From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

966 Drawing arrows in Photoshop 2021

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

966 Drawing arrows in Photoshop 2021

- Hey gang. This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to "Deke's Techniques". Today we'll be talking about Photoshop's new and improved mostly dynamic line tool. "But wait a sec, Deke," you say. "Didn't we talk about Photoshop's new and improved mostly dynamic line tool just 11 weeks ago?" That's what I love about my viewers, you're so attentive. But see today, we'll be talking about how you can use Photoshop's new and improved mostly dynamic line tool to draw lines that begin or end with arrowheads. Which are likewise dynamic in that they rotate a lot with the line itself and you can fill and stroke them any way you like. But are conversely undynamic, i.e. static, in that you have to assign and scale them before you draw the line. And by the time we finish this project, the line will get all wavy even as the arrow remains entirely upright. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right. Here's the starter file, which includes a photographic image from the Dreamstime image library, as well as some editable text set in the font Pacifico, which you will not need if you're working along with this exercise. And here's the final version of the artwork complete with this arrow emanating from the letter W. And I'm going to be drawing that arrow using the new and improved line tool. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on the front of the van just so I can better demonstrate what's going on. And then I'll click and hold on whatever shape tool I see down here near the bottom of the toolbox and I'll see select the line tool from this fly out menu. And now I'll just go ahead and draw a line like so, any angle is fine. I just want you to see that instead of a skinny rectangle, which is what we've been seeing in Photoshop 2020 and earlier, we have an actual straight line with two end points. And you can drag either those end points to change the length and angle of the line. If you just want to change the angle, then move your cursor slightly beyond one of the end points and drag like so. Also notice that Photoshop has automatically popped open the properties panel. At which point, if I want to change the thickness of that line, all I have to do is increase the line weight to let's say, 10 pixels. And so other than drawing the line, nothing I've shown you so far was possible before Photoshop 2021. I'm going to go ahead and hide the Properties panel. And I'm going to click on this gear icon up here in the Options bar in order to bring up the arrowheads options. Now, arrowheads are only applicable to lines that you draw with the line tool. However, as things stand now, it's a static control. So notice if I turn on end, I'm not seeing any change here inside the image. If I want to invoke that arrowhead I need to draw a new line like so. Now you can see that we have a fairly small arrowhead also stroked with that 10 pixel line weight. Now, even though this is a static arrowhead, it does move along with the line. So if I were to drag one of these end points then I'm going to change the angle of the arrowhead along with the angle of that line. All right, this is not the effect I want however. So I'll just go ahead and Shift + Click on line one here, inside the Layers panel, so that both lines are selected and I'll press the Backspace key here on the PC, or the Delete key on the Mac in order to get rid of those lines. All right, now I'm going to click on that gear icon once again in order to bring back my arrowheads options and I'm going to change the width value to 70 pixels. How do I know to do that? Through trial and error. And we'll change the link value to a hundred pixels and then I'll increase the concavity value to 20%. And that's going to give me a little bit of bend on the inside of the arrowhead, at which point I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. And now I'll draw a line like so. I want it to be exactly horizontal, so I'll press and hold the Shift key. And it'll keep that key down until I'm done drawing the line and notice that heads up display right there. The angle should be zero degrees and I'm looking for a length value of 300 pixels. At which point I'll go ahead and release to create that arrowhead. And so notice my width and height values. There are 300 and 70 pixels respectively. All right, now I'll just go ahead and hide the Properties panel because after all, the horizontal options bar takes up a lot less room on screen and offers those same options, including a line weight which I'm going to take up to 15 pixels this time around. And so the line weight is dynamic and I'm going to change the color of that stroke, by clicking on a swatch right there, and then selecting white from my list of recently used colors. If you're not seeing white, you can twirl open the gray scale group right here and select that first swatch and you'll get a white stroke like so. All right, notice that we also have a black fill and the fill is assigned to the interior of the arrowhead. I don't want to fill the interior of the arrowhead. So click on that black swatch right there and I'll change it to this icon in the top left corner of the panel, which is none. And that'll go ahead and get rid of that fill like, so. All right, now I'm going to zoom in here and I want to nudge this arrow head around. So I'll switch to the black arrow tool, the one that Photoshop calls the path selection tool, and then I'll press the down arrow key just to nudge that guy down slightly so that we have a smoother transition. But first, actually I want to show you something. I'll press Shift + Up Arrow a couple of times so we can see the beginning of that line. Notice that it has a butt cap. That is, it begins suddenly. If you want to round things off, then you click on this icon right here. The one that looks like a horizontal line, and then you would think you change the caps option to round it. That happens to produce no effect whatsoever. What you have to do instead, if you're working with a line that includes an arrow head is to change the corners to rounded like so and that's going to take care of those weird edges inside the arrowhead, as well as the beginning of the line. All right, I'll go ahead and press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change and hide that panel and then I'll nudge the line back into place. And then I'll finish things off here inside the Layers panel, by changing the name of this layer to arrow. And that's all there is to it. Now click off the arrowhead to de-select it, and I'll press Control + Zero or Commands + Zero on the Mac to center my zoom. And that's how you work with the new and improved line tool here inside Photoshop 2021. And I would presume, going forward. If you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a followup movie in which we touch on three potential points of confusion that you may encounter when using Photoshop's line tool. Now maybe soon Adobe will deal with these issues, but for now they're issues. If you're looking forward to next week, that's when I'll show you how to blend your vector-based arrow with a pixel based photograph to create this seamless composition, which involves an iconic VW van which how can you not love that? Feel like going down a fun rabbit hole? Google chicken text. "Deke's Techniques" each and every week. Keep watching.

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