P: Please let us change the Pen tool path size and color

Amen! I have been wishing for this function for years! In a commercial photography environment, much of what we shoot is a silo, so the subject is photographed on gray. I have a difficult time seeing the pen tool at a 50% gray tone. I would think that if we can change the transparency checker-board color that with a newer release would allow the tool color to change. When using the healing brush this occurs too, but then I turn my brush into a "precise brush" (cross-hair) by setting the caps lock.

For many years now we have had the ability to change the color of layers in Illustrator, this is very helpful when make a new path or editing an old one to be able to change the color of the path. Many times I am battling the color of the image with the color of the path in photoshop because gray just blends in with the image. The solution right now is to add an adjustment layer to the image and put and extreme adjustment on it so that the path is more easily viewable. Please make the paths color an adjustable option like Illustrator in photoshop this would be greatly appreciated.

An excellent suggestion Kris!

As explained above, we cannot go back to the way it was in CS3 because the blend modes we used are not available in OpenGL, or in the Cocoa API for MacOS.

even with antialias paths off it is still really hard to see paths and brush cursers too. please get it back like it was before in CS3. the way the path would alternate depending on the bkgd was great.

Jeffrey, while similar to that topic, this one might open other possibilities: having a color attribute for each path might be useful in some cases. I could see Bert Monroy using it a lot to differentiate picture elements.

Yes, that is the correct explanation -- also OpenGL is lacking similar blend modes. We've been trying to figure out ways around that lack, but none have been satisfactory yet.

Kris, good request. I think this is something we should investigate improving. The ability to change the color could also help users who have trouble seeing certain colors (color blindness) as well.

I would look at this at this topic to improve the visibility of Paths and Guides in Photoshop CS5:

It's hard to see the paths/lines that are drawn using the pen tool in Photoshop CS5.

Hi David. I think that what you got was an honest explanation, not excuses: from what I gathered, the blending mode used in the carbon versions of Photoshop was not available in Cocoa when CS5 was written... So do we need to wait for Apple to add that blending mode in their Cocoa API's in order to get the previous useful behavior (as I guess Photoshop engineers have filed the absence of said blending mode as a bug). There was a new release from XCode, let's hope that it will brought it...

Last time I complained about this I just got excuses about how it's Apple's fault (why CS5 path visibility is worse than all previous versions). This is a good way to improve it if we are stuck with the poor blending modes of Cocoa.