Smoothing/correcting Edges on Shapes/objects

[Zak]

Hi there I've made a design but unfortunately the shapes I made have terrible wiggly lines and are a little bit pixelated. I've searched and went through a few fixes but unfortunately I've not found one that works yet. any insight into this would be greatly appreciated!

 

[IamSam]

Use this as a pattern and use the Pen Tool set to shape to make better lines.

 

[Zak]

Okay thank you I'll give it a go

 

[IamSam]

Is this just a portion of an overall shape? If so, you should use the shape tools to recreate..............whatever it is. How did you make the lines originally?

 

[Zak]

It's just a portion of the logo and I made shapes using the pen tool but when I wanted to use a bigger canvas I noticed after that the shapes have the wiggly lines lol

 

[IamSam]

Thanks.

When you used the Pen Tool, did you make selections and then fill the selections with color? This might account for the aliasing.

Next time, set the Pen Tool to shape. You can lower the opacity so you can see through the color while creating the shapes.

I'm not sure how the lines became wavy with the Pen Tool, that shouldn't have happened.

 

[Zak]

Yeah I used fill, might be an idea to start again and use shape with the tool if it means it'll cut the aliasing, the design is already together. I'm new to using the pen tool no idea how i made it like that I thought they were smooth at first lol. Looking at my custom shapes majority of them are wavy.

 

[Tony Bowman]

How are you getting on with this? It looks to me like your edges are uneven because you dropped too many anchor points with uneven curves. However, these sort of shapes are quite easy. Here's a few pointers:

In the screenshot below, I dropped three anchor points (the tiny squares along the path), with number 3 having a curve.
- CTRL/CMD+CLICK line 'a' to move the apex of the curve (you'll notice the direction line of the curve and it's handle (the dots at the end of the curve lines) moving accordingly).
- CTRL/CMD+CLICK handle 'b' to adjust the strength of the curve (notice that you can adjust the length of the direction line on that side of the anchor point, but that the handles remain locked together opposite the anchor point).
- ALT/OPT+CLICK anchor point 3 to remove the leading curve direction line, which will give you a straight line to your next anchor point.

Generally, use as few anchor points as possible. In the example you posted, you only need anchor points at each corner and all your shapes are possible using only the pen tool modifiers I've suggested.

 

[Zak]

Hey Tony thanks for explaining that to me, looking at the way I did the original shapes you're right I used way too many plotted points I'll post the shapes when I'm done, see what you guys think

 

[Pipsmom]

Thanking Tony Bowman for that illustration...helped me a lot also