Photoshop's Pen Tool Part - 2

Pick a shape you want to draw, here we will pick Ellipse Tool, and finally make sure you have also “Paths” selected in Options Bar too.

Come back to canvas and draw circle or ellipse, notice it is drawn as a Path, which means we can modify the shape through methods we learn in our previous lessons. [Link]

The Segment
Segment is a section between two points.

Removing a Segment
To remove a segment we will simply Ctrl + click on it and hit “Del” from keyboard if the Pen Tool is enabled. Or we have Direct Selection Tool then only click will work along with Del key from keyboard.

Multiple segments can be select by holding down Shift while Alt Click or Click on each segment.

TIP
Most of the time you will notice a Left alone point after removing several segments in a series, clean them by select and than delete.

Duplicate a Shape
I get into very interesting situation once when I want to duplicate a shape I made. For minutes I never get any way to “Duplicate” that particular piece of line. I couldn’t drag it to duplicate, I can’t duplicate path layer to get the result.

What works? Old fashioned Copy and Paste. Later I also found Ctrl + Shift + Alt and drag

Move mouse to the open point and the pointer will reshape to which means we are ready to continue or connect our path. Click here and move to another open point, mouse pointer will change again and upon our click it will joint two paths or two open points.

Transform a Shape
Stretch, Rotate, Skew and other “Transform” methods works on path in same manner they worked on any other object.

Selected path can be rotate from pressing “Ctrl T” or “Edit -> Transform Path”. Yes there is a “Path” added to indicate us we are about to transform a Path.

At this point it is important to remind ourselves again Photoshop does offer a good hand in Vector based graphics through Path and Pen tool but it is not a best solution. Various methods that are easy in Illustrator or Freehand are not a part of Photoshop. We have to come up with a different solution to duplicate them.

Split a Shape
We have knife and rubbers in other application to cut a line into two with a single click, unfortunately I haven’t found any quick alternative solution for this condition.

What I do is add a point or two to create a small segment and remove it [see removing a segment].

Or If I want small piece out of big like in current example I highlighted area I want to split away. Select segments and use Copy than Paste.