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

967 Troubleshooting Photoshop’s Line tool

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

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967 Troubleshooting Photoshop’s Line tool

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- [Instructor] All right, now, I'll take you on a tour of three things you'll want to know when working with the new and improved line tool inside Photoshop 2021 and later. And so here I am inside Photoshop looking at this solid black layer which will help me to better offset my white lines. And now I'll go ahead and bring up the shape tool via menu and I will select the Line Tool. Now I'm going to dial in a few values in advance here. I'll change the line weight to 15 pixels. I'll click on that stroke swatch and change it to White. And I'll go ahead and click on a Fill and set it to None. Let's say. And then I'll click on this gear icon and now that said, I've set the arrowhead to the end of the path outline. I've set the width to 70 pixels the length to 100 pixels and the concavity value to 20%. Obviously you can go your own way. And now I'll just go ahead and draw a line that includes an arrowhead. And notice by default, anytime you draw a vector shape layer, Photoshop goes ahead and automatically displays the properties panel which in my opinion is highly intrusive and absolutely 100% unnecessary. Notice that all of the settings right here including the width and height values as well as these appearance settings, they also appear up here in a much less intrusive horizontal options bar. If you like me, do not want this panel popping up every time you draw a line or other vector-based shape layer, then click on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner of the panel and turn off Show on Shape Creation. In that way, if I hide the properties panel and I draw another line, notice that the properties panel does not pop up on screen. I'm going to go ahead and select both of these line layers here inside of the layers panel and I'll press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac or to get rid of them. Here's something else that may leave you scratching your head. I'm going to go ahead and switch to the rectangle tool for just a moment and I'll draw a rectangle like so and I'll increase the lightweight value to let's say, 50 pixels so we have a big meaty stroke. And notice by default the stroke straddles the path outline that is, it goes 25 pixels in one direction and 25 pixels in the other direction because its center aligned. You can change that however, by clicking on this horizontal line up here in the options bar once again and then changing the aligned setting to this first guy right here, inside, and now we'll shift the entire stroke inside the path outline. Now, while that works beautifully, when working with rectangles and a bunch of other shapes, it does not work with a line tool. So notice I'll go ahead and switch to the Line Tool and I'll draw another line. And this time I end up with nothing but a white Arrowhead. Watch this, I'll go ahead and select the black arrow tool which is right there above the line tool and I'll click off the path outline to deselect it and notice all we have is a white arrowhead. We're not seeing the line at all. And this, despite the fact that if I were to select this guy once again, we have a line weight at 50 pixels. So it's really super thick and you can see that the stroke is white and so forth. Well, the problem is that the stroke is aligned inside the path outline. What you need to do is click on that horizontal line icon once again and change the align setting to center and you will end up with the effect you're looking for. Now, as many of you know I have a personal website, teak.com and one of my members recently asked a question which is how you render lines as pixels. And so what I'm going to do is create a new layer by pressing Ctrl + Shift + N or Command + Shift + N on the Mac. And I'll just go ahead and call this layer Pixels and I'll click, OK. Notice that we have a pixel based layer as opposed to these vector-based shape layers which have little squares and anchor points in the bottom right corners of their thumbnails. So I'll switch back to the pixels once again and I'll switch back to the rectangle tool as well. And I want you to notice this first option right here by default it's set to Shape, but you can set it to Path in order to draw a path outline in the paths panel or you can set it to pixels. In which case, if you draw with the rectangle tool you'll create a pixel base rectangle. Now we're not really seeing it at this point and that's because my foreground color is set to black. And so what I'll do is undo the creation of that shape and I'll click on this little switch icon right here in order to switch the foreground color to white. Now draw a new pixel base rectangle and notice it appears filled with white. That's not the most dynamic way to work, but let's say that's the way you do want to work. You want to be able to use the line tool to draw up pixels. Well, I'll go ahead and undo the creation of that rectangle and I'll switch back to the line tool right here. And then notice if I click on the word Shape that both Shape and Path are available to me, but Pixels is dimmed. What's going on there? Well, Photoshop wants you set the line weight dynamically before you go converting anything to pixels and so here's what you do. If you're bound and determined to draw a line rendered in pixels, then go ahead and draw a line like you normally would like so as we're seeing right here. Set the line weight to whatever you want it to be. I'll go ahead and crank it up just for the sake of demonstration to 25 pixels, let's say, and then right click anywhere inside the document window and choose Rasterize Layer. And you will end up with a straight line rendered in pixels. And those are the three things that I want you to bear in mind when working with the new and improved line tool here inside Photoshop 2021 and later.

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