Uneven "highlight" line: How to make?

[Tegger]

well you could achieve that by doing the way of pen tool and stroke just like I just did

Is it possible to create a Brush line separately from the Pen line, then "fit" the Brush line to the Pen line the way you might fit text to a path?

 

[agentmoeller]

You can't get a brushstroke of varying widths in Ps. (as far as I know)

Illustrator can, tho.

 

[Tegger]

You can't get a brushstroke of varying widths in Ps. (as far as I know)

You can. You just need a $500 Wacom tablet, which I happen to have. The tablet also works in Illustrator, but Photoshop is where it really shines.

Tablets are best suited to irregular things, like hand-sketching. It's not so good for regular things, like the arc I'm trying to create.

For example, I recently had to work with a bunch of cartoonish characters provided by a customer. The PS files, though layered and masked, were RGB. We need CMYK for printing. During the conversion from one to the other, certain irregular effects and masks were lost, and I had to recreate them in CMYK. I could not have done the recreation without the tablet.

 

[Tegger]

now just warp and blur the line how you want.

Proper warping did it. I used the menu at the top and set the warp to Arc, and the curve to 20%. (It's shown deliberately out of place here).

The highlight is a Smart Object, so any opacity, widths, and blurring are done in there. Since the Arc warp is done to the Smart Object, I can even slide the glow up and down the line if I want, in the underlying object file, and it will follow the arc.

PS is an astoundingly deep and broad program, overflowing with functionality and features. I'm sure there are other (and possibly faster) ways of achieving what I want, but this works well for what I need. Thanks, Dataflow.

 

[ibclare]

Tegger, I don't mean any offense by this question. When you refer to the pen tool, do you mean your tablet or the pen tool which is on the Photoshop tool bar?

 

[Tegger]

Tegger, I don't mean any offense by this question. When you refer to the pen tool, do you mean your tablet or the pen tool which is on the Photoshop tool bar?

I'm referring to the tool that is invoked using the "P" keyboard shortcut, the Photoshop tool bar thing. Sorry, I should have been more precise.

The "pen" that the tablet uses functions basically like a mouse, but with a lot more options than a mouse. I am not accustomed to thinking of it as a "pen", even though it resembles one.