How to draw an irregular, vertical line with photoshop

Question

Similarly to this question I now need to do the same thing with a vertical line, to obtain a shape similar to a capital "I" with the same feature; wider extremities.

I have been trying to do it following the other question answer, I then did a vertical rectangual shape and tried to subtract elipsess but the result is not precise, maybe there is some other method?

more details: to be really precise the line I need should be 15mm high with extremities 1mm wide and the narrow part (middle) 0,5mm wide so to replicate what I did with the other curved line.

Answer 1

There are probably many ways to do this. Here's one method. I've done this in CS4, however shape layers look a bit different in the latest CC, but the same is possible.

1. Make a rectangular shape layer with the Rectangle tool, and select the vector path with the Direct Selection tool.

2. Add an anchor point mid way down the left side, with the Add Anchor Point tool.

3. Use the Direct Selection tool, grab the anchor point and move it in to make a curve.

4. Duplicate the shape layer

5. Click Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal.

6. With the Move tool click and drag the shape to butt up against the other.

Note: if you want to do this accurately to specific sizes, set up your Units to mm, in the preferences. Then turn on the ruler, add guides, and use these to create your initial rectangle.

Also, even at 300dpi, such an image is going to look quite pixelated because it's so small. You might need to change to 600dpi so that it doesn't look pixelated. The beauty of doing this with shape layers is that you can resample to higher dpi without loss of detail, since the shapes are vectors. And you can transform them without loss of detail too.

Answer 2

That's quite a narrow stripe. If you operate with a genuine print resolution 300 dpi it's only about 12 pixels wide. The narrow middle part is 6 pixels wide.

But that do not affect the method.

Start a new image which is 15 mm high and 1 mm wide. Use the same resolution (=pix/inch) as your artwork image. Fill the new image with a solid color - say green.

NOTE: PS fixes automatically the dimensions to fit with the pixel resolution.

Select the new image, copy it to the clipboard and paste onto your artwork as a new layer.

Take he selection tool and touch your new stripe. It gets selected.

Goto Edit > Transform > Warp. Drag the corner direction handles towards the center of the stripe until you have the wanted center width. Pressing Enter fixes the warp.

If you must be precise, add a model layer that has something exactly as wide as wanted. Here I have a blue rectangle with 50% opacity. It's made by duplicating the stripe layer and dragging the copy to smaller size.