Expert: LizaL - 5/13/2005

Question
Is there any way of drawing a curved line in Photoshop Elements? From what I can gather, you would use the Pen tool in Photoshop, but that doesn't seem to be available in Elements.

Thanks.

Answer
Good question, Paul -- I have Elements 2.0 for PC, and although you can *draw* curved lines there with the brush and pencil tools, you can't go back and edit their points, like you can in Photoshop. And no, there isn't a pen tool in Elements.

What I gather from your question is that you want to be able to draw more precise, measured lines than those you'd draw with the pencil or brush tools. I can give you a quick fix for drawing precise arcs in Elements: Draw an ellipse with the elliptical marquee selection tool, then stroke it with any color. Measure your ellipse (or circle, if you held down the Shift key while you dragged out the marquee shape), and find its middle. Drag a guide to that point. Then use the eraser tool to erase the bottom half, and you've got an arc.

But Elements was created as a very scaled-down version of Photoshop, for those who were interested in doing bare-bones retouching and photo manipulation. It wasn't meant to handle the complexities that can be dealt with in Photoshop, and that's my guess as to why there's no good way to edit a curve in Elements.

I did this little movie in Photoshop to illustrate what I meant about the arc:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/arc.mov


Hope this helps!

Lisa