Pen tool Cleanup
I'm working on Kiera's layout here, and I noticed this ugly graphic sitting straight in the middle of it. I've magnified it to 500% so you can see the problem: it's a horrible image quality. how can we fix this? It's not too hard.
As you can see, this heart has some terrible pixelation going on. It's a basic shape and it will be quite easy to edit. You can use the paintbucket or magic wand to solve this problem, but sometimes it is not as effective.
Now, what I'll do it click on my pen tool (that one right there)
To use the pen tool, make sure it's on the correct settings. At the top of your Photoshop window, you'll see this menu. Make sure you've selected what I have, which are Fill Pixels and Paths:
And now I'm going to outline this heart using the pen tool. You do this by clicking around the outside of the shape and tracing it to make points all over it like i have here:
After you've outlined your entire shape, the dots will disappear and keep a path around your shape. Now, I would make a new layer (Ctrl + Shift + N).
Now, with the path outline still visible, right click it and chose Fill Path. This will fill your outline with the color you've chosen. to get rid of the paths, just hit delete.
Now, you can see my choppy looking "vector heart" (i call it a vector heart because the first step in any vector is to outline your shapes/images with the pen tool and fill them like i've done here. and also this new heart i have created will NOT pixelate when I resize it...)
At this point, you can either KEEP the choppy heart or go to your blend modes and change it to soft light or overlay so it blends better. But since this is such a basic shape (and I traced it oh so well), I'm keeping it as it is. Now, the heart is MUCH cleaner. Shop and compare:
This trick also allows you to change the color of the heart, change the size of it, etc. This is a cool trick you can also pull with someone's clothing, or any other object you might want to change color wise.
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