Summary

The path is a magical Photoshop feature that has many applications in your daily Photoshop existence. You can use paths as permanent Photoshop selections that can be reused anytime, as the means to fill or stroke part of an image, as a way to convert areas of an image, as a way to draw a line or shape, or as clipping paths for images that will be exported into a page layout program. Photoshop provides an array of tools and options for creating paths. You can create a path by converting a selection you have already made, or by drawing a path from scratch by using a Pen tool. You can also edit existing paths with the assorted Path tools, and you can create shaped paths with the Shape tools. You can even make and use custom path shapes.