Stroking a Path, anti alias, 1px line woes :-(

Hi everyone

I'm using PS6. Why am I finding it so hard to add a 1px stroke to a path and have it anti alias?

I want to use the pen tool to draw my path, then add a stroke to it. How hard can that be?

I've uploaded these pics to show you what I mean. All I want is to stroke a path with a 1px stroke and have it look nice, therefore I guess it should anti alias on diagnal lines that are not 45 degrees or straight?

I've tried various setting on each brush for each tool and nothing works as I want it too. How do you guys go about creating such lines, which in all honesty should be very simple to create.

I mean surely this is very basic yet I cannot produce good results, what is the point of the "stroke path" option if the stroke applied looks terrible. Someone mentioned I should convert the path to a selection and then do edit>stroke but what if the path isn't closed like in the pics below????

Here is what I've been getting so far. The diagnal lines are 45 degrees. I honestly don't know what's going on with the paint brush and airbrush, that's no way that's a 1px line, even though it was set to 1 px. I have messed about with the brush options so much and I cannot overcome this.





and this below, is a screen grab of the actual path on the screen, see how it looks better than all of the above. How can I get my line looking like this?, surely it's possible as it's on my screen?




Please help, or do I have to start thinking about illustrator or freehand? I cannot understand why this should be made so hard?

Thanks

Gemma

I don't know why the images aren't wokring

they are there

http://www.geocities.com/gemma_cooley/paths.gif
http://www.geocities.com/gemma_cooley/path.gif

Try using Photoshop 6's Line Tool (grouped with the other Custom Vector Shapes in the Tool Bar). Set it to a 1 pixel width, Anti-aliased box checked, and set the drawing mode to "Create Filled Region."

OK - the pencil tool is not anti-aliased thats why the line looks thinner - its actually just less visually correct. The paintbrush is a better tool for smooth lines.

Looks to me like your image is too low a resolution, upsample it by 200% and then do your stroke and see if that helps. If you dont want to do this try blurring the line using Guassian blur and then sharpening it using Unsharp mask to "smooth off" your line.

Try using the Stroke layer effect also. If you drop the fill opacity(in advanced blending options) down to 0 - you can create a stoked path like an Illustrator path - although it can be a bit jaggy too on low res images.