Wallpaper 89 shapes
Out of context: Reply #11
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- Nairn0
ok - I know what you mean - they can be a bit of a pain, can't they?
Personally, I find I can get 'better' results from creating the forms in Photoshop then bringing the paths through. However, if I want quick results from Illy, I can just create a circle, then 'Path > Add Points' a couple of times so that I've got more anchor points to play with. Then it's just a case of manually selecting the anchors and shifting them around tiwth the keyboard.
Ideally though, I'd use a combination of Guassian Blur and Levels in Photoshop to create smoothed forms which look a little better.
Start by making a new channel. Create a hard-cornered geometric shape with the Polygonal lassoo, then make a copy of this layer underneath. On the copied layer, play with Guassian blur until your form has been suitably rounded (this will probably take more than one pass, so don't expect it to look like a pebble first time!). Set the blur, then press Ctrl/Apple F to repeat the filter a few times - gradually you will see the jaggedness of your inital form disappearing. After a couple of Guassian passes, show the original, un-Blurred channel in addition to the currently selected, Blur'd Channel. Open your levels box (Ctrl/Apple + L) then tighten up the dark and light ends so they meet somewhere in the middle - this is where showing the original, unblurred comes in handy as you can use it as a guide.
Don't tighten up the ends too much, as you will need to maintain some level of 'alias-ness' (ie. you don't want pixellated jaggy edges), then use create a selection from the channel and convert your channel to a path - then copy the path to illustrator.
Bear in mind that I'm on old versions of Illy and PShop, so there's probably a quicker CS-Illy only way to do this! :)
(yes, it's long winded - sorry)