Functional materials with highly desirable properties have been highly pursued for a long time due to their potential applications in many fields. High pressure can effectively reduce the interatomic distances and modulate the bonding patterns of materials without changing their chemical compositons, which has been considered as a powerful and important approach to design new functional materials with desired structures and properties. Many interesting types of functional carbon materials, such as optical transparent carbon, super strong and elastic carbon, and ultrahard bulk amorphous carbon have been obtained from different carbon precuresors under high pressure. Recent progress on the high pressure research of low dimensonal carbon composite materials are introduced. Based on the predesigned carbon-based precursors, new carbon materials with superhard properties, covalent polymerization and anomalous photoluminescence enhancement by the application of high pressure have been obtained.