take this part and will duplicate that and then do free transform right click and she was flipped horizontal and then try and match this up so we end up getting a brick and that's kind of the approach we have to take and you can do it by copying and pasting you can do it by duplicating areas you can take the clone stamp tool and say I'm goingto clone this so the pattern stamp tools when and why nothing was happening sorry let's try that again and optional click here and up in this corner I'm gonna try to clone so I'm creating some separation where there's some grout and that's kind of the thing you have to look to do now honestly sometimes the easiest thing to do is when you look at its a situation there's really nowhere to copy I still have the original bricks now I copied from this area I could now say well let's see maybe there's a little brick over here that I could pop on its own layer and then drag that into my document and see if I can't use that to help me make things look a little better and I'm not going to the whole thing but that's kind of the process you have to do we could also look at for example this brick looks okay except the fact that it china changes color dramatically so I could try doing levels this would be a rare case of me doing levels directly onto a new image because I'm just trying to make it match up a little better doesn't look like it's going to really work so that's okay always more than one way to try and do something I could sample the color here and go to the phil command and choose fill with my four wrong color and change it to darken mode okay deliberately works on strong multiply more perhaps it's still too much so multiply at a lower opacity so all of these are just trying to find ways to try and make it look a little better and ultimately I would probably end up having to just do some cloning to try and get rid of this really obvious line every devout clone from another image and the other thing that you want to look for it obviously have to fix this one up here so let's do a little bit I'm not gonna do the whole thing but this is kind of the idea that we're trying to fool your eyes into not seeing this kind of hard edge so normally I would be going back and forth to the original bricks and seeing if there's one I'm copying the one thing I'm trying to avoid is touching these edges because they're already matching up fine it's the middle part that's the problem but the other thing you know is if you see like this the series of bricks has some I don't know what that is on the original photograph it's like paint or something and because it's so obvious because it goes up and down separate from every other breck I might want to get rid of that because it's such an obvious repetition that I think I would notice it once I defined the pattern I would kind of see the fact that that line keeps repeating over and over again so as you can see this is not a quick process to do this but that's not perfect there's still a couple things that I really want to end it but I don't want to take forever to show you this but that's kind of the idea so now I look at it okay there's one more I should fix because that's bugging me a little bit let's go back to our original sorry I can't just leave that one looking like that because it's weird so let's grab this brick because this is a camera off I'll have to first duplicate it and then I can drag it into my other document and then put this is gonna be a little tricky because I've got to put it here and up here that could be a challenge to see that up there I'm not sure that's really doing that by which is not the best way to do it but let's take a look and see so even though there's a whole bunch of separate layers in this case when I do select all and do defined pattern it should see all of that you can see there it is okay now let's go back and see if we have any chance of success with our supposedly new improved brick pattern it's a little better but still it needs some work and in this case it's because she doesn't look too bad although you do start to see some repetition a little bit and that's honestly the challenge was just about any pattern that you create from a photograph is seeing that kind of repetition my feeling is though that if you're trying to take like a small photograph and fill it out and repeat it over and over again then you just may have to live with this fact and honestly if I was to do this it would probably be for some situation where I'm thinking I want to use this as a background behind something so I'm going as we saw in a previous example when we extended the background I might put some text over the top of this or another photos was not crucial that this brick wall really looks that clean right across the whole thing so that's kind of theory of creating a pattern let's look at one other more perhaps typical example of how I might use this I'm working on a document maybe an idea that I have let's make it twelve hundred by seven hundred for the sake of argument and I want to have a siri's of vertical stripes going across here but I haven't quite decided yet exactly how many stripes I want or how big I want them to be so one of the possible options would be to make and doesn't have to be very big a small little document and I'm gonna do is say well I made it two hundred by two hundred so I'm going to go to my marquee selection tool one of things we haven't talked about yet because you have the ability to say I wanted to be a fixed size so I'm going to say I want to be one hundred pixels by two hundred pixels not putting his px for pixels and that means now it will automatically on ly select one side I make a new layer and we're going to fill that with the color we want and then d select and then we decided once again do we want the pattern to have a white background or do we want it to have transparent I'm going to say let's do transparent so we're going to define our pattern that look ok now once again go back to our pattern overlay now when I double click on this and find that pattern you'll see it automatically didn't have to be very tall because it's repeating both ways but you see how there's no seams I can't tell and it's again seeing through to the background which is currently black and once again I have the option of saying I want a whole bunch of little stripes or big fat stripes whatever I want to whatever my background colors so I have myself done this and then realized it was a poor decision where I thought I was going to make a siri's of stripes and I took drew one strike and then tried to duplicate it and then duplicate the same amount and then if I changed my mind about it all it was really hard to edit this way makes a lot better sense so any time you think I want something to repeat especially when it's something like dots or lines or something where you don't have to worry about matching anything up this is a very nice way to do it and it could literally be two pixels hi if you're making a strike like this because it's going to repeat that over and over and over you don't have to do that that used to be a technique many many moons ago in the early days of web design we're trying to create a background pattern we make it a small as we possibly could so repeat really really quickly now that's not as necessary but when you start looking at it there's all kinds of interesting ways in which we can use this here I took uh make it bigger so you can see it whole siri's of just stock photos that I had and used a thing in photo shop called picture package to make just a whole bunch of photos and then five scale it down you can still kind of tell their photos when you're seeing a repetitive background so that's just another example what's this the more stripes sometimes have to go back myself and remind myself what patterns that I created here is some of that patterns that are built in so let's talk about that for a second and then we'll show you one other thing about working with patterns and that is their these are the ones built in few and then the ones that I created like a lot of things we have the often say I would like other patterns and these are all some of the actually really quite nice patterns like colored paper or gray scale paper or artist services whatever you want I'm gonna upend those because I want to keep my existing patterns now these ones by nature are supposed to be very repeatable you'll still see a bit of repetition but overall some interesting options that are just built right in here now earlier I showed you that I like using pattern overlay because it lets me they have a preview and be lets me scale it on the fly which is kind of interesting let's do this make a new layer and I go back to the field command for one second to show you something that happened in for a shop cs six which is new and that is when you choose a pattern and I'll go back to my little maple leaf there's a new option in photo shop called scripted patterns again this was introduced in csx and of course also in c c and what this does and says I want to create apply the pattern in different ways so for example before remember it was just like tiles going cross here if I choose brick fill it will stagger them a little bit like bricks if I choose random fills is one of my favorite ones because itjust each time it's randomized you see how it's changing the size of them so if each time you do what you're going to get a different result and that's a pretty interesting option that wasn't there before course you have no control over but that's frankly part of the fun of it and then there's a spiral so I'm like no show everything one but that's the whole idea of this is that's now probably one of the reasons why I would consider using phil to apply a pattern in the past I've always used pattern overlay gis because of that those too often mentioned preview and scaling but this is a pretty nice option and there are some people out there that are have figured out ways where you khun change the script so in the pdf for this class I will put a little note in there about a place where you can find more information about changing the script for the patterns if you're into that kind of thing all right so that's the world of patterns kind of an interesting option and think about the fact that if you do put the pattern on it's on layer then you have all the options of blend modes and blend of sliders and opacity to try and blend them in with your photos for some interesting kind of results alright let's clean up some of our open files here because we want to start talking about the world of shapes and paths and let's start with shapes I'm gonna delete these layers and just go back to a white document again so shapes are a little bit different than most things in photo shop for the most part and fall shop everything we do is pixel based so we use a paintbrush are we clone or we do something that's just taking these little square pixels and using them in some way shapes our start off being vector but then they can be made into pixels and I'll see what I mean in a second so here's the options for the shapes we have the rectangle tool rounded corner rectangle ellipse palling online and custom shape now they all operate the same way but I'm going to use custard shape because frankly it's more interesting than the rest of others there are basic shapes well let's just show you a rectangle tool and I click and drag but wait a minute that doesn't look much like a shape why did that happen well I think you probably know why I didn't check up in the options bar to see how this was set and right now you see there are three options shaped path or pixels because it was shaped two picks are chosen on pixels when I click and drag it's like adding paint on there so that's away you can use the shaped hole but generally we use it as this thing called a shape when you do now you get options what do you want to fill it with do you want to stroke around the outside you know a specific size all that kind of stuff it automatically makes a new layer and has all of these options now some of this is new and see essex and higher much of it is and c c there's particularly some options where you can say I would like to have rounded corners on this and change it on the fly and you can even change one corner so I guess I just want this one corner to be round that's brand new and see essex but the main thing I want to show you is it automatically made a new layer and this is a special layer called a shape player so that means if I'm working away and I come back later and I want to change something I could just double click on it and edit the color and if I take my selection tool which is the black arrow nor ate the type tool I get back to these options which say I'd like it to have a yellow phil and a black stroke for the sake of argument so this is much more edible in the past it was still kind of a one shot deal the one advantage of using a shape player is it is scaleable unlike almost everything else we talked about where I said you don't want to scale bigger than the original with the exception being file's coming in from illustrator even though this graphing did not originate an illustrator it's still treated the same way it's treated like it's vector which means if I did free transform and scale this up much bigger I am not going to lose any quality because it just simply scales that high quality graphic to be larger now the same thing applies for any of the shapes in the custom shaped tool is the more interesting one on lee because it has a whole bunch of shapes built in now these air a combination of all the shapes in photo shop and some others that I have acquired here and there where go to a website that says here's some free shapes or I purchase some graphics package that said here's some free shape so the bottom half of this is not you will not see it unless you happen to find these same ones but all of these ones in here are the built in shapes so for example if I decide that I want a crescent moon that I just choose that shape and then hold down the shift key if I want to keep it in that exact same proportion and now it creates this shape player with that shape once it's on there I can do free transform and alter it in any way that I want and if you look really closely you will see this shape has these little dots on it which are called anchor points which is what defined this shape if I switched to the direct selection tool what this allows me to do is now I can actually click on these handles and start editing the shape itself so if you want to change the appearance of this shape that's what these options allow me to do so that means you can start with a shape that's very close to what you want but you can also edited as well which is kind of nice now the two other options when we're adding a shape are again pixels and path now if you know that all you want to do is add a new layer and then get a shape on there and not edited in any way then making a pixel just means well says if you've painted that shape and while that's okay it's kind of the same premises saying I'm going to use levels from the adjustment menu as opposed to an adjustment layer this is goingto be less flexible so generally speaking I would say we want to use shape especially because of the options that are available for editing in terms of edit the shape at the content in terms of color all that kind of stuff the third option in here is called a path and when you do that it just makes the shape itself without any phil color now if I drag this onto my document like you saw here and close the documents say that all that means is I would have a blank white document that had a path waiting for something to be done to it in other words a path by nature doesn't display it's an object waiting for something to happen and you can either turn in the path into a selection or you could fill the path with some color or you construct the outside of the path with someone's there's lots of things you can do but honestly this is this is lower on the scale of usability I would say frankly the main reason I use this is because I also use adobe illustrator and illustrator has some does not have as many shapes isn't as photoshopped does so sometimes I'll just draw a path in photo shop strictly for the purpose of dragging it into illustrator or copying elsewhere to use it there now just so you know there is a tool that you'll hear people talk about called the pen tool and the pen tool is a path drawing tool now in what I would consider the old days of photoshopped the original days the pentacle was a very important tool for things like making a selection because you could kind of trace around the outside of an object now to me this is less necessary because we have tools like the quick selection tool and others that do such a good job the pen tool it's real strength is you khun draw editable paths that can be used for different purposes including as I said filling and stroking and also turning into a selection so I'm going to go over this really really quickly just so you get an idea of it in the past I think a lot of people felt like the pen tool was a tool we have to learn how to use for me not as much I'm gonna show you the basic concept but honestly it takes a bit of practice to get used to the pen tool and because we have so many choices that are my mind easier as well see this is kind of where it's good to know but I wouldn't worry about if you're like I'm just not getting the pen tool that's perfectly fine to me it's almost more important understand the a basic concept of a path and how it works and I can edit it that is to create it with the penta so here's my little nutshell tour of using the pen tool you don't click and drag with it like you do a paintbrush everything with passes is based on those little squares we saw called anchor points so basically with the pen tool I tele photo shop start there so that's like point a then I move my mouth wherever I want that line to end and click once so it'll say ok I will draw a path between this point on this point if I keep going every time I want to change direction then I add another point and eventually if I go right back where I started seattle circle that appeared that's gonna tell it I've now close this off but again right now this is it's the same concept is just a path waiting for something to happen to it so at this point nothing would be visible so I would have to add a new layer go to my pats panel and then use a command like fill the path with my current four run car now I have something on a layer but until you do that the path is just there ready to be waiting for something to happen but the good news is when you you create a path using any one of the tools where there's the pen tool or one of those customs shape tools and you look at and say I wish I hadn't done that you have the option of going and either editing it using these tools or very commonly just using this direct selection tool and clicking on to clip officer nothing is highlight now you can go on click on individual points and edit them in any way that you want that's how you create straight lines now the part that throws most people off is what if you want to create a curved line well it's a little bit different and there's just one simple operation that throws most people off so to create a straight line we do single click single click if I want to create a curve I click and hold the mouse button or in this case my tablet pen and I'm going to drag to tell photo shop I would like this curve to start going up in this direction so this is not the line this is just a handle that's helping me or helping photoshopped decide what to do next just like in this case where I drew a line from a to b here this is point a I want point b to be here and I'm also going to click and hold and as I dragged down I'm saying I want the curve to come back down on this angle so this handle and direction line I'm creating is what's allowing me to adjust the curve once I think I'm finished I have this path waiting to be stroked or whatever I want but I can also edit it by clicking on it then I get these handles back again now to be perfectly honest with you I don't in any way used the pen tool as much as I did what I used to use it for for example where things like okay I'm trying to create a graphic that has a nice curved line on it and on one occasion I sat there for a long time trying to get just the edge I want trying to make the path of really nice and smooth and then on one occasion when I was doing that I realized that if I looked at the shape tools there's a bunch of shapes in here that have some pretty nice curves built in like this one is like a shield like a highway sign but what I really look that was this curve right here is actually quite interesting so it occurred to me I could do instead of drawing with the pen tool is just zoom out a whole lot and I'm going to change it to shape and initially I'm goingto just drag it with the shift key held out but then all you do free transform and I'm going to rotate it around and now just scale it to the point where it is where I want something like this and I've got a really nice curve that's served the purpose that I want in a way that honestly is much easier that drawing that with the pen tool and as an added bonus it's a shape that means I can go and say I would like it to be this color once you have a shape player on here you can still do other layer things to it for example aiken devil in boss the edge this let's do more so you can see it like that very much how about a hard chisel still kind of hard to see that sad a drop shadow appears you can kind of see what's happening so all these kind of things are available this is still an editable shape so I could go and change the color by double clicking I could use the direct selection tool so I guess what I'm really trying to show you here is if you're just trying to use the pen tal to draw some shape you may be better served by going and looking at the custom shapes and going is there one of these shapes that's either part of it is safe I want or is very close to the shape I want because I can still tweak it as I go now one of the ways we can use shapes is kind of interesting is by taking something from a vector program like adobe illustrator and using it in photo shop so here an illustrator I have a local that I've created an illustrator includes some text and I want to incorporate this into photo shop now the idea behind this is to say because I've made this logo or someone's made it for me perhaps in this vector program it's very scalable but if I just put it in a photo shop and making pixels that I've kind of lost that scale ability so what I ideally like to do is build this into photoshopped as one of those customs shapes so when I showed me that big box of all those custom shapes I'd like this to be one of them so that way it's built into photo shop anytime I need my logo I have to go looking for it it's basically built in devilish up as a custom shape but with one this is a very big was going to say I won't say that this's a very important but and that's that if text is included it's not going to show up unless you convert the text a graphic that's the first thing and the second thing is when you're working in photoshopped a custom shaped says I will apply this custom shape and whatever phil color whatever one pill color you want so if you have a two color logo this isn't gonna work so it needs to be it will only work effectively if you say this is a logo that can can work with only one color basically so let's see how it works I've got my graphic and my texts are gonna select all and copy it and then switch to photo shop and I just need to have some document open and I choose paste as we saw the other day when you go to paste you have options smart object pixels path I would choose shaped layer in this case and when I click okay you'll see it kind of worked however first of all this one doesn't scale down a fit and when you do you realize oh the type is gone so that's not gonna work and I deliberately did that to show you that's one of the steps you have to do anything you're not terribly familiar with illustrator if you have a aye aye file like this it opens and you can see the text has an underlying to show you it's still editable that all I do is select all and under the type menu there's a command that says create outlines and that means turn the text into a graphic now pause for important note here just like we don't want to rast arise text in photo shop and save it here while it was important in this case for me to create outlines once I had copy paces into photo shop I wantto save this without closing ark's taking around closing without saving so that I would preserve the editable type but for this to work in the photo shop shape scenario I have to convert the type outline now I've coffee all of this information not sure that that actually copies let's make sure go back to photoshopping hit paste still's a shape player and this time you'll see it has everything I need and I don't really need to scale it down to fit I'm just trying to let you see that's where it is you see it's got that thing that says shape now here's what this means I pasted into photo shop and it is a shape but right now it's on ly a shape on this document I want to build it into photo shop well just like we started off this lesson by talking about defining patterns we could do the same thing with the shape something or the edit menu and choose define custom shape it's going to say what would you like to call it and I call it I don't want to call it shape eight forty eight because that's not very descriptive was calling to forty nine and click okay now I'm working away and let's see what we got here uh doesn't really matter but I don't wanna pick something all right so we've got our photograph and now I want to add my logo to this photograph so I go to the shape tool make sure it's gone custom shapes and I have to scroll way down to the bottom till I have my logo and now I just click and drag with ship could you say I would like my logo right here now it looks really weird at first has got all these little anchor points on it but if you just switched to like the move tool there we go and now I can position it where I want and if I look at and say it's too obvious I could lower the opacity still treat like a layer but again because it is a shape player now I can also double click on to say I think I would like this is my like my corporate color it isn't really but let's pretend you don't like that I do but you can see really nice quality and the benefit of doing it this way is not that I probably would but if I decided I want to water mark this photograph to make sure no one uses it yeah you bet you I can scale this up really big and it will not lose any quality because it's a shape layer as opposed to pixels so in order to create your own she built into full a shop it has to be start somewhere as a shape whether it's in photoshopped that you built yourself or in some other programme like illustrator you just have to get it in to be a shape player and then choose to find custom shape like a lot of these presets will continue to talk about through throughout our thirty days they stay built into photo shop until you tell otherwise so when we do find a pattern those air now built into photoshopped from now on so if I ever decide I need dots for um a belief or stripes or whatever those patterns are created they will continue to be there until I decide otherwise or in the worst case scenario if photoshopped or to crash I might lose some of my presets so later on in our thirty days wilt you talk a lot more about presets and when we do we'll also talk about how you can manage those pre sets to make sure we don't lose anything so what I would suggest you do as an exercise in this case to get used to the world of patterns and passes a couple of things that kind of work through this first of all let's have you make a very simple pattern and the simplest way to do that again is just to make a small little document and it doesn't have to be square I just find it's easier to do that and then make a new layer and on that new layer take your elliptical marquis tool fill it with some color and then we're just gonna go select all with our move to ll make sure it's centred middle then use have decide do you want the pattern to have a background or not that's your choice then under edit defined pattern once you've done that to make sure it worked make a new document that's much bigger and then at a new layer fill that layer with something doesn't matter what and then you can go to that layer style called pattern overlay and find your pattern and scale it up and down and play with it you can also go to the edit menu and choose filled and try some of the options for filling a power including some of the scripted patterns if you have c s six or higher and then finally play around with the custom shape to a little bit I would suggest you khun pick anyone you want but again the most fun one is custom shapes and pick some shape and look at the different options in the options bar and try putting something on there so you can start to see how it works and if you're really adventurous once you put a shape on there take the direct selectable click off to the side then you can click on the individual anchor points and see what happens if you start adjusting the image so there you go the wonderful world of patterns paths and shapes will continue to explore these on often other lessons but we shall see you tomorrow

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Ratings and Reviews

Melinda Wong
 

Very good teaching. I really liked how clear Dave was with everything, the order he taught the material, and I thought the stories were very helpful. I REALLY wanted to understand photoshop and extremely thankful for his wisdom and knowledge. Thank you so much! This is what was holding me back from getting my photography started! :) It just seemed so intimidating and now I have a greater understanding.

a Creativelive Student
 

I'm a beginner and have found that the information Dave gives is great, although a little to fast at times. I'd like to buy the course but am curious. If I purchase can I watch it and pause it and rewind it? That would be extremely important to me. Thanks for a great service CreativeLive...

a Creativelive Student
 

Lots of information! Initially I thought I'd just watch the free version as I already have several Creativelive videos on Photoshop but I really like how the classes are broken into subjects and shorter, 1 hour sessions-it will make reviewing much easier! I love Dave's teaching style-he covers everything very well. (Plus the fact that he's Canadian, eh?) :D Thanks for offering such a great course! I'd would love to see Dave do a similar one on Illustrator.

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