Help with Photoshop Pen Tool - rough edges

Question

I've overcome my FEAR of the stupid pen tool, forcing myself to understand it a bit better, but I'm still having some frustrations. My biggest frustration at this point is when attempting to add a swirl embellishment to a letter, it was highly noticeable how rough around the edges the embellishment was compared to the letter I attached it to. How do I fix this?? I'm currently working on a 300 res canvas if that helps (I'm trying to design a logo for a friend).

Answer 1

I'm afraid of the pen tool still. However, you might try changing the brush that you stroke the path with. For example, you draw your path with the pen tool. Then, select the brush tool and choose a brush that is softer (move the slider to change to softer in the brush options). Then stroke the path as usual.

Alternately, you can try using the blur tool to soften the edges, but that probably isn't ideal.

If you have it, Illustrator would be better for this (you could export the font piece from Illustrator and import into Photoshop).