{"course":{"slug":"image-editing","title":"Editing an Image","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/image-editing","level":"beginner","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"the-pen-tool-properly","title":"Two handles and a curve: making the pen tool obey","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/image-editing/the-pen-tool-properly","position":22,"of":78,"minutes":10,"answer":"A bezier path is anchors plus direction handles, so accuracy comes from placing few anchors at direction changes and shaping the curve with handles.","keyIdea":"A bezier path is anchors plus direction handles, so accuracy comes from placing few anchors at direction changes and shaping the curve with handles, and the finished cut-out lives or dies on a sub-pixel feather that matches the photograph's own edge softness."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## Why it feels hostile\n\nThe pen tool is the one that makes people close the application. It behaves unlike every other tool: clicking does not draw, dragging does something unexpected, and the line jumps around after you thought you had finished it.\n\nIt is worth twenty minutes because for any manufactured object (a bottle, a phone, a box, a shoe, a car) a path gives an edge that no pixel-based tool can match. The curve is mathematical, so it is exactly as smooth at 400 per cent zoom as at fit-to-screen, and it can be nudged a week later without redoing anything.\n\n## What a bezier curve is\n\nA path is a chain of **anchor points**. Between any two anchors, the curve's shape is controlled by **direction handles** sticking out from them. The handle's angle sets the direction the curve leaves the anchor in; the handle's length sets how strongly it pulls before the next anchor takes over.\n\nThat is the whole model. Everything else is consequences.\n\n- **Click** to place an anchor with no handles: a corner.\n- **Click and drag** to place an anchor and pull out a pair of handles: a smooth point, where the curve passes straight through.\n- The direction you drag is the direction the curve will leave in. Drag in the direction of travel, not away from it.\n- **Alt/Option-drag a handle** to break the pair, so the curve can arrive smoothly and leave at an angle. This is how you make a rounded corner meet a straight edge.\n\n## The rule that halves your anchor count\n\nBeginners place forty anchors round a bottle. Professionals place twelve. The rule:\n\n> Put an anchor where the curve changes direction, and nowhere else.\n\nA bottle's silhouette has a shoulder, a waist, a base corner. Each of those is a direction change and deserves an anchor. The smooth run between them does not; that is what handles are for. Extra anchors do not add accuracy: they add wobble, because each one is a place where your hand can be slightly wrong.\n\nA second rule that helps: place anchors at the **extremes**, the topmost, bottom-most, leftmost and rightmost points of each curve, with handles horizontal or vertical at those points. Hold Shift while dragging to constrain a handle to 45-degree increments and the curve snaps into a clean shape.\n\n## Editing after the fact\n\nThe path is not committed until you decide it is.\n\n- **Direct Selection tool (A)** moves anchors and handles.\n- **Ctrl/Cmd held** while in the pen tool temporarily gives you the Direct Selection tool, so you can adjust without switching.\n- **Alt/Option held** over an anchor converts between smooth and corner.\n- Clicking on a path segment with the pen adds an anchor; clicking on an existing anchor removes it.\n\nPaths live in the Paths panel and are saved inside the PSD or TIFF. Double-click the temporary \"Work Path\" to name and keep it, or the next path you draw replaces it. That one habit prevents the commonest loss in this lesson.\n\n## Turning a path into a cut-out\n\nThe Paths panel's buttons: load as selection (or Ctrl/Cmd + click the path thumbnail), fill, stroke.\n\nThe practical sequence for a product:\n\n1. Trace the silhouette. Sit the path **half a pixel inside** the edge, not on it, so no rim of old background survives.\n2. Load as a selection.\n3. Feather 0.3 to 0.5 pixels: enough that the edge is not aliased, not enough to look soft.\n4. Click **Add Layer Mask**, never Delete.\n\nThe feather number matters more than it looks. Zero gives a jagged, cut-with-scissors edge that reads as fake instantly. Two pixels gives a soft glow that reads as fake for the opposite reason. On a normally-shot photograph, the subject's real edge is about half a pixel soft, and matching that is the whole trick.\n\n> Figure: From path to cut-out, and the number that decides it. Steps: 1. Anchor only where the curve changes direction (A bottle has a shoulder, a waist and a base corner. Twelve anchors, not forty: every extra one is another place your hand can be slightly wrong.); 2. Sit the path half a pixel inside the edge (On the edge leaves a rim of the old background all the way round, and that rim is what reads as a halo once the subject is on white.); 3. Load the path as a selection (Name the path in the Paths panel first, or the next path you draw replaces the temporary Work Path and the tracing is gone.); 4. Feather 0.3 to 0.5 pixels (Zero reads as cut with scissors. Two pixels reads as a glow. A normally shot photographic edge is about half a pixel soft, and matching it is the whole trick.); 5. Add a layer mask, never Delete (The pixels stay, so next week's revision is a brushstroke. The path stays too, inside the PSD or TIFF, so the cut can be redone in six months.). Every e-commerce cut-out that looks expensive was made this way. The pen tool is the wrong choice for hair, fur, foliage against sky or anything out of focus, because a path draws a boundary and those subjects do not have one.\n\n## Clipping paths, for print\n\nA path stored in a TIFF or EPS and designated as a **clipping path** tells layout software the outline to flow text around and the shape to knock out. Printers and magazine designers still ask for this, and supplying a PNG instead is not the same thing.\n\nIn Photoshop: name the path, then *Paths panel menu > Clipping Path*, and set the flatness (a device tolerance: leave it blank unless the printer specifies). Save as TIFF or EPS. GIMP can export paths as SVG but does not write Photoshop clipping paths, which is a genuine gap if you do print production; Photopea does write them.\n\n## Practising in the right place\n\nThe pen tool in Inkscape, Illustrator, Photoshop, Photopea, GIMP, Figma and Affinity is the same tool with the same handles and nearly the same modifier keys. Learn it once and it transfers everywhere, which makes it one of the highest-return half-hours in this whole course.\n\nA good practice exercise, and it is how people learn it: open a photograph of a wine bottle at 200 per cent and trace it, aiming for under fifteen anchors. Do it again tomorrow. By the fourth attempt it will stop feeling hostile.\n\n## When not to use it\n\nThe pen tool is wrong for anything with a soft, fibrous or transparent edge. Hair, fur, foliage against sky, smoke, out-of-focus flowers: a path draws a hard boundary, and those subjects do not have one. Forcing a path onto hair is the technique that produces the helmet look.\n\nIt is also slow. Tracing a complex machine can take forty minutes. When the subject is a person in a soft-focus photograph, the automatic tools plus a painted mask will be faster and better. The skill is not using the pen tool for everything; it is recognising the twenty per cent of jobs where nothing else gives that edge."},"check":{"question":"A retoucher traces a phone with the pen tool using forty anchor points placed evenly around the outline. The resulting cut-out edge looks subtly wavy along what should be dead-straight sides. Why did more anchors make it worse?","options":[{"text":"Each anchor introduces a place where the hand's position and the handle angle can be slightly off, so a straight run described by many anchors accumulates small errors a two-anchor segment cannot have.","correct":true},{"text":"Photoshop smooths paths with fewer than twenty anchors automatically, and the smoothing is disabled above that count.","correct":false,"tempting":"Invents an automatic behaviour: no editor applies a threshold-based smoothing to bezier paths, which are rendered exactly as specified at any anchor count."},{"text":"Dense anchors force the path to be rendered as a polyline rather than curves, which produces visible faceting.","correct":false,"tempting":"Describes a rendering fallback that does not occur: each segment remains a cubic curve regardless of how many anchors sit along it."},{"text":"The feather value was too low for a path with many anchors, and raising it to two pixels would hide the waviness.","correct":false,"tempting":"Treats a geometry error as an edge-softness problem: a larger feather blurs the wobble rather than removing it, and costs the crisp product edge the path existed to provide."}]},"prev":{"slug":"selections-and-edges","title":"Selections are easy until you reach hair","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/image-editing/selections-and-edges"},"next":{"slug":"quick-mask-and-painting-a-selection","title":"Stop fighting the selection tools and paint it","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/image-editing/quick-mask-and-painting-a-selection"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Two handles and a curve: making the pen tool obey', in Editing an Image. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/image-editing/the-pen-tool-properly (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Two handles and a curve: making the pen tool obey","courseTitle":"Editing an Image","module":{"index":3,"slug":"selections-cutouts-and-edges","title":"Selections, cut-outs and edges"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"A bezier path is anchors plus direction handles, so accuracy comes from placing few anchors at direction changes and shaping the curve with handles, and the finished cut-out lives or dies on a sub-pixel feather that matches the photograph’s own edge softness.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure","figure":{"type":"flow","steps":[{"label":"Anchor only where the curve changes direction","detail":"A bottle has a shoulder, a waist and a base corner. Twelve anchors, not forty: every extra one is another place your hand can be slightly wrong."},{"label":"Sit the path half a pixel inside the edge","detail":"On the edge leaves a rim of the old background all the way round, and that rim is what reads as a halo once the subject is on white."},{"label":"Load the path as a selection","detail":"Name the path in the Paths panel first, or the next path you draw replaces the temporary Work Path and the tracing is gone."},{"label":"Feather 0.3 to 0.5 pixels","detail":"Zero reads as cut with scissors. Two pixels reads as a glow. A normally shot photographic edge is about half a pixel soft, and matching it is the whole trick."},{"label":"Add a layer mask, never Delete","detail":"The pixels stay, so next week’s revision is a brushstroke. The path stays too, inside the PSD or TIFF, so the cut can be redone in six months."}],"title":"From path to cut-out, and the number that decides it","caption":"Every e-commerce cut-out that looks expensive was made this way. The pen tool is the wrong choice for hair, fur, foliage against sky or anything out of focus, because a path draws a boundary and those subjects do not have one."},"alt":"Figure: From path to cut-out, and the number that decides it. Steps: 1. Anchor only where the curve changes direction (A bottle has a shoulder, a waist and a base corner. Twelve anchors, not forty: every extra one is another place your hand can be slightly wrong.); 2. Sit the path half a pixel inside the edge (On the edge leaves a rim of the old background all the way round, and that rim is what reads as a halo once the subject is on white.); 3. Load the path as a selection (Name the path in the Paths panel first, or the next path you draw replaces the temporary Work Path and the tracing is gone.); 4. Feather 0.3 to 0.5 pixels (Zero reads as cut with scissors. Two pixels reads as a glow. A normally shot photographic edge is about half a pixel soft, and matching it is the whole trick.); 5. Add a layer mask, never Delete (The pixels stay, so next week’s revision is a brushstroke. The path stays too, inside the PSD or TIFF, so the cut can be redone in six months.). Every e-commerce cut-out that looks expensive was made this way. The pen tool is the wrong choice for hair, fur, foliage against sky or anything out of focus, because a path draws a boundary and those subjects do not have one."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"why-it-feels-hostile","runs":[{"text":"Why it feels hostile"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The pen tool is the one that makes people close the application. It behaves unlike every other tool: clicking does not draw, dragging does something unexpected, and the line jumps around after you thought you had finished it."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"It is worth twenty minutes because for any manufactured object (a bottle, a phone, a box, a shoe, a car) a path gives an edge that no pixel-based tool can match. The curve is mathematical, so it is exactly as smooth at 400 per cent zoom as at fit-to-screen, and it can be nudged a week later without redoing anything."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"what-a-bezier-curve-is","runs":[{"text":"What a bezier curve is"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A path is a chain of "},{"text":"anchor points","b":true},{"text":". Between any two anchors, the curve’s shape is controlled by "},{"text":"direction handles","b":true},{"text":" sticking out from them. The handle’s angle sets the direction the curve leaves the anchor in; the handle’s length sets how strongly it pulls before the next anchor takes over."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"That is the whole model. Everything else is consequences."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Click","b":true},{"text":" to place an anchor with no handles: a corner."}],[{"text":"Click and drag","b":true},{"text":" to place an anchor and pull out a pair of handles: a smooth point, where the curve passes straight through."}],[{"text":"The direction you drag is the direction the curve will leave in. Drag in the direction of travel, not away from it."}],[{"text":"Alt/Option-drag a handle","b":true},{"text":" to break the pair, so the curve can arrive smoothly and leave at an angle. This is how you make a rounded corner meet a straight edge."}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-rule-that-halves-your-anchor-count","runs":[{"text":"The rule that halves your anchor count"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Beginners place forty anchors round a bottle. Professionals place twelve. The rule:"}]},{"t":"quote","runs":[{"text":"Put an anchor where the curve changes direction, and nowhere else."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A bottle’s silhouette has a shoulder, a waist, a base corner. Each of those is a direction change and deserves an anchor. The smooth run between them does not; that is what handles are for. Extra anchors do not add accuracy: they add wobble, because each one is a place where your hand can be slightly wrong."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A second rule that helps: place anchors at the "},{"text":"extremes","b":true},{"text":", the topmost, bottom-most, leftmost and rightmost points of each curve, with handles horizontal or vertical at those points. Hold Shift while dragging to constrain a handle to 45-degree increments and the curve snaps into a clean shape."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"editing-after-the-fact","runs":[{"text":"Editing after the fact"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The path is not committed until you decide it is."}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"Direct Selection tool (A)","b":true},{"text":" moves anchors and handles."}],[{"text":"Ctrl/Cmd held","b":true},{"text":" while in the pen tool temporarily gives you the Direct Selection tool, so you can adjust without switching."}],[{"text":"Alt/Option held","b":true},{"text":" over an anchor converts between smooth and corner."}],[{"text":"Clicking on a path segment with the pen adds an anchor; clicking on an existing anchor removes it."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Paths live in the Paths panel and are saved inside the PSD or TIFF. Double-click the temporary “Work Path” to name and keep it, or the next path you draw replaces it. That one habit prevents the commonest loss in this lesson."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"turning-a-path-into-a-cut-out","runs":[{"text":"Turning a path into a cut-out"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The Paths panel’s buttons: load as selection (or Ctrl/Cmd + click the path thumbnail), fill, stroke."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The practical sequence for a product:"}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"Trace the silhouette. Sit the path "},{"text":"half a pixel inside","b":true},{"text":" the edge, not on it, so no rim of old background survives."}],[{"text":"Load as a selection."}],[{"text":"Feather 0.3 to 0.5 pixels: enough that the edge is not aliased, not enough to look soft."}],[{"text":"Click "},{"text":"Add Layer Mask","b":true},{"text":", never Delete."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The feather number matters more than it looks. Zero gives a jagged, cut-with-scissors edge that reads as fake instantly. Two pixels gives a soft glow that reads as fake for the opposite reason. On a normally-shot photograph, the subject’s real edge is about half a pixel soft, and matching that is the whole trick."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"clipping-paths-for-print","runs":[{"text":"Clipping paths, for print"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A path stored in a TIFF or EPS and designated as a "},{"text":"clipping path","b":true},{"text":" tells layout software the outline to flow text around and the shape to knock out. Printers and magazine designers still ask for this, and supplying a PNG instead is not the same thing."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"In Photoshop: name the path, then "},{"text":"Paths panel menu > Clipping Path","i":true},{"text":", and set the flatness (a device tolerance: leave it blank unless the printer specifies). Save as TIFF or EPS. GIMP can export paths as SVG but does not write Photoshop clipping paths, which is a genuine gap if you do print production; Photopea does write them."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"practising-in-the-right-place","runs":[{"text":"Practising in the right place"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The pen tool in Inkscape, Illustrator, Photoshop, Photopea, GIMP, Figma and Affinity is the same tool with the same handles and nearly the same modifier keys. Learn it once and it transfers everywhere, which makes it one of the highest-return half-hours in this whole course."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A good practice exercise, and it is how people learn it: open a photograph of a wine bottle at 200 per cent and trace it, aiming for under fifteen anchors. Do it again tomorrow. By the fourth attempt it will stop feeling hostile."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"when-not-to-use-it","runs":[{"text":"When not to use it"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The pen tool is wrong for anything with a soft, fibrous or transparent edge. Hair, fur, foliage against sky, smoke, out-of-focus flowers: a path draws a hard boundary, and those subjects do not have one. Forcing a path onto hair is the technique that produces the helmet look."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"It is also slow. Tracing a complex machine can take forty minutes. When the subject is a person in a soft-focus photograph, the automatic tools plus a painted mask will be faster and better. The skill is not using the pen tool for everything; it is recognising the twenty per cent of jobs where nothing else gives that edge."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"A retoucher traces a phone with the pen tool using forty anchor points placed evenly around the outline. The resulting cut-out edge looks subtly wavy along what should be dead-straight sides. Why did more anchors make it worse?"}],"options":[{"text":[{"text":"Each anchor introduces a place where the hand’s position and the handle angle can be slightly off, so a straight run described by many anchors accumulates small errors a two-anchor segment cannot have."}],"correct":true,"tempting":null},{"text":[{"text":"Photoshop smooths paths with fewer than twenty anchors automatically, and the smoothing is disabled above that count."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Invents an automatic behaviour: no editor applies a threshold-based smoothing to bezier paths, which are rendered exactly as specified at any anchor count."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Dense anchors force the path to be rendered as a polyline rather than curves, which produces visible faceting."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Describes a rendering fallback that does not occur: each segment remains a cubic curve regardless of how many anchors sit along it."}]},{"text":[{"text":"The feather value was too low for a path with many anchors, and raising it to two pixels would hide the waviness."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Treats a geometry error as an edge-softness problem: a larger feather blurs the wobble rather than removing it, and costs the crisp product edge the path existed to provide."}]}],"order":[3,1,0,2],"why":null},"prev":{"slug":"selections-and-edges","title":"Selections are easy until you reach hair","minutes":10},"next":{"slug":"quick-mask-and-painting-a-selection","title":"Stop fighting the selection tools and paint it","minutes":8}}}