As promised, I pondered about real life examples that might help users better understand Grouping versus Making Path. My first thought was Fruit Salad versus a Smoothie… but then I realized that with a Smoothie, you cannot go backwards and extract the individual pieces of fruit back out of it! lol

So, I pondered some more and come up with the following analogy, which I think is pretty cool. 😛

Grouping is like a car pool where you put various people together into a vehicle for the purpose of moving them together from Point A to Point B, BUT those people are still very much individuals from different locations each with their own purpose and priorities. And so, with grouping, the images retain their color and their original format… even raster images remain raster. When grouped you simply can move them as one, rotate, resize etc.

Making Path is more like a sports team where individuals come together, they wear the same uniform (become the same color) and there’s a bigger purpose for them to be together. They perform in unison. Making Path on selected vector images will make them all the same color, convert them all to polyarc or polygon, the nodes for all will show up at once when selected, and if you send then to cut, along with other objects, all of the objects in that “Make Path” group will be cut together before or after other objects.

Does this help?