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Using Paths

What can you do with paths after you've gone to all the trouble of creating them? Well, a lot of things. In Photoshop, you can use paths to remember selections you want to use repeatedly. You can also fill a path area or define the color, border, and so on of the outline of the path. Paths indicate selections or lines, but they don't actually appear on your canvas unless you add some paint to them to make them show up. You can fill a path or stroke it, or both. Stroking adds a stroke of paint over the path. Filling places a color or pattern inside the path. Figure 13.17 shows a freeform path that has been stroked with red and filled with a pattern.

Figure 13.17. A filled and stroked path.

Use the Active Layer When you fill or stroke ...