Pen Tool Training Wheels Part 1: Clipping Paths

They say once you've learned to ride a bike you never forget. The problem is, unless you use the pen tool regularly, you really never learn and oh the pain of forgetting what you once thought you had mastered. So here is goes...

Click once. Click somewhere else. Continue and you will make a polygon.

Click once. Click and drag somewhere else and you will make a curved shape, a Bezier curve complete with an adjustment handle. Now if you click again it has a mind of its own and will always want to continue the curve, going in the direction of your new click.

Press ALT and drag to change direction. Press ALT and click to make a straight segment. Pressing ALT reveals an arrowed cursor.

Press Spacebar to see the Pan hand which will allow you to reposition the canvas.

Press CTRL and the Pen tool morphs into the white arrow selection tool. This is useful if the last point was bad and you want to reposition it. Note you may physically click on and move the segment or click on the end of the handle and change the curvature.

When you come back to the beginning and hover over the initial point, the pen tool displays a small circle indicating that you are about to close the shape.

Some points on saving:

• As soon as you make the first point, a path is activated on the Path palette. When you finish, click on this path; activate the palette's selection menu and choose Clipping Path. Give it a flatness of 1 until you know better.
• Save as a jpg or psd - both retain the clipping path for use in InDesign.