From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Brush basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Brush basics

“

- [Instructor] We're going to take the next few minutes to find out how to quickly customize the most common attributes for the painting tools in Photoshop. I'm going to open a new file, and I'm going to select the default Photoshop size. Then I'll tap the B key to select the Brush tool, and then right click or Control click to reset the tool. I'll also want to select a foreground color. In this case, I'll choose this blue. The brush preset picker, which you can access by clicking on the downward facing chevron allows us to change a lot of different options, such as size and hardness, allows us to search our brushes, see the recently used brushes, and also select from our presets. We can make this smaller or we can enlarge this by just dragging it out. For now, I'm going to start with the General Brushes, the Hard Round brush. When you select a preset, you'll notice that there is a blue outline around it. As I make any changes to this, it tells me or notifies me that the preset has been changed, because it turns to orange. Alright, let's tap Return in order to dismiss that, and we can see that I can start painting with my brush. Right now, let's focus on how to change the brush size. So I can use the right bracket to enlarge the brush and then paint with that, or the left bracket to get a smaller brush, and you can either tap the left or right bracket or you can hold it, in which case it will make the change faster. Another way to change the brush size is using the heads up display. So I can hold the Control key on Mac and the Option key, it would be the Alt key and right click on Windows, and then we can drag up or down to change the hardness of the brush, or left to right to change the size of the brush. Alright, I'll right click anywhere in the image area in order to get the brush preset picker and select the Hard Round brush again to set it back to its default, and tap Enter to dismiss that brush preset picker. I'll decrease the size of my brush a bit. With the brush set to a hardness of 100%, I want to point out that as I drag my brush, the paint stays within the icon, or the circle of the brush. If, however, I go in and change the hardness of the brush to 0, then when I paint, you'll notice that it paints outside of that icon. And if you ever see this icon instead, the crosshairs, that just means that your Caps Lock key is on. So on your keyboard, just tap it again to turn off Caps Lock. If I want to paint a straight line, I can paint and hold down the Shift key. And if I want to draw a straight line between two points, I can click once, then hold down the Shift key, click again, and Photoshop will draw the line between those two points. Alright, let's use the Edit menu and choose Fill, and let's fill this with white. Next, let's talk about the opacity flow and smoothing. So the opacity, by default, is set to 100. We can use our scrubby sliders to decrease or increase that amount. We can use the dropdown menu. We can also select the area and then enter in a value, or we can just tap the numeric keys. If I tap 6, for example, I'll get 60%. 0 will give me 100%. So as I paint with 100%, we get this effect. If I paint again over that same area, I can add to it, but it's never going to get darker than the opacity of the paint, which was 100%. If I change the opacity to 50%, and I paint out one line, now, wherever the paint overlaps, it's going to slowly build up that paint until it gets to 100%, but it can never go darker than 100% of the color that I have targeted. Alright, let's set the opacity back to 100%. The flow setting controls the speed at which paint is laid down. I like to think of it as, am I pressing the nozzle of a can of spray paint just a little, or am I holding it all the way down? With the flow at 100, we can see that the paint builds up very quickly. If I change the flow down to, say, 10, now I have to paint, and paint, and continue painting to build up the paint till it reaches 100%. Alright, if I want to control the flow using the numeric keys on my keyboard, I'll have to add the Shift key, and then I can press like 7 to get to 70%, or 0 to get to 100%. Now, the smoothing option can help us when we're making long strokes if we want them to appear smooth. I'll get a smaller brush here, and then I'll try to make a very smooth stroke here. But you can see that it gets more and more difficult as I go along. Let's increase the smoothing all the way up to somewhere around 90, and now, although we can see it might take longer to create my stroke, it's a much smoother stroke. Alright, let's right click and reset that tool, and choose Edit, and fill this again with white. So another way that brushstrokes can interact with one another is by using the blend modes in the options bar. Now, we haven't talked about blend modes, but they change the way that the color of the paint and the brush will blend with the colors on the layer. So I'll start with multiply, and again, I just want to point out that I have a light blue color. So the opacity and the flow are both set to 100%, but I'm going to paint once, release the cursor, and then paint over that area. Even though the opacity is set to 100%, I'm actually creating a darker color, and that's because of the blend mode. If the blend mode was set to normal, I would never be able to paint darker than this foreground color. If I change this to a blend mode like Screen, then when I paint over, it's doing the opposite. It's almost like it's painting with bleach. It's going to lighten the area that I paint over. So be sure to experiment with different blend modes when you have time. But for now, I'm just going to set this back to Normal. Now, one of the things that I might recommend is if you're going to be using the painting tools a lot that you invest in a pressure-sensitive tablet. Let me show you why. I'm going to quickly fill this with white again, and then return to the brush preset picker. We'll start with the Hard Round brush, select that, get a little bit smaller of a brush. And when I make a paint stroke, it looks like it looked before. Now I'm going to choose a different brush. I'm going to go down to the Hard Round Pressure Size, and again, I'll go ahead and paint, but it looks exactly like the first preset. Then I'll scroll down a little further, and I'll get the Hard Round Pressure Opacity. But again, when I create my paint stroke, it's going to look the same, and that's because I'm painting with a mouse. Now I'm going to switch over to a pressure-sensitive tablet, and let's return to the top of our presets here, starting with that Hard Round brush. Well, sure enough, the first paint stroke that I make looks the same, but when we choose the second Hard Round Pressure Size, then I'm going to be able to control the paint stroke using the pressure sensitivity of the tablet. So if I press very lightly, I get a small stroke, but as I press harder and harder, it's going to be a larger and larger brush. If we return, and scroll down, and I select the Hard Round Pressure Opacity, now as I start painting, if the pressure's light, I get a lighter color, and as I increase the pressure, then we get a darker paint stroke. So as you can see, a pressure-sensitive brush can really help create more natural looking paint strokes, and they can also help when masking. So as you can see, a pressure-sensitive brush can help create a more natural looking paint stroke that you have a lot more control over. Alright, now that we know how to change the most common attributes for the painting tools, next, we'll take a look at customizing additional attributes of our brushes.

Contents