Hopefully you’ve been practicing on our image trying to get the path around it right. When you notice that you don’t have to go back to redo a path it means you’re on your way to mastering the tool.
Now, notice there’s a little hole on the handle of the pan. This tutorial will explain a few minor things when applying paths.
What we should do is put a path in that hole too so when the image is over another image or a background it will show up in the hole, too. (shown below)
PATH OPTIONS EXPLAINED
Above is the most common used option I set for the pen tool. I really don’t have to explain what the settings mean you can still use the pen tool competently. But for the sake of clarity… or in case these are not your default settings…
1. The pen tool can also be used to create Shape Layers – that is, if you draw a path it creates a new layer with a fill color on it and the path editable. This is useful if you’re creating logos in Photoshop.
I always set this to draw a path (2nd option). What this does is it creates a path in the Path Palette. From there I can save, rename, make selection, stroke, fill, resize a path.
2. The second option basically let’s us use a tool as if it’s another tool. Not much to explain here except if I choose the Pen Tool I want it to behave as a pen tool – so I chose the pen as shown.
3. When Auto Add/Delete is on it just means you can add or remove a point in an existing path.
4. The Pathfinder Options might freak out beginners but basically I set it to the fourth options which when another path is overlapped over another it gets excluded. I always keep it in on exclude (4th option).
You can select path and play around with these options to see what each Pathfinder option does.
As long as you have your settings identically set to the image above you will be fine for now.
