Painting with brushes is another way to create digital imagery from scratch, and Photoshop gives you amazing flexibility in its Brush tool. Basic Brush SettingsYou've got a few ways to view brushes in Photoshop. Let's start with the simplest view containing the fewest options. When you click the Brush tool in the toolbox, you'll notice that the Options bar changes to reflect the current tool's available settings. Figure 4.30. The Brush tool options.By exploring these options, you'll find the most basic settings that can be applied to a brush: tip To change brush sizes quickly as you paint, press the left and right bracket keys. Press the [ key to reduce the brush size and the ] key to increase it. The increment of change depends on the brush size. A brush size between 0 and 100 pixels will change by 10-pixel increments each time you use this shortcut. A brush between 100 and 200 pixels will change by 25 pixels; a brush between 200 and 300 pixels will change by 50 pixels; and a brush between 300 and 2500 pixels will change by 100 pixels.
Advanced Brushes PaletteHere's where we get into the meat of Photoshop's powerful brush engine. The advanced Brushes palette contains the options for re-creating traditional media brushes as well as options that allow you to generate random textures and designs quickly. This is the palette in which you'll be spending most of your time when doing advanced painting in Photoshop. Starting from the top, let's work our way down the palette and see what each option can do for us.
The various Control drop-down menus let you specify how you'd like to control the variation of certain elements of brushes. You can choose not to control, fade, or vary a brush based on Pen Pressure, Pen Tilt, and so on. Figure 4.32. These controls are available if you're using a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet.Pen controls are available only when you're using a pressure-sensitive digital drawing tablet rather than your mouse. A warning icon appears if you select a pen control but have not installed a tablet. Custom BrushesCustom brushes are a great way to enhance your creative painting options in Photoshop. They let you go beyond what Photoshop has provided and create a brush tip shape out of nearly any object you can imagine. Figure 4.33. Another stunner by Bert Monroy. In this Photoshop painting, the leaves were created using a customized brush tip and settings.To create a new brush tip, use any selection tool to select the area of an image you'd like to use as a brush. Once it's selected, choose Edit > Define Brush Preset. Your new brush will now appear in the brush tip presets seen in the Brushes palette discussed previously. Saving your brushes to your computer is similar to saving the contents of any other preset in Photoshop. Once you have the custom brushes you've created in the Brushes palette, just expand the options menu at the right of the palette and select Save Brushes. Name the file accordingly, and your brushes can now be backed up and reloaded should you ever clear your current brushes or if Photoshop crashes and deletes the current settings. Saving your Brush tool presets is slightly different from saving the actual brush tips. Suppose you've created a complex brush preset using the advanced Brushes palette. You've got it just the way you want, but you realize it's time to create another brush preset. What do you do? You don't want to lose those settings and have to re-create them. Writing them down hardly seems like a good alternative. Never fear; Tool Presets to the rescue! To begin, create the brush you'd like to save, then open the Tool Presets palette (Window > Tool Presets). Choose New Tool Preset from the fly-out options menu. Give it a meaningful name, and you're set. Just as with brushes, you can save these Tool Presets. |