Paths and channels

In some tutorials they make selections and store them into a channel. In others they use the pen tool and store the selection as a path.
Are these two ways or doing the same thing or they have different uses?
What are the pros and cons of each one?

Thanks

It can either be two different ways of doing the same thing, or you can create a path first, then make a selection out of it and store it as a channel. There are a number of ways of doing the same thing within Photoshop.

If you keep the path, you can edit the path later and it will remain vectors. Keeping just a channel will still allow you to edit the channel later, but that comes at the price of losing the smooth vectors you had earlier.

I suggest keeping both the path/channel selections in your PSD. Hard drive space shouldn't be an issue these days.

Here a mojor diference, The path only allow a slection to be on or off (100% or 0%). The chanel for his part work in the same way as a mask, so you can have softness and gradient in your selection...

A selection should be saved as a path only if it was creted with the pen tool... convering a slection to path can result ina jaggy path.

Finaly, be concerne thannot all file format will support both of them, so your finasl choice may be forced to follow the file format...