Photoshop will soon be giving designers and photographers more control over curves in less time. In a sneak peek video, Adobe shared a new Curvature Pen Tool that will be coming to an upcoming version of Photoshop CC.
The new Curvature Pen Tool makes it easier to create a curving path in Photoshop, a feature both useful for graphic design and for selecting specific areas for photo editing. On YouTube, Abode demonstrated how the new path tool will work. Clicking to add points creates automatic curves, adjusting based on the placement of the next point. Double-clicking, instead of single clicks, creates a corner point. Without swapping tools, users can customize the shape by clicking a line or point along that new path and dragging into the desired shape.
Along with creating shapes inside a design, the new curvature path tool will be one of the several ways to create specific selections inside of an image, like for whitening just the teeth in a portrait, along with existing tools. Photoshop includes a number of different ways to create paths and selections, but the new tool is designed to be a quicker way to create a curved shape path to edit just a specific portion of the image.
“The new Curvature Pen Tool makes path creation easier and more intuitive in Photoshop CC by enabling you to create paths more quickly and precisely,” Adobe said in the video. “This is just one of many new features coming to Photoshop CC later this year.”
The Curvature Pen Tool will join the Pen Tool and Freeform Pen Tool. The existing Pen Tool already makes it possible to create curved selections, however, the process is a bit more complex than the steps for using the upcoming tool. In the existing versions of Photoshop, users have to hold down the mouse button while adding a point — this gives the resulting point “handles.” Turning those handles allows the designer or photo editor to customize how that line curves. With the lines automatically generating curves based on the placement of the next points and no tool swaps necessary to adjust the resulting shape, the Curvature Pen tool is designed to both simplify and speed up the process.
Adobe did not say specifically which update the new feature will be coming to but said the update will be this year, among a long list of new features. Photoshop 2017 launched in November 2016, so if that trend continues, Photoshop 2018 could be out before the end of the year.
