Forget about all the complex color math and Shape tool geometry we’ve been talking about for the last few hours—it’s time to break out the paints and have some fun! Although Photoshop was originally designed as an image editor—a program used for modifying and improving digitized photographs—it also draws a lot of its parentage from paint programs, such as MacPaint and Windows Paint. Remember the fun you had doodling around in those programs back in the day? Well, Photoshop offers you that same experience and much, much more in the way of art creation capabilities.
For one thing, you have complete control over your virtual paintbrush: It can be any size, shape, and texture you want. It can be hard-edged or soft-edged, and you can choose exactly how much paint it applies with each stroke—and even whether it responds to your pressure with a stylus on a graphics tablet. And, of course, you can paint with all sorts of tools in Photoshop, not just a brush (see Figure 8.1). You’ve got an airbrush, an eraser, a pencil, a bucket, and even your finger (it’s called the Smudge tool). You can blur and sharpen details, you can paint previous incarnations of an image back into selected spots, and you can create perfectly shaded gradients containing as many colors as you desire. In this hour, we look at all these tools and techniques—and more.
Before we discuss specific brush configurations, let’s take a brief look at the Brush picker, which is accessible from the Tool Options bar after you switch to any of the tools that use brush shapes. To open it, click the swatch on the Options bar that shows the current brush shape. Although each tool has its own set of options, the Brush preset picker (shown in Figure 8.2) works with most of the Painting tools, from the Brush to the Clone Stamp tool. (The Pencil’s brushes are different, and the Paint Bucket and Gradient tools don’t use brushes.) Using the Brush preset picker, you can choose any of Photoshop’s preset brush shapes to use with the current tool.
Click to choose one of the built-in brush shapes. The size and shape displayed are the size and shape of the brush, unless you see a number underneath the brush shape. The number indicates the diameter of the brush in pixels. Drag the Master Diameter slider to change the size of the brush without changing any of its other characteristics. A brush can be up to 2,500 pixels wide.
Tip: Tip Versus Tool
Remember, clicking a brush shape doesn’t change which Painting tool is active; you have to do that in the toolbox or by typing a letter shortcut (such as E for the Eraser). The Brush preset picker only determines the shape of the tool you’re using.
Photoshop comes with many alternative sets of brushes. You can install one of the additional brush sets by choosing it from the pop-up menu on the Brushes menu. Photoshop asks whether you want to replace the current brush set with the new one or add the new brushes to what’s already in the Brushes menu (Append). If you want to view the brush shapes by name instead of by the shape of the stroke they make, use the pop-up menu as well.
Figure 8.3 shows the Brushes panel. Open the Brushes panel by first switching to any painting tool and then clicking the preferences button on the Options bar (it’s the farthest button to the right), or by choosing Window, Brushes. You can drag the Brushes panel to a convenient spot on the screen or leave it “docked” at the right edge of the screen. If you move the panel out onto the screen, you can return it to the dock by dragging it back into its panel group with the Clone Source panel.
The left column displays a list of brush attributes, from tip shapes to dynamics (characteristics that can change while you’re painting). Clicking each of these items opens a different pane on the right side of the panel. (Shown in the figure is the Shape Dynamics pane.) With this panel, you can specify the qualities of each brush: the diameter, hardness, spacing, angle, roundness, and other characteristics of a brush, either starting from scratch or modifying a preset brush.
The first two brush attributes to consider are size and shape, which you set in the Brush Tip pane. Adjust the diameter with the slider, then drag the black dots on the brush tip proxy inward to determine its roundness (or lack thereof). Drag the arrow to set how far off horizontal the brush is angled.
Next, set the brush’s hardness. The harder a brush is (closer to 100%), the sharper the edges of each paint stroke will be. A brush with a setting of around 20% makes soft-edged strokes.
The next option is for spacing. By clicking the Spacing check box, you can set a standard spacing of paint, no matter how fast you drag the mouse. If the Spacing check box is left unchecked, the speed of your mouse determines the spacing of discrete drops of paint. If you move more slowly, paint appears in a continuous line. If you move the mouse more quickly, dabs of paint shaped like your brush tip appear with spaces between them. If you prefer consistent spacing, a setting of about 25% normally yields a very smooth line of paint. As you increase the percentage (either by dragging the slider or by entering a number), the spaces expand. You can see the differences in the brush preview at the bottom of the panel as you drag the spacing slider (see Figure 8.4).
Feel free to play around with these settings. With a little experimentation, you can end up with a brush that behaves just as a real brush does—painting thicker and thinner depending on the angle and speed of your stroke. When you create a brush you really like, save it. Click the New Brush button at the bottom of the panel and give your new brush a name in the Brush Name dialog. The brush will be available to you in the Brushes menu from then on (see Figure 8.5). If you create an assortment of brushes, you can save them as a group. There’s a pop-up menu on the right side of the Brushes panel. (Look for the right-pointing triangle.) Choose Save Brushes to save a brush set.
In addition to the brush shape options, Photoshop gives you some options for brush behavior. Unfortunately, unless you have a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet, you won’t be able to enjoy the full benefit of these options, but you don’t need to have a tablet to use them. The brush behavior options appear in a list on the left side of the Brushes panel. Click the name of the action, such as Scattering, to reach the pane containing its settings. After you’ve made your adjustments, use the check box next to the action’s name to turn the effect on or off.
Caution: Always Back Up
If you’ve created a bunch of custom brushes that you don’t want to lose, be sure to save them in a set as a backup. Reinstalling Photoshop deletes your custom brushes, actions, and palettes—and, of course, a hard drive crash does the same thing.
Wet Edges creates a sort of watercolor effect when you paint. Paint builds up at the edges of your brush, and, as long as you’re holding down the mouse and painting, the paint stays “wet.” In other words, you can paint over your previous strokes without building up additional layers of color. However, if you release the mouse button and begin to paint again, you add a new layer of paint, which creates an entirely new effect. Figure 8.6 shows an example of the same brush and paint with Wet Edges on and off. Notice the overlapped strokes in the figure.
If you use a graphics tablet and stylus, you can get the same sort of fadeout effect that you’d get in the real world by easing off the pressure on a brush or pencil, and you can vary the color and shape of your brush by manipulating your stylus. You have five options for each of these settings: Off, Fade, Pen Pressure, Pen Tilt, and Stylus Wheel. Figure 8.7 shows the Color Dynamics pane of the Brushes panel and some sample strokes with the dynamics on.
If you’re not using a tablet and stylus, you can get a similar effect by choosing Fade from the pop-up menu shown in Figure 8.7; with this option, the effect is in full force at the beginning of a stroke and fades out as you continue to paint.
In the Color Dynamics pane, you can set an amount for your paint color to change during each stroke, called jitter. Foreground/Background Jitter, for example, makes blobs of the Background color appear within your stroke, while Brightness Jitter makes the color become brighter and darker as you paint. The Shape Dynamics options include Size Jitter, Angle Jitter, Roundness Jitter, and Flip X and Flip Y Jitter, by which you can flip the brush’s shape horizontally or vertically while painting. This won’t show if you’re using a round brush, of course, but with other shapes it’s a great way to add a naturalistic, random element to your painting. Finally, the Other Dynamics pane has two settings: Opacity Jitter and Flow Jitter. (We talk more about Opacity and Flow settings in “Using the Brush,” later in this hour.
We’re not done yet; the Brushes panel has more to offer. I’ll bet you never realized that designing a paintbrush could be so time-consuming, did you? The remaining settings in the panel are as follows:
Scattering—. These settings remove the restriction that brush tips must stick exactly to the line of your stroke, allowing them to float nearby at varying distances and adding another random element to your painting.
Texture—. Here you can add a pattern to your brushstrokes to make them look more natural. Click the pattern swatch to see a menu of other patterns you can use, and don’t forget to check the Pattern menu’s own pop-up menu for more preset groups of textures you can load.
Dual Brush—. Yes, yet another brush! Here you can set Photoshop to overlay another brush shape on top of the one you’ve already chosen, with the specified blending mode applied to the brush on top to determine how the two interact.
Noise—. Click this box—there are no settings to make—to add flecks of noise around your brush strokes.
Airbrush—. Check this box to turn on the Brush tool’s Airbrush mode by default. You can still turn it off and on in the Options bar while you’re using the brush, but you’ll always start with it on.
Smoothing—. With this option turned on, Photoshop smoothes out your mouse’s path, making your brush strokes into gentle curves instead of jagged lines.
Protect Texture—. This option ensures that all your patterned brushes use the same pattern and scale, so you get a consistent look throughout the image.
Most often, when you’re painting in Photoshop, you’ll be using the Brush tool. Press B to switch to the Brush, or click it in the toolbox, then click and drag to paint; it’s that simple.
When you’re working with the Brush tool, the single most important setting in the Tool Options bar is Opacity. Enter a value or click and hold the triangle next to the Opacity field to enable the slider. A low setting applies a thin layer of paint—nearly transparent. The closer you come to 100%, the more concentrated the color is. Figure 8.8 contains some examples of different opacities. I’ve drawn lines on top of the gradient with both a soft and a hard brush, and I’ve changed the percentage of opacity for each set of lines.
Note: Better Brushes
Although you can press Caps Lock to get a precise painting cursor instead of a cursor shaped like the tool you’re using, there’s an even better way. Instead, choose Edit, Preferences, Cursors (Windows) or Photoshop, Preferences, Display & Cursors (Mac OS). In the Preferences dialog, check out the Painting Cursors section. You can choose from the following options: Standard, Precise, Normal Brush Tip, or Full Size Brush Tip. Choosing Normal Brush Tip changes the cursor for all Painting tools from tool-shaped icon or a crosshair to a shape that is the size of your brush. Full Size Brush Tip does the same, except that it shows the entire area your brush will affect even the slightest bit. Normal Brush Tip is more representative of your brush’s perceived size. Click the check box marked Show Crosshair in Brush Tip to see a dot indicating the exact center of your brush.
The Options bar’s other settings include Blending Mode. All the blending modes you learned about in the last hour are available when you’re using the Brush tool, although you can choose only Behind or Clear if you’re on a layer other than the Background layer.
The Flow setting is similar to Opacity, but it enables you to vary the amount of paint you apply with each stroke by varying the amount of time you keep the Brush in that spot. The total amount of paint can’t exceed the Opacity percentage, however, no matter what value you enter for the Flow value.
Can’t draw a straight line? No worries. To paint a straight line between two points at any angle with the Brush or any other Painting tool, click the canvas once to set the first point, and then Shift-click to mark the endpoint. A line magically draws itself between the two points. If you need to draw a straight horizontal or vertical line, just press Shift as you paint to constrain the Brush’s path. This trick also works with all the Painting tools, as well as the Toning tools. Figure 8.9 shows some work with the Photoshop brushes that uses both of these techniques. The picture began with a gradient. Then the artist used a smooth, moderate-sized Wet Edges brush, followed by a brush that simulates grass. These are all included in the default brush set.
Now that you’ve mastered the Brush, it’s time to turn your attention to the other Painting tools. Let’s start by taking a good look at the Airbrush, Smudge, Eraser, and Pencil tools.
Long ago, the Airbrush was a separate tool. Now it’s represented by a button on the Tool Options bar when the Brush tool is active. Clicking this button makes the Brush work like an airbrush, which uses compressed air to blow paint through an adjustable nozzle. The Airbrush applies paint with soft diffused edges, and you can control how fast the paint is applied. You can adjust the Airbrush to spray a constant stream or one that fades after a specified period. You’ll achieve notably different results with different amounts of pressure and different brush sizes and shapes. The longer you keep the Airbrush tool in a single spot, the darker and more saturated the applied color becomes, as if you were spraying paint with a real airbrush or from an aerosol can.
Figure 8.10 shows a drawing done with the Airbrush. The spotty effect comes from using a blending mode called Dissolve. (You’ learned about blending modes in the last hour””; turn back and review, if you need to.)
It might not seem like a technical term, but smudge is the artist’s term for blending two or more colors. The Smudge tool looks like, and works like, your finger, and you’ll find it in the same toolbox compartment with the Blur and Sharpen tools. Just like your finger on wet paint, the Smudge tool picks up color from wherever you start to drag and moves it in the direction in which you drag. The Tool Options bar’s Strength field controls the pressure of your smudging finger. At 100%, the finger wipes away the paint completely. At 50%, it smears it, and at 25%, the smear is less pronounced (see Figure 8.11 for examples of these different Strength settings). The Sample All Layers check box, also on the Options bar, determines how many layers you can smudge at once: only the current layer or all of them.
Photoshop considers the Smudge tool to be a brush, so you can set its width by choosing an appropriate brush size from the Brush menu.
You can also use the Smudge tool to mimic finger painting by checking the Finger Painting box on the Options bar. When this option is active, each stroke starts with the foreground color. You’ll find it quite handy if you need to blend some color into an existing picture or soften the edges of an object.
Figure 8.12 shows the Smudge tool’s Options bar. Click and hold the arrow next to the Strength setting to open the slider, then drag to set the Strength. If you’d rather not bother with the slider, type a single digit to set the Strength value to a multiple of 10. For instance, type 4 to set it to 40. Incidentally, that trick works with all of Photoshop’s sliders, as long as only one relevant slider is visible at a time. If you like this shortcut but want more precise control, just type the digits of the measurement you want in quick succession.
As usual, the blending modes are on a pop-up menu. This tool doesn’t give you all the blending mode options you learned about in Hour 6, but you can choose Darken, Lighten, Hue, Saturation, Color, or Luminosity, or you can leave the menu set at Normal. Of these, Darken and Lighten are obviously the most useful. The Darken and Lighten modes affect only pixels that are lighter or darker, respectively, than the beginning color. So you can draw right over an existing object in Darken mode, and as long as the object’s color is darker than the Foreground color you’re using, it won’t be affected. The reverse is true for Lighten mode—it will draw only on areas that are darker than the Foreground color.
Tip: Which Smudge Is Best?
If the Smudge tool doesn’t achieve the effect you intended, you might try the Smudge Stick filter, which you’ll learn about in Hour 16, “Applying Filters to Turn Your Picture into Art.” Filters, in case you haven’t encountered the term before, are commands that apply special effects to your picture, some artistic, others more prosaic, and still others just plain odd. Photoshop has dozens of filters, each of which applies a different effect to the image. These range from blurring and sharpening filters to one that adds clouds to a sky, another that lights up your backdrop, and yet another that turns the picture into a Japanese brush painting. You can adjust most filters in various ways before applying them, and you can use the Fade command on them afterward to increase or reduce their effects.
The Eraser tool is unique, in that it can replicate the characteristics of the other tools. It can erase with soft edges as if it were a Brush removing color instead of adding it. It can erase a single line of pixels, as if it were the Pencil, or it can erase some of the density of the image, as if it were the Airbrush. Of course, it can also act as an ordinary rectangular eraser, removing whatever’s there to reveal either the Background color or a transparent layer. The Eraser’s Options bar settings enable you to determine how it works: whether it will be a block or a brush, how much you want to erase with each pass of the tool, and even whether you want to erase to a previous step on the History panel or to the Background color. Figure 8.13 shows the Eraser’s Options bar.
The Opacity slider controls how much is erased—a setting of 50% removes half of the existing image, allowing whatever is behind it to show through. This is useful for blending separate images together, and it can help you create a watercolor effect.
Instead of erasing to the background, you can choose Erase to History. This check box in the Options bar hooks up the Eraser with the History panel, so your strokes of the Eraser can reveal an earlier version of the picture instead of allowing the background to show through. Before you begin to erase or make any other drastic changes to your picture, you can take a snapshot of it by choosing New Snapshot from the History panel. Then if you like the results of your changes in part of the image but not in other areas, you can use Erase to History to restore the snapshot’s appearance wherever you don’t like the changes. You’ll find that this option can save you a lot of time when you’re trying new techniques.
Tip: Not Fade Away?
The Fade option, found in the Control pop-up menu in the Brushes panel’s Color Dynamics section, works with the Eraser just the way it does when you’re using the Airbrush. When the Fade option is turned on, after a specified number of steps, the Eraser no longer erases. This is useful for creating feathering around irregularly shaped images. Set the Opacity slider to around 75%, set Fade to about eight steps, and then click and drag away from the object you want to feather.
The Eraser has two roommates in its toolbox slot: the Background Eraser and the Magic Eraser. These tools make it easier for you to erase sections of a layer to transparency so that you can do things such as delete the background around a hard-edged object (called, in graphic arts terms, silhouetting).
With the Background Eraser, you can erase around an object to transparency as you drag along the object’s edges. By specifying different Sampling and Tolerance options, you can control what color the Magic Eraser removes and the sharpness of the boundary between what’s erased and what remains. In Figure 8.14, with the Sampling: Background Swatch option turned on in the Options bar, I’ve set the Background color to the predominant color of the background in my photo, so that the Background Eraser will remove only that color and those close to it. I’m using the Background Eraser to remove only the leaves surrounding the rose blossom. I can drag the tool right over the edges of the petals and remove only the green leaves next to the flower.
The Background Eraser can also take its cue for what to erase directly from the image; if you want to try this, click either the Sampling: Continuous or Sampling: Once buttons on the Options bar instead of the Sampling: Background Swatch button. The latter keys in on the color of the first pixel you click when you start each stroke; the former modifies the color it’s looking for as you drag the Background Eraser across the image. Either way, the color the tool picks up is that of the one pixel directly under the cursor, so you’ll get the best results with the Background Eraser if you use Precise or Normal Brush Tip cursors. (Change the cursor type for Painting tools and other tools in the Preferences dialog; press Command-K [Mac] or Ctrl+K [Windows] to get there, then click Cursors in the left column.)
Two other settings on the Options bar affect how the Background Eraser works: Limits and Tolerance. The Limits pop-up menu contains three choices; the second of these, Contiguous, is the most restrictive. With this option set, the Background Eraser removes only pixels that are directly under the cursor’s crosshair when you click or drag, or pixels that are adjacent to the path of the crosshair. Set Discontiguous to allow it to delete pixels of the same color anywhere within the circle defining the Magic Eraser’s area of influence. Find Edges, on the other hand, works like the Contiguous Option, but it looks farther afield to figure out where object edges are and maintain those clear boundaries. Finally, the Tolerance setting is a percentage between 1% and 100% that determines how far off from the original color a pixel must be for it to be erased; lower values erase fewer pixels and higher values erase more with each click or drag.
The Magic Eraser tool is very similar to the Background Eraser tool. When you click in the image, the Magic Eraser removes all pixels of that color throughout the image, without regard to their location; it doesn’t try to figure out the foreground and background objects the way the Background Eraser does. This makes it the best possible tool for erasing large areas of similar colors, such as a boring gray sky; when you need to erase a detailed area containing multiple colors, the Background Eraser is a better bet. The Contiguous check box on the Options bar allows the Magic Eraser to erase throughout the image with one click; uncheck the box to restrict the tool to the pixels adjacent to where you’re clicking. Two other useful settings appear in the Options bar for the Magic Eraser: Anti-alias, which softens the edges of the erased area to avoid a jagged-looking transition, and Sample All Layers, which enables the tool to base its work on all the visible layers, while erasing only on the current layer.
In Figure 8.15, you can see the results of using the Magic Eraser tool. First, I isolated the sky by lassoing the house and then inverting the selection; this ensured that the Magic Eraser wouldn’t erase the light-colored house along with the light-colored sky. Then I clicked once in a white area between two tree branches to remove the entire white sky. Sometimes more clicks are required, but this time I got lucky. If the Magic Eraser misses any pixels, you might need to use the regular Eraser to clean up. In this case, once I removed the sky, I created a new blue and white sky using the Render Clouds filter, brightened up the image a bit with Shadows/Highlights, and warmed it up even more using the Photo Filter command and a warming filter. The result: a bright, cheerful photo instead of the gloomy shot I started with.
The Pencil tool works very much like the Brush tool, except that its strokes are always hard-edged, even if the Hardness value in the Brush Preset picker is set to 0%. You can’t create soft-edged lines with the pencil as you can with the Brush. Click the Pencil tool in the toolbox (it’s located in the same slot as the Brush and the Color Replacement tool) or press B to switch to it. (Press Shift+B if the Brush tool or the Color Replacement tool is active.) Figure 8.16 shows the Pencil’s Options bar.
Most of the Pencil’s options are the same as for the Brush: brush tip, blending mode, and opacity. The Pencil tool does have one option, though, that no other tool has. In the Tool Options bar, you’ll find a check box labeled Auto Erase. When Auto Erase is checked, drawing over the current Foreground color (as shown in the toolbox) erases to the current background color until you release the mouse button instead of painting. If you click on any other color to start your stroke, the Pencil draws its line in the Foreground color as it normally would.
The Focus tools, Blur and Sharpen, are great for touching up an image, fixing tiny flaws, and bringing objects into sharper contrast. They can’t save a really bad photo, but they can do wonders for one that’s just a little bit off. Sharpen increases contrast to create the illusion of sharper focus, whereas Blur softens edges and can rid the background of unwanted clutter and de-emphasize parts of the picture that you don’t want viewers to notice, such as facial wrinkles in head shots. Figure 8.17 shows the Focus tools.
Simply put, the Blur tool blurs your pictures by softening or evening out pixel values, reducing the image’s contrast and, therefore, its sharpness wherever the blur is applied. Click the Blur tool in the toolbox; it doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut. The Tool Options bar shows you the Blur tool’s options (see Figure 8.18), which are the same as those for the Smudge tool except that there’s no Finger Painting option. The Sample All Layers option is relevant only when your image has more than one layer. It enables the Blur tool to affect all the visible layers instead of just the active layer. You have the same choices of blending mode and the same Strength settings as with the Smudge tool.
Note: Back and Forth
While working with the Blur tool, you can temporarily switch to the Sharpen tool (and vice versa) by pressing Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows).
Figure 8.19 gives you a close look at the Blur tool’s effect. This picture of a prize-winning donkey looked great, except that the car and horse trailer behind the beastie were rather distracting. So I applied some careful blurring to downplay the intrusive elements. Figure 8.20 shows the picture before and after retouching.
When you’re blurring, be sure you don’t miss any spots; a sharp, clear area really stands out in the middle of a blurry background. This can work for you—or against you, if the sharp area isn’t the part of the picture you want to highlight. As you work, you can switch brush sizes to accommodate the area you’re targeting, and feel free to zoom in and out as needed so that you can see clearly.
The Sharpen tool is the exact opposite of the Blur tool. Where the Blur tool softens color transitions by reducing edge contrast, the Sharpen tool brings edges and details into greater relief by increasing the contrast between adjacent pixels. Because of these two tools’ equal-but-opposite relationship, they share a space on the toolbox, with a pop-up that lets you choose either one or the Smudge tool. Figure 8.21 shows a mushroom before and after having its surface sharpened.
Tip: A Touch of Retouching
One of the things you’ll begin to notice as you become more accustomed to working with Photoshop is the use of image-manipulation techniques in advertising and even in editorial photos. You’ll begin to recognize pictures that betray the work of a digital retoucher—and most of this work is done with Photoshop. When you see a picture that doesn’t look quite right, or one that looks too good to be true, take a careful look at it and see if you can figure out how the pros created the image. Are details blurred? Are there extra highlights? Do surfaces look too perfect? The old saying “Pictures don’t lie” is definitely obsolete these days. To see the dark side of Photoshop retouching, however, check out the Web site Photoshop Disasters (www.photoshopdisasters.com); it’s full of retouched photos that couldn’t exist in any universe I’ve ever heard of.
Sharpening is best done in very small doses. If you go over a section too many times or have the Sharpen tool’s Strength set too high, you can end up burning the color out of an image and making it look worse than it did originally. See Figure 8.22 for an example of oversharpening.
Remember, too, that not even the magic of Photoshop can put back what wasn’t there originally. Always work with the clearest, sharpest pictures you can manage. If your photo is fuzzy all over, instead of trying to sharpen it, set it aside until you start working with filters (see Hour 15, “Applying Filters to Improve Your Picture”). You may not be able to return to its full, lifelike glory, but it can still make good fodder for the funky and artistic effects that you can achieve with filters.
Use the Focus Tools
Let’s take a quick break here and try out these tools. Open any convenient picture in Photoshop and follow these steps:
Click the Zoom tool and then click once or twice in the image window to zoom in on the image.
Switch to the Blur tool and choose a soft-edged brush shape from the Brush Preset picker on the Tool Options bar.
Type
5to set the Blur tool’s Strength to 50%.Drag the Blur tool across the picture. Notice the effect (see Figure 8.23).
Switch to the Sharpen tool and choose a hard-edged brush. Drag it over a different part of the picture. Try to drag it along the edge of an object, and note the effect (see Figure 8.24).
Try sharpening the area you previously blurred. Can you restore it to its previous appearance? (Answer: no.)
Practice with these tools at different Strength settings and with different brushes. Use Revert (File, Revert) or click the snapshot at the top of the History panel to restore the picture if you run out of practice room.
In this hour, you took a look at the Brush tool and several of its colleagues: the Airbrush, Smudge, Pencil, and Eraser tools. Brush shapes apply to all these tools, not just to the Brush. You can alter the brush shape or its behavior using controls on the Tool Options bar, which vary depending on the tool you’re using. You learned about some of the tool options and how they affect the quality of the brush stroke. You also learned to activate the Brush, Pencil, or Eraser by pressing a single keyboard letter.
Photoshop provides several ways to move paint around after you have applied it. The Smudge tool is one of these; it’s useful for blending small areas of color and has the same effect as dragging your finger through wet paint. Sharpen and Blur, which share its space in the toolbox, are two sides of the same coin, so to speak. The Sharpen tool increases the contrast between adjacent pixels, whereas the Blur tool diminishes it. You can use both of these tools on photos you’ve taken or pictures you’ve painted.
Can I make a custom brush that’s not round? | |
Sure. You can even make part of your image into a custom brush. Use the Rectangular Marquee to select a portion of an image, or use the Pencil tool to draw a brush shape and select that. With the selection active, choose Edit, Define Brush Preset. The new brush appears on the Brushes panel. Click it and then click Brush Tip Shape to set its spacing option and other variables. | |
What’s the difference between the Smudge tool and the Blur tool? | |
The main difference is in the way you apply them. Because smudging moves pixels from point A to point B, it tends to show the direction of that move. Blurring decreases the contrast between adjacent pixels, so they seem to blend together with no indication of movement. | |
I understand the Sharpen tool, but there also seem to be Sharpen filters. When should I use the tool and when should I use the filters? | |
You peeked ahead, didn’t you? You’ll learn how to work with the Sharpen filters in Hour 15. For now, stick with the Sharpen tool when you have a small area that you want to sharpen so that it stands out more from what’s around it. The filters are useful when you have a soft-focus image that needs all-over sharpening. |
Are there other brush sets besides the ones I see in the Brushes panel and the Brush Preset picker? If so, where can I find them?
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What effect does 100% Strength have on the Smudge tool?
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If you sharpen a piece of the picture too much, what happens?
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Here, you’ll get some more practice with the Airbrush, Brush, and Eraser tools. Follow along with these steps:
Start by opening a new document, at least 6 inches square so that you have plenty of room to work.
Click the Brush in the toolbox. Set your opacity to 100%, choose a medium-sized, hard-edged brush, and draw a star.
Click the check box to turn on Wet Edges and draw another star.
Choose a soft-edged brush and draw another star.
Now turn off Wet Edges and draw another star with the soft-edged brush. Your result should look something like Figure 8.25, only, with luck, your stars are more symmetrical.
Now scroll to the top of the History panel and click the history state icon labeled New. This returns to your freshly opened page, minus stars. (It’s a quick way to erase everything.)
Press B to activate the Brush, then click the Airbrush button on the Options bar. Set the Flow to 100% and draw a star.
Set the Flow to 50% by typing the number 5, and draw another star. (You can change Brush Opacity settings by typing a number, too.)
Change brushes. If you’ve been using a soft-edged brush with the Airbrush, try a hard one, or vice versa. Draw more stars with different brushes and pressure settings.
Press E to bring up the Eraser. Set the Eraser mode to Brush and the Opacity to 50%. (Type the number
5.) Try to erase one of your stars. Don’t click the mouse more than once while you’re erasing.Change the Opacity to 100% and erase another star.
Experiment with different settings until you’re comfortable with these tools.
