Transcript:
Hi, I’m George Peirson. And this is how to draw a curved line in Photoshop Elements Now. If you liked this video, make sure you hit that. Like button and, of course, Share and also Subscribe if you haven’t done so already. Take a look at supporting my channel from Patreon. Just $1 a month will help to keep this channel going and, of course, take a look at my complete training course for Photoshop Elements, and there is a link for that right down there in the description. Okay, let’s get to it [Music]. This drawing curved lines in Photoshop Elements is something I just thought up and I’m still playing around that. I haven’t ready, figured the whole thing out yet. The whole process out yet, so I don’t have any actual project yet for this, but I will be including this in future projects, doing cards and things like graphics projects. So you’ll be seeing this in the future, But I’m very excited about this, and I wanted to show you what I’m doing so you can play around this as well if you feel like it. So all of these were made here by drawing. These nice, smooth, beautiful, curved lines in here and this is all done right here inside of Photoshop Elements, something which you normally can’t do. There isn’t a pen tool, for instance, inside of this program, but there is a way to do these interesting, curved lines. Me show you how that’s done and then. I’ll let you put that as you like and again in the future. I’ll be using this technique to do some graphic work, and I’ll be including this in some of the cards and things in the future. Okay, so take a look at this. I’ll start off with a brand new file. Here, new blank file. I’ll put it out the default element size there it is choose, okay, and what does it talk that in place and fit screen okay now? The idea here is based upon the concept of doing type warping this put a little line of text. Just kind of big lets. Bring this text down to about 36 points there. We go so a type warping. You can do some text like this, and then if you’re on the type tool, come down here, click on this little button right there, and you can then use all these different shapes in here to actually curve the text. It’s a great tool. You have a lot of fun with this. You need all kinds of interesting twists and so forth in here. Get some real fancy, twisted text. Look, but I was thinking about this today and I was thinking, you know, I could actually use this to make curved lines as well. Let me show you that trick, lets. Just hide that one now. I’m still using the text tool here. The type tool let’s set the size here up all the way to 72 point. I’ll set it at centered on the text doesn’t matter. What type face you use? Different typefaces would give you a little bit different effect, lets. Click right in the middle someplace real nice large thing now. I’ll hold down the shift key and then do a shift -, which is kind of an underline. There we go and it gives you a solid line, but the solid line is made up of text. There’s type in here. A whole bunch of lines all kicked it together, Which means we can use that type warping on this line. And that’s the whole basis for this trick. Okay, here’s our text text line up here. Come down to the type warping. That’s choose arc and there we go. There’s a curved line. I can adjust the amount of curve like that, so you can be real specific, actually put it against something and then match the curve. You want very easily And because its text can be real clean, curved, just like you would get with a standard drawing tool, so there you go. There is making a nice, curved line now. If you do these horizontal distortion, you can push it one way or the other, and it gets thin on one end and thick on the other series. Come a nice swooping line. Vertical distortion gives us more interesting effects and kind of just reverse that swoop or push real far. Get even a larger, interesting kind of a swoop curve in here. This pulls over a bit there. We go real nice kind of a swift curve now as you can see. I can’t come in and draw this exactly how I want it, so I need to have a sketch or something underneath or a picture underneath and then make these lines a piece at a time to fill in exactly where I want them to be. So you do the basic curve that you want you The basic thickness and you can then modify that once it’s done as long as it’s in text, you can go back and you can adjust that with the warp text tool, so we have this nice basic curve now. The Arc Upper doesn’t do a whole lot does a little bit, but not a whole lot. It’s not as useful you can see right there kind of interesting arc effect in here, kind of push it back and forth again. You can get different. Curved shapes are the upper again, a little bit of different shape in here. Just some fun things happening on this one arch is basically the same thing as the Arc Bulge. Right there. Come with that bulge. The shell lower thicknose doesn’t really give you a she’ll shape. It does give again another interesting curve now. The flag is a nice when the flag gives you an s-curve in here, you can control how much of a curve by adjusting your bend. You can reverse that going out of the direction and then the horizontal distribution. Let you go from thick to thin right there, so there’s a nice s-curve thick to thin and again vertical. Distortion you can use too. I’m going to make it even more interesting on your on your shape. So there you go real fun. Little curve shapes. Let’s come on s and right in right in there. It’s kind of interesting little swoop a bit. I can see using this in some typography. Actually, so lots of different ideas. Here’s a rising effect right there again. You can reverse the bend on that, so take some playing around with this, too. You know, a real good handle on exactly what can be done with this and which ones these will give you the best of fix, but it does allow you to draw nice, curved lines and you have slider controls over here to adjust those curve lines. Now there’s even more you can do with this. This is just part of it. This gives you your basic curve to go beyond this. Take this layer. I must make a copy of this layer. Let’s hide that one on this layer up here, right-click and simplify a layer. It’s now just a shape and once it’s a shape we can use other stuff in here. We can go up here to the image transform. We have all of our transform options up here. Here’s a perspective transform again, allows you to control the shape of that curve, pretty easily lots and lots of possibilities. In here on that one, we have the distort transform. This allows you to take any corner and pull that corner around and again adjust the shape. Any way you want, you can go in here and do a real nice, real swoopy curve on this thing, using that that tool and then back up here again, transform the skew allows you to pull sides back and forth there. You go or up and down, And, of course, you can rotate these things around stuff like that. You can use the ctrl. T keyboard shortcut brings up your standard control handles. You can then rotate it and resize like that larger curve, smaller curve and get a lot of flexibility with this. You can even adjust the thickness a little bit on this thing by going up here to layer, come down to your layer style and style settings and right down here under stroke. Set this at outside and then you can adjust the outside stroke and actually make it thicker with an outside stroke. One thing about this is as you can see here. It also rounds the corners off as you add in more outside stroke, and that may also be a useful attribute here. If you want to have rounded corners, you can do this to get yourself. Some nice rounded corners. Now the only drawback. I see so far on. This is that it does limit you a little bit in that. You have to build a piece at a time, so for this drawing here. I did this piece up here for the eye, you see? We did one very much like this just a minute ago. I then duplicated that and flipped it and that gave me both parts of the eye. I then flipped that over here for the second eye. So I did those individual pieces down here did one. Lowe’s s curves right there for the whiskers. Then it’s duplicated that and spread those out copy that flipped it and put it over here for the ears up here. That’s a nice swoop right here, coming up to the end there and I flipped that and just put the ends together. That’s this piece right here just flipped so the second half comes down there. I then copied that and brought it down here. Now where it comes in behind a piece like this? I just took this piece up. Here simplified that, and you can then use the eraser tool to erase out the parts that you don’t want so again. A lot of possibilities in here. Only limitations. Are that you have to draw this. You know, a piece at a time, a line at a time, but you’d have to, anyway with all kinds of different drawing programs, so that really isn’t that big of a limitation, but you’re limited to basic curves, you know, a single curve or a double curve. It’s kind of what you have an era, then build based upon those, but it does allow you to do some actual drawing in here with nice, smooth curves. There’s the coffee cup again. Same idea, there’s that same shape and here that I use for the eyes are just a little different in here. Couple copies over there. The background circles those are just ellipses with an outline applied to them. There’s another curve with that text tool, and, of course, these same thing as the whiskers in here used for the steam. So there you go, That’s my idea on being able to draw curved shapes. Simply, mister, that one more time over here, put in a nice little insertion point here, hold the shift key down, and then it’s the – key, which gives you an underline right there. You can change the thickness of this line very easily just by changing your point size, just make it half as thick 30 points thinner line, make it longer just by adding in more of those there we go, that’s still text, so once you have it as text, simply grab your text tool, make sure on that layer. Click on your warp text option, give it a warp and then create the shape that you’ll want to have just by using the different warping effects. In here, there you go, that’s all there is to it as you can see actually very easy to do, and I want you get the hang of this. You can do a lots of real interesting, drawing with this basic concept of just using or making your line as text and then warping that text line. So there we go, little idea. I just had again. I’ll be using this in the future for some more graphics type work. And there is a thought you might like to see what I’m going to playing with here. See this idea, and you may have some of your own creative ideas and go ahead and play around with this and wish you lots of luck With this new drawing technique, allowing you to draw curved lines inside of Photoshop Elements. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and the like button and the share button and go over to patreon and support this channel and take a look at my complete training course, and the link for that, of course, is down there in the description. [music] you you!