From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Mastery

Introducing the Paths panel - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Mastery

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Introducing the Paths panel

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- [Instructor] Over the course of this chapter, we're going to take this little boy's face and we're going to combine it with this buff dude's body, and incidentally all of these images come to us from the Dreamstime image library, about which you can learn more and get deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. And we'll end up with this sumptuous, if quietly disturbing, composition here. And even though it's absurdly impossible, it's rendered with the kind of attention to detail that's required for any major masking project, and it relies heavily on the Pen tool. Now, we're going to start things off with a look at the Paths Panel, which is where Pen tool paths hang out. And so, just as the Channels Panel allows you to build masks in the form of alpha channels, the Paths Panel allows you to build them in the form of vector-based path outlines. Now, I've saved the final version of the composition as well as this guy right here, which as you know can accommodate layers and alpha channels. This little guy though is a jpeg image. Jpegs do not support layers or alpha channels. In fact, they pretty much just support colored pixels and nothing more. But a jpeg file can also include metadata. So, for example, if I were to go up to the File menu and choose File Info, you can see all the copyright and various other information that's associated with this particular photograph. Meanwhile paths are just a bunch of anchor point coordinates and as a result they can be saved as metadata as well. And so I'll cancel out of here, and go up to the Window menu and choose the Paths command, at which point you'll see a single path listed here at the top of the panel. And this is a path that I've created for you in advance, and saved along with a jpeg file, and this is something you can do as well. And so, if you're sending jpeg files out to other folks, you can include path outlines as well that they can then turn around and convert to selection outlines, layer masks, or vector masks, as we'll see. I'll just go ahead and click on this item to select it and you can see that it's really a combination of three path outlines. One that surrounds the entire face, another that surrounds the left ear, and then this tiny guy around the visible portion of the right ear. To select a path outline, drop down to the Arrow tool, and notice if you click and hold, you'll see two varieties of the arrow: the black arrow, which Photoshop calls the Path Selection tool, and the white arrow, which it calls the Direct Selection tool. I call them the Black and White arrows, for a couple of different reasons. First of all, there's no other tool inside Photoshop except the Quick Selection tool, which goes by the name Selection, and as I'm sure you've come to appreciate by now, the Quick Selection tool is not quick. It's ultimately a selection brush. All the other tools are named after what they look like, so we've got the Magic Wand tool, we have the Marquee tools right here, and finally we have the Lasso tool, so it's not called the Freeform Selection tool, it's called the Lasso tool, and it has a shortcut of L, which is analogous to the two arrow tools, which have keyboard shortcuts of A for Arrow. In any event, I just want you to know what I call them, and what pretty much everybody out there calls them. All right, so I'll go ahead and click on the path outline that surrounds the face and you can see that that lights up the anchor points, and so notice these square anchor points, all of which are connected to their neighbors, in our case by curving segments, but they could be straight segments as well. Now, I drew each and every one of these anchor points using the pen tool, and we'll see how that works in a future movie. But, for now, I just want you to know that I can click on the ear to select it independently, or I can shift click on a path to add it to the selection, like so, and then I could shift click on the face in order to select it as well. If you want to de-select any path outline, you just shift click again. Now, the difference between the Black and White Arrow tools is that the Black Arrow selects entire path outlines at a time, whereas the White Arrow selects individual anchor points and segments. And so notice, if I were to switch to the White Arrow and then click somewhere on this path outline, in my case, I've selected a curved segment, which includes a couple of control handles, which allow you to change the degree of curvature. If I were to click on the anchor point, then I would select it independently of the other anchor points, as we're seeing here, at which point I could drag it to a different location if I like. If you want to select multiple anchor points, then you just go ahead and shift click on them, or you can drag outside the path outline in order to create a rectangular marquee and then when you release, everything inside the marquee becomes selected. You can also shift marquee, so for example, I could marquee these two points for starters, and then I could press the shift key and marquee these two points in order to add them to the selection. You also have the option of marqueeing with the Black Arrow tool, and I'll switch to that tool just by pressing shift A, like so, and then I will partially marquee these three path outlines. Now, if I were drawing this marquee with the White Arrow tool, then I would just select the anchor points inside the marquee, but because I'm working with the Black Arrow tool, I select all of the paths that even slightly fall inside of my marquee. And that is my introduction to the Paths Panel, which allows you to store path outlines that you draw with the Pen tool. Now one of the great things about these paths is that you can save them not only with native psd and tiff files, but with lowly jpeg files as well.

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