Drawing in Adobe Photoshop involves creating vector shapes and paths. In Photoshop, you can draw with any of the shape tools, the Pen tool, or the Freeform Pen tool. Options for each tool are available in the options bar.

Before you begin drawing in Photoshop, you must choose a drawing mode from the options bar. The mode you choose to draw in determines whether you create a vector shape on its own layer, a work path on an existing layer, or a rasterized shape on an existing layer.

Vector shapes are lines and curves you draw using the shape or pen tools. (See Drawing shapes and Drawing with the Pen tools.) Vector shapes are resolution-independent—they maintain crisp edges when resized, printed to a PostScript printer, saved in a PDF file, or imported into a vector-based graphics application. You can create libraries of custom shapes and edit a shape’s outline (called a path) and attributes (such as stroke, fill color, and style).

Paths are outlines that you can turn into selections, or fill and stroke with color. You can easily change the shape of a path by editing its anchor points.

A work path is a temporary path that appears in the Paths panel and defines the outline of a shape.

You can use paths in several ways:

• Use a path as a vector mask to hide areas of a layer. (See About layer and vector masks.)

• Convert a path to a selection. (See Convert paths to selection borders.)

• Fill or stroke a path with color. (See Fill paths with color.)

  Designate a saved path as a clipping path to make part of an image transparent when exporting the image to a page-layout or vector-editing application. (See Create transparency using image clipping paths.)

When you work with the shape or pen tools, you can draw in three different modes. You choose a mode by selecting an icon in the options bar when you have a shape or pen tool selected.