Imagine that - we've been spending quite some time in Photoshop, and we're just now learning how to paint!

The brush tool is one of the most versatile tools at your disposal. By creating your own brushes, or by downloading them from the Internet, you can paint an infinite variety of shapes and styles onto your canvasses.

Deselect any selected areas leftover from the previous chapter and select the brush tool.

Notice the tool options bar above. This component is especially important to the brush tool. On the far right side of the options bar, you can modify percentages for opacity and flow, as well as toggle airbrush effects on or off. Changing these options allows more control over the appearance of your brush strokes. Let's explore what each of these things mean in more detail.

First, leave the opacity and flow options at their defaults, 100% each. On your open image, draw a simple vertical line.

(note: image scaled to reduce size)

Photoshop's default brush set includes circular brushes, which give your strokes more gradual edges (as opposed to making plain single-colored marks.) Now go back to the options bar and turn the opacity down a bit - between 60 and 70% should do it. Leave Flow alone for now. Make another vertical line of the same color next to the one you just drew.

Changing the opacity affects the visibility of the stroke. 100% opacity is a solid opaque stroke, while an opacity around 15% will be mostly transparent and barely visible.

Finally, bring your opacity level back to 100% and change the flow down to something lower - try 20%. Draw a third line.

The flow setting manages the amount of color that appears from a single stroke. While adjusting the opacity will result in repeated passes with the brush having no extra effect, adjusting the flow and making multiple passes with the brush will result in increased control over the distribution of color.

Finally, click the airbrush toggle to the right of the flow field and reset the flow to 100%. Once again, draw a vertical line with your brush, but observe how the stroke changes the longer you hold the pointer stationary as you paint.

The aptly named airbrush function makes the tool behave like an airbrush. The longer you keep the brush active and stationary, the darker and wider the stroke will become. Toggle the airbrush off for now.

The brush tool would be pretty boring were it limited to a single shape. Thankfully, Photoshop comes with a huge variety of brushes for you to play around with. On the left side of the options bar (left of Mode) is the brush preset picker.

By clicking on the downwards arrow on the right part of the picker, you can adjust the
size of your current brush, as well as select from a variety of new sharpes. Try it now - change to something that interests you, such as the leaf brush or any of the sponge-like brushes.

Draw along any blank part of your image. Try a few more brushes. You may notice that some brushes have different properties, which create more interesting effects than others. You have full control over these things.




To the right of the options bar is the palette dock. You should see a tab there that says "Brushes." Click the brushes tab and a large variety of properties will become available to you. You can adjust the amount of jittering in a brush stroke, give texture to the brush, adjust color dynamics and more. The easiest way to learn what these things do is to experiment on your own during your free time - see which options work well and which brushes they work well with.

A tip - clicking the lock next to a property under the brushes tab will keep it from changing inadvertently.




A variant of the brush tool is the pencil tool. It functions a lot like the brush tool, and can be modified as such, but the strokes created by the pencil tool are different in that they showcase a single solid color. See the image below for an example.

The pencil tool is useful for creating rough-edged strokes, whereas the brush is useful for a smoother appearance.

Now that we've learned how to paint strokes onto an image, we should learn how to remove them via the eraser tool. The default eraser tool functions much like the brush, but instead of painting, it erases. The magic eraser tool works like the magic wand tool - it detects colors close to the color of the pixel you originally click and erases them along with it. Finally, the background eraser tool works by erasing the background of the current layer - replacing it with transparency. It can be a little tough to control at first, so expect lots of trial and error.

Chapter 2, Section 2 has been completed! Now you've learned how to select and manipulate parts of an image, as well as painting techniques and the modifying of brush properties. Next up is the Text tool - a very simple tool to learn. Click "continue" below to move on.

 

 

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