PhotoPlus X2 User Guide - Serif

98 Painting and Drawing
Creating and editing outline shapes
Outline shapes are shapes you draw yourself with the three Outline tools from the
Tools toolbar's Outline Tool flyout.
The Straight Outline Tool produces an antialiased straight line in
PhotoPlus, which is just a very thin shape. The line can be of
varying Weight (thickness) and can be constrained to 15-degree
increments, by holding down the Shift key as you drag.
The Freehand Outline Tool, as its name implies, lets you draw a
squiggly line made up of consecutive line segments and nodes (each
new segment starting from another’s end node), which can be
attached back to itself to create a closed shape. Use the Smoothness
setting on the Context toolbar to even out ragged contours
automatically.
The Curved Outline Tool can produce complex combination
curves and shapes in a highly controlled way.
Each tool's supporting context toolbar lets you create the outline
shape on a shape layer, as a path or directly as a filled bitmap. Additionally,
combination buttons let you add the shape to its own layer (or path), and can also
be used to control how the new shape interacts with existing shapes on the layer.
The use of the Straight Outline Tool and Freehand Outline Tool is fairly straight
forward. However, using the Curved Outline Tool effectively requires some further
explanation.
• After choosing the tool, click and hold down the mouse button. An additional
pair of handles appear, defining a pair of red attractor nodes that orbit the
original click point as you continue to drag the mouse. What these nodes do is
define the curvature of the line segment you’re about to draw. The distance
between attractors determines the depth of the resulting curved line.