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Question

Anchorpoint Editing: Change only length, not direction of direction Point

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
April 6, 2022
4 replies
426 views

Hello 🙂

I stumble across this every now and then-it is not a very big deal, but enough that I now seek our for help, maybe I am missing something.

Also I haven´t found anything related to this online or in this forum.

I have an anchor point with the 2 standard direction points and I only want to change the length of one them without disturbing the other one. I hope with the image it is understandable. By pressing ALT it moves independently, but therefore loses the tangency to the second direction point.

Is there another shortcut I am missing?

Thanks in advance 🙂

Best,

Sebastian

Windows

This topic has been closed for replies.

Earth Oliver

Legend

The other setting that Ps needs to adopt here is constrain node to path, but maintain path shape (Illustrator has this now). This is another feature i requested many times more than a decade ago, but i gave up because the Ps team really does not seem intersted in improving paths. Which is totally wild to me, since there are entire industries that depend on using the Pen tool.

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

Pet-peeve …

Remember Illustrator’s Scripts-in-Actions-bug? It took the Illustrator team more than a decade to fix.

Remember connector points in Freehand? It was discontinued by Adobe* but the Illustrator team didn’t seem to bother to incorporate those aspects where Freehand was superior to Illustrator**.

So all in all I find the Illustrator team’s performance underwhelming.

*: Removing Freehand as competition was probably no priority at all and the Macromedia-purchase was more about Flash.

**: They may not have been many but there were some.

D Fosse

Community Expert

In Illustrator you can do this. Hold shift, and the handle length can be adjusted without affecting the angle.

Or, alternatively, ctrl+shift if you have the pen tool selected. Then it switches to select tool + constrain dragging.

The shift key has an additional function in that it snaps to horizontal/vertical if you drag it far enough. That's the only function shift has in Photoshop.

So - the best advice is to use Illustrator. Which of course is what you should do anyway, if you're doing advanced pen tool work.

Earth Oliver

Legend

It's so frustrating not to have feature parity using the same tool in a suite of apps owned by the same company. It should be a requirement that all the Adobe PMs know how to use all the tools in the relevant apps. And that once a month they spend at least an entire day completing a project on a deadline that requires using the same tools across the apps. I'

D Fosse

Community Expert

Absolutely. It's almost like they just forgot to add this last function to the shift key. This makes a sensible feature request.

It may sound odd with two functions in one modifier key, but it works very intuitively and fluidly in Illustrator. It's basically all a "constrain angle"-function.

Earth Oliver

Legend

There's no way to do this, but it should have long ago been possible if Adobe had ever spent any time at all trying to improve Paths UX. Illustrator has been making progress with this tool lately, but the Ps team seems totally disconnected from the user segment who needs a better pathing experience.

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

Illustrator has been making progress with this tool lately, but the Ps team seems totally disconnected from the user segment who needs a better pathing experience.

I disagree somewhat.

In my opinions Illustrator’s default Path handling is poor, to say the least.

Perspectival transformation of Paths in Illustrator by dragging the corner points (like in Photohop)? Nope.

The Pen Tool’s Path-closing behaviour? The Illustrator team seems to assume that Illustrator users are incapable of creating meaningful bezier handles for the first point of a Path and decided to destroy the point’s backwards handle when closing the path. (Though this can be circumvented with a Script …)

And then there is the continued absence of connector points …

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

I see no option to achieve maintaining the angle while dragging other than using a Script and that would most likely need numerical input (or an UI element like a slider) in a dialog and not on-canvas-dragging.

It’s one of the reasons why it is so useful to set curve points on the horizontal and vertical extremes, that way one can use the shift-key …

If the direction/angle is irrelevant have you tried ctrl-dragging the bezier handle?

BastiFntastiAuthor

Participating Frequently

I am creating different vector masks to try out shapes for Products, so if i think i need to change something but only in the one direction (lets say from a round shape, then the other side also changes and its really frustrating...

Good hint with the horizontal and vertical extremes, but I unfortunately have more than those points 😕😕

Okay then I just need do be careful when dragging.

Thanks for the response! 🙂

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