Brush Tool
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PSDTUTS Photoshop Wiki / Photoshop Tools / Brush Tool
The brush tool is one of the most essential tools in the Photoshop artist’s kit. It allows the user to draw freehand lines, shapes and create interesting effects in your design.
Like most other tools, it’s worth taking the time to fine-tune your brush options before using it.
Brush Tool Options
The left-most option is a dropdown menu for your Tool Presets. Here, you can access brushes you’ve saved for frequent usage, and reactivate them with the exact size, shape, hardness, opacity and flow settings you saved them with. You can save your current brush by clicking the dropdown arrow, clicking the small menu arrow on the right-hand side of the palette, and clicking New Brush Preset. It will present a dialogue box where you can give the brush a name and then add it to your presets.
The Brush Preset palette is a dropdown palette that gives you control over the way your brush looks and access to other brush sets. The Master Diameter setting is your brush size. Move the slider to increase or decrease it. Beneath that is the Hardness setting, which defines how hard the edges of the brush are. You can adjust it to create either a rigid, hard brush or a softer, smoother effect that allows you to blend and transition subtly.
Underneath the Hardness setting are the brushes in the currently active brush set, allowing you to choose the shape of your brush. When you select a new brush, the size and hardness settings will be reset to the default for that brush. You can load other brush sets, including those you’ve downloaded from the Internet from the menu you’ll see if you click the little arrow in the top right corner of the palette.
The Mode dropdown menu provides access to the various blending mode settings. These are, for the most part, the same as the blending mode options for layers, with a few exceptions. These control how your brush interacts with other parts of the image, including images on other layers. You should read up on Blending Modes in general, but the modes unique to the brush are:
- Behind only works on transparent areas of a layer, so that it looks as if you’re painting behind the pixels already present.
- Clear basically turns the brush into an eraser. It doesn’t work on the Background layer, since Photoshop won’t allow transparent pixels on it.
The Opacity setting lets how you set how opaque or transparent the brush will be. The closer to 0% you get, the more you’ll be able to see through the image, and the closer to 100% you get, the more solid it will be.
The Flow setting determines how much “paint” is applied at a time. By default, Photoshop paints all pixels in a brush at the set color and opacity at once, but reducing the flow means that the more you paint over an area, the more paint will be applied.
The Airbrush button turns your brush into an airbrush. Several versions back, the airbrush was a separate tool, but Adobe saw fit to make it a brush tool option. When this setting is on, the brush applies a continuous stream of paint when the mouse is held down, at a rate set by the Flow setting.
Usage
The keyboard shortcut to select the brush tool is B. Once you’ve configured the brush tool options, painting is a simple matter of clicking on your canvas, and dragging to draw a line or shape or releasing immediately if you just want to draw the shape of the brush.
As always, the Ctrl/Cmd+Z keyboard shortcut allows you to undo mistakes.
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