Pen Tool Tips Needed

[bydesign]

Would love to see a tutorial that makes using the pen tool easier. Tips for tracing around an object with the pen tool to get a perfect path to pull the object off its background would be great.

[Scott]

Hi bydesign, I'll try and come up with something. The most common problem new users of the pen tool have is they do not let go soon enough. I'll see if I can come up with a tutorial.

[mutiny]

that tutorial sounds like a good idea. i could really use that too...

[burndog]

I remember being intimidated by the pen tool. I am pretty much used to the paen tool in PS now, I am still having fits when using it in Illustrator.It is just not very user friendly. Best advice I can give is to play with it a bit. It does take time to get the hang of it, so do let yourself get discouraged. The more you use it the better you get at it. The one thing that helped me most was finding out that you can chop off one of the handles by alt clicking (PC). This is most useful when you make a long sweeping curve and then have to go to a small bump.

But practise is the best. Although it seems impossible at first it really is worth the trouble of learning.

[TrinityOfOne]

There are two very seperate camps when it comes to how to use the pen tool. When I first started, I found a video of someone using it to outline a butterfly. They created a corner for every point, whereas now, I very rarely use corners unless there's a very definite switch in direction - it also makes for a smoother outline. One thing I have found is that it's a lot quicker to do the initial outline in rough and zoom in to edit it afterwards, rather than trying to get it right first time (I've been doing a lot of isolating for stock images recently :))

[Oddcharacter]

Id love to see this tutorial also just ftr (:

oc............