How to find the pen tool

might sound silly, but having trouble find it. thanks:)

Not silly. You can't find it because it's not there. Pen tool is in Photoshop, not PSE.

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How To Use The Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign CS6 | Creative Suite Podcast: Designers | Adobe TV

In this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast Terry White shows how to use the Pen Tool to create Art, Frames and to trace images in Photoshop CS6. If you've never used the Pen Tool before, this is your video!
http://adobe.ly/STegFg

With the pen tool in Indesign, is there a way of making the points not join if you want to make a few single lines?

Why can't I find the pen tool in the tryout version of Illustrator CC?

Why can't I find the pen tool in the tryout version of Illustrator CC?

No clue. You've provided nearly no information.
What happens when you tap the P key on the keyboard?

How Do I make curved lines with the pen tool in after effects CS6

Hello, so I have been following this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKzB-CFT0MI on how to make 2d intros in after effects and at the 2:20 mark he shows how he uses the pen tool to make curved lines around the elipse. I tried to do the samething myself, and couldent make the curved lines. I looked it up online and there were tutorials on how to make curved lines but they did not work the same way, and I could not make curves like he did.So if any of you know how to do curved lines like in the video, your help will be appreciated.
Thanks !

This is basic stuff and it's basically the same way Illustrator or Photoshop works with bezier paths. You'll find a lot of helpful information if you just type masking or mask in the Search After Effects Help field at the top right corner of the app.
Adobe - Search: masking
Directly from the Help Files: After Effects Help | Creating shapes and masks
Mylenium.. sorry you thought it was an awful tutorial. I made it in under a minute just to show this member the very basic task of creating a mask with the pen tool and animating the shape. I'll try and up the quality of my quick replies to simple operations.

Better ways to work with the pen tool

I'm finding the pen tool a real aggravation to use... first off you cannot hardly see the points once a path is completed. Even blowing the artwork up really big doesn't help much.
Then its really easy to loose the ability to move individual points... at least I've found that at one point I can select and move the points easily with keyboard and somehow I loose that ability and seems to difficult to regain it. Instead I'm moving the whole path.
I wondered if any of the plugins out there might be dedicated to making the pen tool points easier to manipulate and edit. Just making them easily visible would probably be enough.

Jacob Bugge wrote:
Harry,
The Direct Selection Tool is the one to use for moving Anchor Points after the path has been drawn. Always work on paths without anything selected when you start; this is one place where Smart Guides are your friends because they let you see highlights of what you may select.
If you Click an Anchor Point, you will see that it is shown as a filled square; the other (non selected) Anchor Points are shown as hollow squares; you can select additional Anchor Points by ShiftClicking them.
With the desired Anchor Point(s) chosen, you may ClickDrag (either of them), or use the Arrow keys, or Object>Transform>Move, to move it/them.
You can also ClickDrag across the desired Anchor Point(s), starting from an empty spot with no fill (normally outside the path).
If I'm following you above... I do not see that behavior here. I speaking particularly of your third and fourth points.
You are talking about doing point 3 and 4 with direct select right?
To make it simple I'll just work with one point on a closed path :... I first click on an empty part of art board, then click a single point. At that point all the points light up and show there handles. The clicked one is a solid red dot, the others are a hollow dot with red stroke.
Now according to what I got of your comments, I should be able to move that single selected point with the arrow keys.... but I cannot.
Far as point 4, same thing applies... It is good to know that I can select multiple points that way, but after selecting ... the keyboard arrows do nothing to the selected points. But at least I can quickly pull mutiple points around with the mouse... so thanks for that bit.
Are you able to select a point on a closed path, and control it with arrow keys?
Is there some circumstance I may have initiated inadvertantly that would prevent the arrow keys moving points around.
I pretty sure there was while early on where I was moving individual points with keyboard but cannot get it to happen now.

Using the pen tool, how best should I build or construct this image?

Hello,
I'm trying to recreate a certain image with the pen tool.
I have already tried using Live Trace using the "Simple Trace" setting. Live Trace did a pretty good job but not with enough accuracy or fidelity to the original image as I would like.
I am pretty rusty with Illustrator now, but I remember from past lessons that the basic idea is that artwork in Illustrator is divided into layers, objects, and elements within objects. But one of the biggest principles with Ilustrator is the order these layers, objects, and elements are stacked. Elements are stacked to create an object. Objects are often stacked, each object on its own layer, to create the entire piece of artwork.
Also, the lower an element, object, or layer is in a stacking order, the further towards the back it appears in the image.
Also, the higher an element, object, or layer is in a stacking order, the closer to the front it appears in the image.
So, in Illustrator, you don't so much draw or paint a piece of artwork, but, instead, creating artwork in Illustrator is more a matter of building it or constructing it.
So, with all that said, below I have an object I would like to create with the pen tool. It is a fleuron. It is at least fairly complex.I am not sure how to build it or construct its parts. What would come first, second, third? What would be on the bottom layer, middle layer, top layer, etc.?
I know there is no one way to reproduce this object with the pen tool. Whatever way you would use or would like to share is fine. I guess, more specifically, I'm not afraid of rigor and working hard, but I'm also not necessarily looking for rigor. Instead, what I am looking to do is work smartly and efficiently. I'm looking for what might commonly be considered "best practice."
So, how would you advise I approach the object below? How should I build or construct it?
Thanks! : )

As for the simple graphic itself, this is what I would end up with:
One Group containing:
One red-filled, unstroked Compound Path consisting of three subpaths.
One white-filled, unstroked Compound Path consisting of 18 subpaths.
The reason I would compound the red paths and the white paths is simply so I could apply to them different fills with one move, should I want to.
The reason the two Compund Paths would be grouped is simply so the whole graphic can, when finished, be moved, rotated, scaled, flipped, skewed (i.e.; transformed) as if it were a single object. (Which it would be; a Group is a logical object, just as a "set" is a logical object.)
As for how I would actaully draw the graphic:
First I would roughly evaluate it to get an idea of what I want to end up with in terms of clean, tidy, paths (as already describe above.)
Second, I mentally devise a "plan of attack" by which to achieve that; just studying the shapes a little more deeply for anything that can be exploited to minimize the work:
Are there any repetitive elements of the shape that can be accomplished by duplication, moving, scaling?
Is there any symmetry that can be accomplished by duplication and flopping?
Is there any simple geometry that can be accomplished with basic shape prmitives (whole or partial ellipses, rectangles, polygons)?
Third, I always try to also consider whether the process of drawing the current graphic and/or portions of it might be of future use to me, and if so, can I exploit other software features to save me time and effort later. For example, consider a single one of the ess-shaped "coils" of the middle tapered "spiral" grouped together with its white highlight. Such a graphic, colored in black and white and stored as an ArtBrush with its Colorization set to Hues & Tints would let me stretch and scale that basic shape along other-shaped paths. Similarly stored as a PatternBrush, it might do multi-duty for many things suggestive of coils, like rope or jewelry chains.
Then I just start drawing the necessary paths, using my default Graphic Style (.25 black stroke, no fill). As I proceed, I store (as Brushes, Symbols, etc.) any intermediate things that I think I might find useful later. For the graphic at hand, I then optimize the paths I've drawn by combining them (cutting, joining, path operations) into the fewest, cleanest, and simplest paths necessary to define the shapes. I then store the finished graphic as a Symbol, Brush, etc. if I think it might be of use later.
Regarding Layers, Groups, etc., etc:
It sounds like you (like many beginning AI users) are way over-thinking the matter of stacking order. Yes, it's good to use some sensible amount of organization as your illustrations and designs become more elaborate, but you don't have to fret so much over it. The principles are very very simply.
Layer really don't even enter into my mind when creating such a graphic, because the paths of which it consists are all going to be grouped, and all the contents of a Group have to exist on the same Layer anyway. Multiple Layers would only come into play when this whole graphic is used as one element in the overall page layout. For example, suppose several instances of this object will exist on a page layout to serve as dividers between ads or stories arranged in columns in a page layout. I may choose--if it makes organizational sense to me--to put all the copies of this object on a Layer dedicated to them. The Layer on which they reside may or may not include other graphics; it's just a question of what makes organizational sense and editing convenience to me while I'm working the file. For example, having the copies of this graphic on a separate Layer would allow me to lock that Layer to avoid accidently selecting the graphics when I'm editing text objects that I've organized on another Layer.
Don't think of Layers as some oppressive "right or wrong" thing that you have to decide upon at the start of every little thing you draw. It's nothing but an organizational convenience that is driven almost entirely by common sense. The mechanics of it are really very very simple in principle.
Look: Everything you create or import in an Illustrator document is an object. Just like sheets of paper in a tablet, each of those objects (each path, text object, raster image) is going to reside somewhere in the z-order (think front to back) of the document's object stack. You can't do anything to prevent that. It's the way the program works. The file is basically just a list of things that the output device has to draw. Being a list, it has a first object, a second object, and so on. Objects higher in that list are nearer the "front"; objects lower are nearer the "back." Normally, objects in front obscure objects behind them, wherever they "overlap."
Now, considering that what you have is just a list of objects, as that list grows and grows, doesn't it eventually just make sense to be able to "bracket" or "label" contiguous portions (contiguous is key here) of that list for organizational and manipulative purposes? That's all Groups and Layers are; brackets around sections of the list.
Consider that an Illustrator file (like most computer files you create) is really just a text file. So suppose you have written a technical manual in a word processing program. Would you write that manual as one big, honkin' text string, or would you "bunch together" contiguous portions of the story under some labeling scheme of subheads? After that, wouldn't you similarly "bunch together" contiguous subhead sections as chapters?
So you can think of Groups as "subheads," and Layers as "chapters" in your Illustrator document's list of objects.
Sure; if you're working on a page layout document, sometimes it makes sense to go ahead and set up some of this structure at the start (just as when writing a book, it makes sense to start with an outline). So you might go ahead and define a Layer for printer marks, another for the diecut, another for text, another for images, another for background fills.
The very next designer might decide to structure the very same project a little differently. He might, for example, decide there's no reason not to keep the text objects on the same layer with the raster images. There's no hard & fast right & wrong her. You do what makes sense for the project at hand.
Now in this context, back to your simple graphic: I don't need a PrinterMarks Layer, a DieCut Layer, or a TextObjects Layer to draw this graphic. I just need the default Layer 1. For convenience, I may want to add a TraceThisStuff Layer onto which I put the original raster image, just so I can conveniently isolate it (lock it, dim it, etc.) while drawing the paths on Layer 1. On the other hand, I can really just as easily leave the raster image that I want to trace on Layer 1 and reduce its opacity and lock/unlock it at the object level. It's up to me.
But for that matter, revisit my "third level" of evaluation described above. In reality, I would very likely not even start drawing this graphic in the document for which it is intended. I would just as likely open an existing JET_Dingbats.ai or a JET_Ornaments.ai or CustomerName_StyleGraphics.ai file or template, draw the graphic there and when done, just copy it and paste it into the current document file. That's how you, over time, build yourself a reasonably organized "personal library" of re-usable resources that save you countless hours of repetitive work in the future.
JET

How do I turn off the alt scroll zoom? When I'm in Adobe photoshop and illustrator using the pen tool, alt is utilized for another short cut. I would like to use the alt command for the pen tool instead of zooming into the screen.

How do I turn off the alt scroll zoom?
When I'm in Adobe photoshop and illustrator using the pen tool, alt is utilized for another short cut. I would like to use the alt command for the pen tool instead of zooming into the screen.

I tend to select things from left to right and every time I am moving in a downward right diagonal motion during lasso selection I am missing a clear view and I am tending to have a more sloppy selection. All this does is slow me down since I need to go back and hit those areas again. The big arrowhead just get's in the way. The original lasso tool with the thin line and small active point at it's lower left was far better for me.
I don't like turning the cursors to precise because I like to see the active tool icon where my cursor is and as the icon changes as I hold modifier keys down. If I am forced to get comfortable with using pricise cursors I guess I will, but man, I've never had to do this in my 15 years of photoshop use...
I would absolutely LOVE to find a way to get the old lasso icon -- without the arrowhead above it.
Is there any chance this option could be inlcuded in cursor preferences? I'd give much thanks, Adobe.

How to create a wavy line with the Pen Tool?

Let me start by saying that I am a novice to Adobe CS4, including PS.
I am trying to follow this tutorial: http://www.rnel.net/tutorial/Photoshop/11541 but I can not even get the pen to draw wavvy line. I keep get a straight line. To say the least, I am only able to complete creating the file.
How do I create a wavvy line or lines using the Pen Tool?

Check out this page from the Help Files:
Draw curves with the Pen tool:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/11.0/WS08E4D386-15E9-4dcd-91E6-DF4219CC6D24.html

How do you change the color of the path the pen tool makes?

There must be some way to change the color of the path the pen tool makes from that grey color to something that will contrast with the image underneath. I found one thread about this from 2010 or so and the answer led to a dead link. This seems like it would be a very helpful feature that would be easy to implement. Someone please tell me in 2014, after a zillion version of photoshop have come out in the past 30 or so years, how do we do this? Thank in advance.

Why? When you zoom in too close sometimes it become too pixelated to see what's going on and the point on the pen become to close to each other. Why can't you change the path to a color so that it doesn't blend into the image you're trying to trace? Why is the unchangeable color one of the most likely colors to become invisible on most images? So frustrating!

I have Photo Shop Elements 11. How do I find the clone tool?

I have Photoshop Elements 11. How do I find the clone tool?

You can select the clone stamp tool in Expert mode by pressing the letter S on the keyboard. There are two choices in the tools options bar at the bottom. Either clone stamp or pattern stamp tool.

Adobe Reader deselects the pen tool after making a single mark. How do I fix this?

I have a Surface Pro 2 tablet that deselects the pen tool after I make any kind of mark with it. It works occasionally with the mouse but not the stylus. For example, if I were to write a "41", I'd have to make one stroke, then select the pen tool, and then make the other stroke to complete the "4", select the pen tool again, and then write the "1".
The Adobe Reader is updated to the latest firmware (11.0.10).

Wow lol I think that might have been the issue I pressed it a few times and it stopped, thank you!

How to adjust a selection made with the Pen Tool

We are designing images for the new iPhone 5. I'm facing some difficulty with the pen tool I select. Just wondering whether it is possbile to make add areas those which are in subtract area. If I wrolgly click the area which I don't want, I need to spen lots of time refining my selection. Is there any shortcuts or easy way to switch between the path nodes to add
Thanks & regards
Noel
(Personal information removed)
Message was edited by: Kendall Plant

Good day!
Each individual SubPathItem’s Shape Operation can be changed manually later on and their order can also be changed.
Could you please post a screenshot to illustrate your specific issue?
Regards,
Pfaffenbichler

Help with using the pen tool

I have a few different problems with the pen tool.
1. When using the pen tool I keep finding that the shape I'm doing is slightly overlapping where I've already gone with the pen tool.
If I try and go over that area again the path I've just drawn then jumps and ruins the shape I was creating.
How can I stop this from happening?
2. Also is there a limit to the amount of paths you can create and add text to? I created two paths and typed on them fine but when I added a third path it refused to type. The cursor didn't change to show I could type and if I did click on the path line and try to type jumped to my other path and typed there. All paths were on different layers and none were overlapping, but it is 3 circles inside each other that get smaller if this makes a difference.
How can I type on the third path?
3. When I have done a path and clicked stroke it is only a thin line. How can I make this line thicker?
Thanks.

Ok, the first example would be something like this. Pretending the lines go elsewhere, say I've drawn a path with the pen tool, gone round the bottom box and that then goes round the two lines going down. So if I go down the one on the left side it hits the previous path I did, but to go up the line on the right side I'd need to go across there. But if I make a point where the two lines meet to do this it then throws the line off elsewhere.
I did have snap vector tools on but it does that without it on.
The next one I was creating a car speedometer so it has lines on the outside, dots inside of that and then, where I've done the blue circle, would be the third path where I then write the numbers in. But I can never write on that third path.
And finally, the pen tool and I think it dd have Shape Dynamics set. I've changed a couple of things and it looks a bit better now so I think that should be ok. Thanks
I know I haven't shown the panels but I haven't got any for the first as it won't go right so I deleted what I was doing. And each thing I've done is on a different layer for the speedometer, all just paths created with the circle tool with the text on.

Using the Pen tool to create a shape with equal sides?

I am new to working with the Pen tool and started drawing a rounded button (I know I can easily do this with the rounded rectangle, I'm just practicing to learn the Pen), I draw the top horizontal line and start the curve going down the right side. How do I now continue drawing the lower curve so that it matches the one I already drew and replicate this on the other side? Is there an easy way to do this? Is there also a way for me to just copy this path and reuse it somehow?
Thanks.

I think you'll find this tutorial useful.
http://is.gd/A90Q5t

True or False about the pen tool in Photoshop?

Since Photoshop is mostly a raster image program,
and the Pen Tool is better for vector drawing in vector programs,
the Pen Tool is virtually useless in Photoshop, even if you want to
outline and mask something.
I always thought it was easier to use the paintbrush.
The pen tool in Photoshop is just silly.

Buko:
Don't be silly. I use the pen tool all the time (for cutouts, as a tool, text on path, you name it). Read post 17 -- 75 hours a week for four months cutting paths. Only cutting paths. A client that wanted the path between the dark and light pixels in the USM halo. The psychological damage is probably starting to surface now.
I understand how paths can be useful. I also wonder if their usefulness might have run its course. The reason I used paths 10 year ago was that I **had** to use paths. Don't you use them less for your mag now than you used to? Aren't you a big proponent of PSD outlines? In my workflow I find less and less of a need for them. But I make Medicaid brochures. It would be great to hear from some folks who use vector masks and need them for x reason.
I'm having trouble visualizing x.
J

How to find the pen tool

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