Fundamentals of Photoshop: Typography and the Pen Tool (Photoshop III)
Meg Lewis · Designer, comedian, performer
You get one real skill here: the pen tool, taught slowly enough that its alt-click curve trick finally clicks, but the typography half is mostly button-tour filler.
This is the third installment in a five-part Photoshop series, and it announces its scope honestly: the pen tool and basic typography, nothing more. The class runs under an hour and is built from two demonstrations stitched into one final project, a greeting card that combines a masked photo with hand-styled type.
The pen tool section carries the course
The strongest material comes early. The teacher starts with shape mode, drawing simple closed shapes to get comfortable with anchor points, then moves into the harder skill: curves. The key technique taught here is holding alt (option on Mac) over the last anchor point to kill Photoshop's automatic curve continuation, letting you snap back to a straight line mid-path. It is a small mechanical detail, but it is the actual answer to why so many beginners fight the pen tool without knowing why, and the course repeats it enough times while tracing a photo that it should stick.
The tracing demonstration itself, cutting a friend's photo apart point by point, is the closest thing to a real workflow in the class. It shows the full chain: crop and zoom the canvas, trace with the pen tool in path mode rather than shape mode, convert the path to a selection through the Paths panel, then apply that selection as a layer mask rather than deleting background pixels outright. That last choice, masking instead of deleting, is worth calling out on its own, since it is the kind of nondestructive habit that separates a hobbyist workflow from a professional one. The section also folds in a secondary technique, the magnetic lasso tool, as a faster alternative for high-contrast edges, and shows how to soften a mask's edge with the feather setting in the Properties panel so a cutout does not look pasted in.
Typography is present but thin
The typography portion is comparatively weak. It walks through the Character and Paragraph panels: font size, leading, tracking, all caps, faux bold and faux italic (with a fair warning that faux styles are inferior to a font's real bold or italic weight), paragraph alignment, hyphenation, and the warp text dialog. It also touches on where to source fonts, contrasting free options with paid libraries. None of this is wrong, but none of it goes past identifying what each button does. There is no real design principle offered about pairing fonts, establishing hierarchy, or building a type system, which is the gap that separates "here are the controls" from "here is how to use them well."
The closing project pulls both halves together convincingly. Building the greeting card involves resizing a canvas without distorting the subject, rotating and coloring a name to run vertically along one edge, converting fill to a stroke-only outline for the lettering, and adding a low-opacity drop shadow at a deliberately chosen angle to fake depth. Watching those choices assembled in sequence does more to teach composition than the standalone typography demo did.
Overall, the class delivers real value in the pen tool half and comparatively little beyond a features tour in the typography half. Anyone signing up specifically to finally understand vector paths and masking will get their money's worth. Anyone hoping for a typography lesson should treat this as a controls orientation, not a design education.
The standout
The alt-click technique for forcing a straight anchor point after a curve is the one piece of muscle memory that actually makes the pen tool usable afterward.
What you will learn
- Drawing shape layers versus vector paths with the pen tool, including closing a shape correctly
- Using alt/option-click on an anchor point to break Photoshop's automatic curve continuation and force a straight segment
- Tracing a subject with the pen tool, converting the path to a selection, and cutting them out with a layer mask instead of deleting pixels
- Refining a rough mask with the magnetic lasso tool and a black/white paintbrush, plus feathering the mask edge for a softer cutout
- Formatting type and paragraph text: leading, tracking, all caps, faux bold/italic, warp text, and Lorem Ipsum placeholder copy
- Building a finished composite by combining a masked photo, rotated stroked type, and a subtle drop shadow into one greeting card
Best for: A visual learner with zero to light Photoshop experience who wants a slow, narrated walkthrough of cutting a subject out of a photo using paths and masks.
Skip it if: Anyone who already masks images competently or wants a fast typography reference, since the type segment is a surface-level tour of panel buttons with little design reasoning behind it.