From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

The Brushes and Brush Settings panels - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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The Brushes and Brush Settings panels

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- [Instructor] Next we're going to take a look at a number of different brush presets as well as how we can customize them using the brush settings. I'm going to start by opening a new file at the default Photoshop size. I'll select the brush tool and then right click to reset the brush tool. In order to show the brushes panel, I'll click on the folder icon with the brush in it. We can see the brush settings as well as the brushes panel. I'm going to use the two chevrons here in order to expand these panels and then I'm going to separate them. I want the brush settings down at the bottom, so I'll select the tab and then drag it down until I see the cyan line and release it in order to unnest those two panels. So at the top we have our brushes. Here are all of our presets, and we're going to start with the dry media presets. I'll choose the ultimate pencil hard and use the right bracket to get a little bit larger of a brush. And we can see when I paint with this brush, I'm getting a very different paint stroke than we were getting with the general brushes. Then I'll select the ultimate charcoal pencil 2. Let's give that one a try. We can see, again, very different paint stroke, and if we move to the pastel palooza, again, it's very, very different. And of course, all of these presets can be modified, not only by changing the blend mode or opacity or flow or smoothing, but also using all these different brush settings. But first, let's check out a few more of the presets. I'm going to just create three areas here of blue, just using this ultimate inking brush. And then I'm going to switch to the wet blender. But if I paint here in the white area, nothing's happening. Well, at least nothing's happening that we can see and that's because we actually switched from the brush to the smudge tool. We can see the icon for it here, and it selected it in the toolbar. So now when I start painting over, we can see that I am smudging the white with the blue. But down here I was just smudging white with white. All right, let's take a look at the real oils. This actually swaps to the mixer brush tool. And now when I paint, we can see that I can mix these colors together. So I can mix the white going into the blue or the blue going into the white, and it's going to make it look much more like an oil painting. All right, I'll move down to the impressionist blender. Again, this swapped us to the smudge tool and we get some interesting effects here depending on if we start in the blue and move to the white or start with the white and then move to the blue. I'll scroll down a little further to the special effects brushes, but let's go ahead and use the edit menu and choose fill and just fill this with white for now. There's several different spatter brushes here. These just add kind of a spatter effect. Then we have some concept brushes. This one for foliage actually is in the shape of some leaves. And then we've got some screen tones. So if I paint with the screen tone here, one of the things that we can do is we can use the brush settings panel to figure out what options were used to create that technique or that brush preset. So for example, if I look at texture, we can see that a texture has been applied and it's a screen tone texture, but we could apply a different texture such as this grass texture and now we're going to get a completely different brush. Or we could go into the shape dynamics and maybe make a change to the size jitter or to the angle jitter, and that might also change the brush. All right, to look at a few of these more in depth, let's return to just our general brushes and grab this hard round brush. And again, I'll choose edit and then fill and we can fill this with white. Okay, in the brush tip shape, we have a number of brush tips we can choose from. But first, let's just take a look at changing, for example, the roundness or the angle of the brush. And each change we make, we're going to get a preview right down here. I'll also change the spacing of the brush. So now we get a number of dots instead of a solid paint stroke. So as you can see, we can really vary the brush and how it lays down paint quite dramatically. Okay, I'll return to the hard round brush, but we can also select any of these different brush tips and again, do things like change the spacing or change the roundness or the angle and we'll get a very different paint stroke. All right, this time I'll use the hard round brush. Let's take a look at some of the shape dynamics. So we can change the size over a paint stroke. We can also change the scattering. Now here it might make more sense to pick a different brush tip shape. In fact, let's pick that foliage brush tip shape so we can see what's happening. I'll go ahead and decrease the size of it a bit and then return to scattering. So we can see it scatters it. And I can do this along one or along both of the axis. I can also add a secondary texture like we did a moment ago. We can create a dual brush, which means we're going to be adding a second brush tip and applying that through a blend mode. There are color dynamics that we can apply. Let's go ahead and make a paint stroke here. But then if I decide I want to jitter the hue, well, I can do that on a per paint stroke basis, or we can apply it per tip and then we can get some variation while we're painting. We can also get variation in opacity. We can add some wet edges to this and we can really change the look and feel of the paint stroke that we lay down. If you want to access more brush presets, you can use the brush menu and then choose get more brushes. This will take you to adobe.com and then you can download any of these brushes. If you want to access additional brush tips, then I would recommend that you return to that menu and choose legacy brushes. Once you load these brushes, when you return to the brush tip shape, you'll see a number of different icons that weren't there before. So we have a number of different natural media bristle tips. So you can choose between a round or a flat brush. And then all of these additional options, including how many bristles, what are the lengths of the bristles, and again, you get a very different paint stroke. Now remember I have all of those other options on here, so I might want to take off the wet edges and maybe not jitter the opacity and let's just take off that hue jitter as well. All right, so that's a kind of more realistic painting. Then if we come down here, these are all of our erodible tip shapes. So you can choose from square or triangle, flat or point, and as you paint, you'd actually be eroding down the tip. You can sharpen the tip at any time, so be sure to check that out. And then below that we have the airbrush tip shape. And here you can change things like the granularity and the spatter size. Again, seeing the preview down here. So there are a lot of controls available in the brush settings to change your brush presets that are unfortunately beyond the scope of the essential training course. We'll touch on additional options in the next video, but if you want to know more, I would highly encourage you to just take some time out and explore them on your own.

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