Working with Vectors, Part 2

In this installment, we'll look at the Paths palette and take a glance at the Freeform and Magnetic Pen tools.

Last week's column explained the basics of vector paths, as well as how to manipulate their Bezier curves. If you're not familiar with the Pen tool and its capabilities, it's a good idea to take a quick peek before continuing. Working with Vectors

The Paths Palette

The Paths palette is one of the keys to working with paths. Let's take a look at its key features.

To the left is the palette itself, to the right is its menu. In the palette, you can see a single path, named Work Path. By default, when you start a new path in an image, such a work path appears in the Paths palette. As long as you continue to keep the path active, you can manipulate it or add to it. However, if you deselect it without saving and start another path, it's gone.

When a path is active in the Paths palette and use the Pen tool to start a second path, the two become subpaths of the work path. As you can see by the Path palette's thumbnail in the next figure, the three paths are all components of a single work path.

To save a path, use the Path palette's menu command Save Path. This opens the dialog box seen below.

When there is no work path in the Paths palette, the Save Path command is replaced in the menu by New Path. You'll also see a New Path button at the bottom of the palette.

When the New Path command or button is used, a path is listed in the Paths palette but, as you can see from Path 2's thumbnail, there is not yet a path. Until you create a path using the Pen tool, the path remains empty in the Paths palette.

You can also create paths using techniques other than the Pen tool. Any selection can be turned into a work path using the Make Work Path button at the bottom of the Paths palette. If you have a feathered edge or the selection was made with a gradated mask, the path will fall at the point where pixels are 50 percent selected. If you use the palette's menu command rather than the button, a dialog box opens, allowing you to specify how closely the path should follow the selection.

When a very intricate selection is being converted to a work path, a low tolerance will produce a more accurate, but more complicated path. If a selection has rather jagged edges, using a higher tolerance can smooth the path.

The Paths palette allows you to stroke and fill paths using either buttons or menu commands. If the Stroke Path button is used, the tool active in the Toolbox (if it can be used to stroke a path) will be used with its current settings. If the active tool cannot be used to stroke a path, the tool last selected using the Stroke Path command will be employed.

Most Photoshop users (who are aware that paths can be stroked) think in terms of Pencil vs. Paintbrush. But the list of tools that can be used to stroke a path is rather impressive:

• Pencil, Paintbrush, Airbrush, Eraser
  
• Background Eraser, History Brush, Art History Brush
  
• Clone Stamp (Rubber Stamp), Pattern Stamp
  
• Dodge, Burn, Blur, Sharpen, Sponge, Smudge

When you think about it for just a second, you can see some of the potential. Getting exactly the right burn around the edge of an image... blurring a specific line... creating an outline from an earlier history state.... And when you consider that any selection can be turned into a path at the click of a button (the Make Selection button to be exact), the Stroke Path command starts looking pretty powerful, and drastically underused.

Similar to the Stroke Path command is Fill Path. While not as powerful in some respects, Fill Path does have more creative potential than simply dumping in the foreground color. The figure below shows some of the choices.

In addition tto using the Make Selection button at the bottom of the Paths palette, there is, of course, also a command to turn a path into a selection. It opens the dialog box seen here.

(Before we turn from the Paths palette to the specialized Pen tools, I'd like to mention that the palette's menu command Clipping Mask will be discussed in a future column.)