Path

What Is A Path?

A "path" is, quite honestly, something that may seem a little out of place inside a program like Photoshop. The reason is because Photoshop is primarily a pixel-based program. It takes the millions of tiny square pixels that make up a typical digital image and does things with them. Paths, on the other hand, have absolutely nothing to do with pixels, which is why I said they may seem out of place in a program that's used mainly for editing and drawing pixels.

A path is really nothing more than a line that goes from one point to another, a line that is completely independent of and cares nothing about the pixels underneath it. The line may be straight or it may be curved, but it always goes from one point to another point, and as I mentioned, it has nothing at all to do with the pixels in the image. A path is completely separate from the image itself. In fact, a path is so separate that if you tried to print your image with a path visible on your screen, the path would not appear on the paper. Also, if you saved your image as a JPEG file and uploaded it to a website, even if you saved the image with the path visible on your screen in Photoshop, you won't see it in the image on the website. Paths are for your eyes and Photoshop only. No one else will ever see them, unless they happen to walk past your computer while you're working.

We always need a minimum of two points to create a path, since we need to know where the path starts and where it ends. If we use enough points that we can bring our path back to the same point it started from, we can create different shapes out of paths, which is exactly how Photoshop's various Shape Tools work. The Rectangle Tool uses paths, connected by points, to draw a rectangular shape. The Ellipse Tool uses paths, connected by points, to draw an elliptical shape, and so on. It's also how Photoshop's Type Tool works, although Photoshop handles type a bit differently than it handles regular shapes, but all type in Photoshop is essentially made from paths. In fact, you can convert type into shapes, which then gives you all of the same path editing options with type that you get when working with shapes.

You may also have heard paths referred to as outlines, and that's a pretty good description of what a path is, or at least, what a path can be. We can draw a square path, and if we do nothing else with it, as in we don't fill it with a color or apply a stroke to it, then all we have is a basic outline of a square. Same with a circle or any other shape we draw. The path itself is just the outline of the shape. It's not until we do something with the path, like fill it, apply a stroke, or convert it into a selection, that the path actually becomes something more than a basic outline.

You can select an entire path using the Path Selection Tool (also known as the "black arrow" tool), or you can select individual points or path segments using the Direct Selection Tool (the "white arrow" tool). A path "segment", or "line segment" as it's sometimes called, is any path between two points. A rectangular path, for example, would be made up of four points (one in each corner), and the individual paths connecting the points together along the top, bottom, left, and right to create the shape of the rectangle are the path segments. The actual path itself is the combination of all of the individual path segments that make up the shape.

That can be a little confusing, so let's see what I mean. Open a new document inside Photoshop. It doesn't matter what size it is. I'll choose the 640x480 size from the list of presets, but as I said, it doesn't matter what size you choose. Select your Pen Tool from the Tools palette. You can also select the Pen Tool simply by pressing the letter P on your keyboard.

The Two Pen Tool Modes
Now, before we continue, we first need to make sure we're working with paths, and that's because the Pen Tool actually has two different modes it can work in, and by default, it uses the other one. With the Pen Tool selected, if we look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen, we'll see a group of three icons:

The Options Bar in Photoshop showing the group of three icons representing each of the three Pen Tool modes.

I know I said there's two modes the Pen Tool can work in and yet, as if to make things more confusing, there's three icons, but the icon on the right, which is the Fill pixels icon, is grayed out and not available when working with the Pen Tool. It's only available when working with the various Shape Tools, so there's really only two icons we need to look at.

The icon on the left is the Shape layers icon, also known as "not the one we want", and it's the one that's selected by default. If we were to work with the Pen Tool with that icon selected, we'd be drawing shapes, just as if we were using any of the various Shape Tools, except that instead of drawing a predefined shape like a rectangle or an ellipse, we could draw any shape we wanted. As I said though, that's not what we want. We want the icon beside it, the Paths icon, so go ahead and click on it to select it:

Photoshop Tutorials: Click on the "Paths" icon in the Options Bar to work with paths with the Pen Tool.

With the Pen Tool selected and the Paths icon selected in the Options Bar, click once anywhere inside your document. Don't click and drag, just click. When you do, you'll add a small square point. I've enlarged it here:

Click once inside the document with the Pen Tool to add a point.

This first point we've just added is the starting point of our path. Now at the moment, we don't actually have a path. All we have is a starting point. The "point" is technically called an anchor or anchor point, and it's named that because it anchors the path into place. This first point will anchor the beginning of the path to this spot inside the document. As we add more points, each of them will anchor the path into place at that location.

Let's add another point. Click somewhere else inside the document. Anywhere will do. I'm going to click somewhere to the right of my initial point:

Photoshop Tutorials: Add a second anchor point by clicking somewhere else inside the document.

I've now added a second anchor point, and look what's happened. I now have a straight line joining the two points together! That straight line is my path. As I mentioned earlier, we need a minimum of two points to create a path, since we need to know where the path starts and where it ends, and now that we have both a starting and an end point, Photoshop was able to connect the two points together, creating our path.

Let's add a few more points just for fun. Click a few more times at different spots inside the document. Again, don't click and drag, just click:

Add additional points by clicking at different spots inside the document.

In the image above, I've added seven more anchor points by clicking at different spots with the Pen Tool, and each time I added one, the length of my path increased because a new path "segment" was added between the previous point and the new point. My path now consists of nine anchor points and eight path segments. I could continue clicking around inside the document to add more anchor points and path segments, but what I'd really like to do now is close my path so it forms a complete shape.

Closing A Path
To close a path, all we need to do is click once again on our initial starting point. When you hover your mouse cursor over the starting point, you'll see a small circle appear in the bottom right corner of the pen icon:

A small circle appears in the bottom right corner of the pen icon when hovering the cursor over the initial starting point of the path.

That circle tells us that we're about to come "full circle" with our path, finishing it off where it began. To close it, simply click directly on the starting point. We can see below that my path has become a closed path and is now a basic outline of a shape:

The path is now closed, finishing at the starting point, creating a closed path.

Even though this path was drawn just for fun as an example of how to draw a basic path with the Pen Tool , I can easily turn this path into a selection. For that, we need Photoshop's Paths palette, and we'll look at that next.