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Hi and welcome back to Rich Media Design Productions
next video
uh... actually uh... this is going to be a continuation of a video that i did
some time ago
it dealt with the pen tool
so we'll call this
Secrets Revealed understanding photoshop tools
colon: The Pen Tool Part Two
okay, take a
taken over
a notepad out if you have it
and write these things down
because uh...
i think it's important before we start
what really is going on with learning the pen tool.
uh... number one
The pen tool is the most important
tool that you could possibly learn in any
given program that deals with art on the computer
Okay?
It's any given program
and the reason why i could say that is because
there are actually
nine off the top of my head that
use this
vector pen tool.
Now, what those
programs are
uh...Who they are? I can name
one is Photoshop, for example
That you're looking at now
the other one is Illustrator , then there's Fireworks and then there's Flash
there's Corel Draw.
there's In Design, there's Quark Express there's Free hand FX
there's Painter
So, there's you know
a slew of them
actually
when online you know you can have these
programs. You can actually get
uh... free programs online
that pretty much, try to emulate
a lot of these
paid software
And they're out there for free, so
You know, you can get them for free, You can pay for them
um... either way
they to
because they try to emulate these programs that you have to buy,
there going to have the pen tool too.
Okay, I hope you took some notes there, because this is the reality of
what we're dealing with here. Okay,
now to the pen tool.
The pen tool
as you can see is
right here
If you go back and look at all the
the things the pen tool does
um...
there's actually only four
things that the pen tool
does it will be either make
the pen tool to make you know a point-by-point
line
or you can draw a freeform line
and then you can do
adding and subtracting
I said the last time that we talked about pen tool
that we were talking just about
the plus and minus
and the pen tool
so let's talk about those
let's talk about the plus and minus tool, okay? And here's why
if i were to do
draw something, I'm going to take the
free form pen tool and
draw something
Okay, that's kind of hard there
Uh, let's erase that, I went too crazy, Okay so get this and here it is, delete
okay let's try again
Now I'm going to put it on a different uh... layer, first of all, new layer
as you can see here, I have a layer on the bottom
and on top of that
bottom layers
is actually the circle
and the square
now squares and circles are what you'll be dealing with
you're going to work with squares
or circles
or both when you're
dealing with the pen tool
straights and curves.
Basically the same thing
Okay? Okay, on top of the
actual drawn circle and square we actually have
the titles
I'm going to put it another layer here so that we can draw on them, something there, so I'll just make this. You see that little circle there, that
means you've closed that line up. You've actually connected it from
the end to the beginning
So the alpha and the omega just met, Okay?
now here's what i'm talking about
with the plus and minus
uh... going back to the pen tool
if I go to plus
I can add
more
points
in between
the other points, like here and another one there. But what if?...
okay yeah i would Unless I needed it to to stretch it more and that's why I added it
to do
to bring out this
this um...
this arm and this other arm
to do some things with, okay, tilt it. Okay
here's what you're doing by adding those extra points,
you are enabling yourself to be able to do something a little bit more to what
is happening, okay?
so that way, let's say
you missed a
very important thing to
to add to your drawing
But you didn't want to have to start all over again
so you can add a point
maybe stretch that
little vector point so that it will
do the thing that you want it to do
in the first place. okay? So that's why we added the point
the next one is the subtract tool
And let's say if we didn't need this little
curve right here
So, if i subtracted that
it took away that point
so that I can actually
make the line different
and not involve this little end curve here
here's where the last
part of this convert point
comes in
you want to convert it
so you go like, press it
and you'll see what happens
it converts it into a straight line
so you can actually
convert all your points into straight lines.
Now, let's say [Pause ]
Let's say I was on the pen tool
and I wanted to convert the end point
from there
Could I do it? Yeah, I could go to command
Press command
then press there
and then go to
option and that will do it. See? Option, Just made it into
a convert tool.
Okay so let's move on
this is where you'll really, really be happy that you're learning how to use a
pen tool
I think you should be happy about learning
the pen tool
because to me this is like a going to college handling taught everything
possibly can
about uh...
being a lawyer,
the law
and , uh
not passing the bar exam because you didn't take
the tests or
because you didn't take
the requirements to take the test.
So, in other words you don't have the degree
master's degree
or the doctorate
to do the job s a
full-fledged lawyer
and that's basically what
learning the pen tool is really all about. You want to be the best
at it because
this is the most important tool that you can learn.
Every program
with online graphics or computer graphics
has a pen tool involved in it.
Some of these
publications like
Quark Express and Indesign deal with it
you can import
or export
line drawings or rather
vector drawings but uh... etc
Now , here's where we're going to get to really
get to interesting things about
vectors are probably the most
least
amount of information that a drawing can have
Maybe, I'm not phrasing it properly but basically
what I'm saying
a drawing
from a vector
pen tool
produces these
points
and the line between the points to create an area
Now, vector drawings are bezier drawings are...
the computer can handle it better
okay it's not like a photograph
so it's you know it's it's
it's handling it alot better because
it's not as, let's say information
field or, ugh, I'm trying to get to the accurate or the right word
but I'm not successful at it.
But, anyway I think you've got the idea
about what I am talking about. This
not going to carry alot of information so that's why people use it a lot.
stretch it out whatever size you want
whether it's stretched out to
twenty feet or whatever beyond that.
from let's say a
five-inch drawing
uh... it's going to look
just as good
and that not going to be easy
for let's say you know
a photograph that you scan and you try to blow it up
if you scan it at 300 and you try to make it
maybe a thousand or
fifteen hundred
d_p_i_ picture of it. It's not going to come out
It's going to be fuzzy. So, anyway
this is why
vector drawings are being used a lot all over.
ok so heres another thing you have to know
even though
you're not picking up a lot
computers are not picking up a lot of information by these
vectors
It's still could be, let's say
finalized and it can still be reduced to the final amount of information
that you're saving
by lessening
the amount of points
that you're introducing to this
drawing
Okay, and here's
what I'd suggest you do
Will erase this and then I'm going to show you
very
interesting trick
I know that you are going to say why didn't you show me this from the beginning
it would have saved me a lot of time
and energy
listening to your boring computer graphic
tutorial.
Actually
this is not
something that you can use all the time
but it is a nice little trick in case that you have to use it
It comes in handy, okay?
You get the magic wand
okay up here
these you strike
You have to be on the right layer you strike... you strike the inside of it
And you can see this layer
is, both of these
images are
active now
Now , i'm sure you're
advanced enough to know that if i would have clicked outside of it
all the white area would have been active
Not the inside, we're ok now
So, I'll go up here up to paths
on the window
up here and
press make work path, okay?
and I press that and I make the tolerance exactly 1.0 and this
is just perfect
So, it's already there so I say okay
and you'll see what happens
okay now
this working path
is temporary if you want to save it you have to go back and press save path
so i'm going to save it just because
you'll never know
you might need it
in your drawing later on So,
it's always the best thing to save it, okay?
if you don't want it later on you can always take it
and drop it into the trash can down here
but for right now, we're going to save it, okay?
Save path, you could have named it, but I didn't name it, Okay so now we go back here and
select
you can see what happens
this one is using the
very minimum amount
of points to make that square
And it did it accurately, it did a
straight line from point to point to point. [pause]
The circle however
did a very interesting calculation, okay?
Now, everything around here is the same but you notice that there's a
little grouping up here
than there's one
jutting out here
there's a little grouping right here
like it's trying to
the algorythim is trying to grab it you know in the best way possible
with a little grouping here and a little grouping there
now is that the best for this
drawing? I wouldn't think so
and the reason why is because you can actually
get his drawing
i'm going to try to
grab this, without grabbing the square
and erase it
why erase it? because it didn't give me a
true
amount of
vectors that would make this file
a lot simpler
and smaller
in size as far as
Trust me, these people that receive your files don't want
a very heavy weighted file they want the
very simplest file that you can give them
that's what we're talking about here
Okay so I erase it
and I'm going to grab them all and I'm going to delete with the delete sign
so then I'm going to do my own. So i'll go back in here and
press
to start it
then I'm going to come here
and try to make a match
or a fill in there
the least amount
i'm gonna to go back here and press option in then press here because
if I don't
see how that line disappeared?
it's going to try to give me the same curve
So I press option
click here again
so , that it would
make the
the line
controlled by me and not
the algorithm
okay so now it'll go down here
make another point
so that see it gave me a straight line between the two sides
and go back and
stretch and pull and try to make the thing work, okay. Go back
and press
option
and back to the same thing. Stretch
try to get this thing as close as possible
go back in here and press option, close and I close it by doing the same thing.
so basically I've got the circle covered
and I'm using
the least amount of points. That's the point that
that this
is trying to make here.
Okay, I'm going to show you something down here
that I saved for you that
we'll show you that
this is in Illustrator
illustration. [Laughter]
Anyway uh
as you could see
it's made of
vector points.
And if you look at the layers on the side you can see that every
there's one layer but there's groupings within the layer
and within the layers there are layers so basically layer one has been
sub ranked
and basically you have a layer down here
and layers above that
path and what is that path? You can see it right here if I select it
You can see the little blue dots show up here so that means that
this path right here
is actually a gradation, I'll show you what that means
I'll bring the color in
there's your gradation right there and it's a blue
with a white circle in the middle
and so you can see actually see that going on blue with a white circle in the middle
and within this background
and um... that's how you build it
build it in layers
within the layers
this is layer one
with a layer on top of a layer, on top of a layer
this is group on top of layers and
this is a group back to the media
Okay, what is this group?
perhaps it was this one
it actually turned out to be
this one, If I hadn't named it
you would have seen. You would have been able to see
right away
which part of the illustration
to select
uh... but it was kind of uh...
fast and loose
the other day for this tutorial. So,...
here's a chance to name it blue vial
so now i think i could go
back to the blue vial
okay folks that's it for the
lesson. And I hope that you learned something today
um... remember we
learned how to use
vector tool
or the pen tool
in such a way that you can control it
and also
you learned how to use the
magic wand
to do a quick
pen tool coverage.
Take care of yourself and have a Good Day again!