Using Paths

What can you do with paths after you've gone to all the trouble of creating them? Well, a lot of things. In Photoshop, you can use paths to remember selections you want to use repeatedly. You can also fill a path area or define the color , border, and so on of the outline of the path. Paths indicate selections or lines, but they don't actually appear on your canvas unless you add some paint to them to make them show up. You can fill a path or stroke it, or both. Stroking adds a stroke of paint over the path. Filling places a color or pattern inside the path. Figure 13.17 shows a freeform path that has been stroked with red and filled with a pattern.

Figure 13.17. A filled and stroked path.

Use the Active Layer

When you fill or stroke a path, you are adding pixels to the active layer of your picture. Make sure that the layer you want to put the paint on is the active one.

Turning Paths into Selections

In Photoshop, paths one way to permanently save selections. This can be incredibly helpful when you think you might want to reuse a specific selection later. When in doubt, create a path so that the selection will always be available.

Try it Yourself

Convert a Path into a Selection

You already learned how to convert a selection to a path. The following steps show you how to convert a path into a selection:

1.	Create a path through whatever means suits your fancy.
2.	Activate the path you want to convert by clicking it in the Paths palette.
3.	Choose Make Selection from the menu at the top-right of the Paths palette (see Figure 13.18) or click the Make Selection button, third from the left in the bottom of the Paths palette. (This bypasses the dialog box described in the next step.) Figure 13.18. Turning a work path into a selection.
4.	In the Make Selection dialog box that appears, you can set the feathering radius of the selection that Photoshop creates (see Figure 13.19). The higher the Feather Radius setting, the more partially selected pixels will appear along the edges of the selection. Figure 13.19. The Make Selection dialog box.
5.	Click OK, and you'll see the path turn into a selection.

Filling a Path

Filling a path means just what you would expect. Select a path, choose Fill Path from the palette menu, and you'll get the same kinds of options you get for filling a selection, plus a couple of extras. In the Fill Path dialog box (see Figure 13.20), you can choose a color, a pattern, or a snapshot to fill the area. You can also choose a blending mode, opacity percentage, optional transparency, anti-aliasing, and a feathering value. If the path consists of two separate subpaths, only the one selected will be filled or stroked.

Figure 13.20. The Fill Path dialog box has many options.

Stroking a Path

Stroking a path affects the outline of the path, not the entire area enclosed within a path. Select a path and then choose Stroke Path from the palette menu. The dialog box enables you to choose the tool you want to use, from Pencil and Brush to Blur and Sponge (see Figure 13.21).

Figure 13.21. The Stroke Path dialog box allows you to determine which stroke you'll use.

Whatever tool you pick, Photoshop uses that tool's current settings to create the result. So, for example, if you want to airbrush the path outline with only 60% pressure, make sure that value is set in the Tool Options bar and that the Airbrush option is selected before you choose Stroke Path.

Take the Shortcut

There are shortcuts for filling and for stroking. Hold your mouse pointer over the buttons at the bottom of the Paths palette, and you'll see the tooltips. Press Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) as you click a button to open its dialog box.

Using the Shape Tools

In a hurry? Can't draw? Don't despair. Photoshop provides a handy arsenal of predrawn shapes , which it calls its Shape tools . These can be used as paths and be filled or stroked as needed. They can be resized, to a certain extent reshaped, and placed wherever you need them. The rounded rectangle is great for masking photos. The polygons are useful if you need a bunch of stars or other unusual shapes. The custom shapes will amaze you. Figure 13.22 shows the Shape tools.

Figure 13.22. These tools can draw filled or unfilled shapes.

To draw a shape, first specify a foreground color, which can be used to fill the shape. Select the appropriate tool. (If you are using the Custom Shape tool, you need to click its icon on the Tool Options bar and choose one of the available shapes.)

A Multitude of Shapes

Photoshop comes with piles and piles of custom shapes. To pick through your choices, click the arrow on the Tool Options bar's Custom Shape menu to see yet another pop-up menu. Scroll to the bottom of the menu and choose a shape library, such as Animals, Ornaments, and TalkBubbles. The resulting dialog box asks you whether to replace the existing shapes with the ones from the new library (OK) or just add the new shapes in (Append). You can always return to the default Shape menu by choosing Reset Shapes from the pop-up menu.

To create a new shape, click the Shape Layers, the Paths, or the Fill Pixels button in the Options bar, as shown in Figure 13.23. Use Create New Work Path if you want to make a path with a particular shape. Use Create Filled Region to produce a filled shape. Use Create New Shape Layer to draw a shape on a new layer.

Figure 13.23. Select one of these options.

To edit a shape after you've drawn it, make sure that the shape layer is selected and choose the Add, Subtract, Intersect, or Exclude option in the Tool Options bar. If you choose Add and draw a second shape, they'll both be filled. If you choose Subtract and draw a second shape touching the first, you can cut out part of the filled shape. Intersect fills the shapes only where they overlap. Exclude removes the color where two shapes overlap. Figure 13.24 shows some examples.

Figure 13.24. These options aren't available until you've drawn the first shape.

Dragging as you draw determines the size and orientation of a shape. Hold down Shift as you drag to constrain a rectangle or rounded rectangle to a square or to constrain an ellipse to a circle. Hold down Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) as you drag to draw from the center of the object.

If you need a precisely sized shape, click the down arrow at the end of the row of Shape tools on the Tool Options bar. This opens a dialog box. Depending on the shape you chose, you can set height and width, corner radius, or the number of sides in a polygon or points on a star. Use the Tool Options bar to specify a blending mode and opacity for the shape.

Add a Shape to the Custom Shapes Palette

Create a shape using the other Shape tools, or select the path containing the shape you want to use. In Figure 13.25, I've used the star, drawn a path around it, and filled it. To add it to the Custom Shapes palette, make sure the path is selected in the Paths palette, then choose Edit Define Custom Shape and enter a name for the new shape in the dialog box (see Figure 13.25). When you click OK, the shape will be added to the palette.

Figure 13.25. Give the shape a name to add it to the palette.

To select your new custom shape, choose it from the shape list in the Tool Options bar. To restrict the shape to its original size, choose Fixed Size in the Tool Options bar.