How to use Photoshop brushes
Use brushes to fix flaws and enhance your images with precise accuracy and control.
Published
It is really impressive what you can do with brushes in Photoshop.
They're really powerful, and just because you're not using the brushes tool doesn't mean you're not using brushes.
In fact, they're in a number of tools.
If you're blurring out or smudging or sharpening something, if you're using the healing brush of course, if you're erasing something, you're going to be using the brushes.
And that's what I want to review.
And really let's just talk about the fundamentals.
And in fact, I'm going to start with the brush tool.
And right up here you'll notice you have a couple different options.
You have your size and then the hardness.
Now I can go ahead and paint accordingly.
You can see what that looks like.
And I can control the size with my bracket keys.
So larger hitting the right bracket, smaller hitting the left bracket.
So I can control the size.
Not only that, but if I held down the shift key, I can control the hardness.
So that's right up here, the hardness.
Let's see what that looks like.
As I make it harder by holding down the shift key, using the right bracket you can see how hard it gets and then even making it smoother by using the left bracket, as you can see right there.
All right.
So that's roughly the fundamentals of controlling the brush, but really we can go beyond that.
You have the different modes you can use with your brushes.
Now the key thing here is if you wanted to use overlay, for instance, you'd have to actually have an image.
You'd have to be on that image layer, and then you'd have to paint accordingly.
So that's how the layer mode works.
But you're actually doing it destructively, if you will.
So it's actually a little more wise to actually work on a separate layer, make sure your brush mode is on normal, and to then change your layer mode to overlay.
With that done, zoom out a little bit, and I can start to work on this image.
And as I start to paint, you can see, well, it's pretty drastic.
It's pretty sharp what's happening there.
In fact, I do want to bring out more color but now quite that strong.
So you might play with the opacity.
Now what's the difference between opacity and flow?
Well, opacity if I have this set down to say 25%, and as I click it's always going to be at 25%.
That might be fine for some cases, but if I'm ever working and I want to actually have more of a flow, so as I click on an area it builds up, well that's when you're going to deal with flow.
And then there's a layering that happens.
So as I press harder up here, you can see that's already at 100%, and then we can kind of trail off there and just kind of paint the way we want to much more easily, as you can see, when we start to fill in this sky.
Even that's a little drastic.
Nonetheless, you can always jump in and, like I was saying earlier, use the eraser and your bracket keys to decrease or increase the size when it comes to the eraser just to make that a little more soft.
Okay, I do want somewhat of a surreal scene.
In fact, I'm going to play with this some more.
I can click up here and see the different options, or I can just right click anywhere and you'll see all these other options.
So you have pencils, different brushes.
Let's take one that looks pretty interesting, this one right here, this fan brush.
Selecting it, notice how you get a preview of it right over here.
So I'll just change the color to somewhat of a gold color, and on a new layer you can see what that looks like.
It's pretty straightforward.
But where this gets fun is when you have a pressure-sensitive stylus.
So I have a Wacom Intuos and I can jump in.
And you can see, as I tilt it, I get those different angles and those different directions.
And I can try to paint in some more bright grass right down here and have some fun with it.
But let's go beyond the out-of-box brush that we have.
In fact, let's go down here.
We have our brush presets, which is what I was working in, but let's look at our brushes because you have so many other controls.
In fact, you can go down in here into color dynamics, which I find pretty unique because it will start mixing the foreground and background colors.
So that's actually what I want, and there's other things you can do.
You can have wet edges, and it will treat it as if it's actually wet edges.
So it's really pretty impressive what you can do in just picking a couple settings.
In fact, let's change that background color to black just like that, and as you can see, you can see that black right there.
You can even change that color to white as we get further in here, start to control.
And again, it's actually pushing around pixels for that grass.
So again, I'm just roughly painting this particular image.
You can have as much fun as you want sort of getting a painterly effect with this scene.
But really I want to go beyond even these brushes, even as I take down that opacity.
I want to actually show you how else you can use brushes because I happen to have this text right here.
And in fact, you can use something like the brush.
From here I can paint on this layer mask that I already have.
In fact, what I want to do is I want to go beyond this brush because as I scroll down, you can see all the different ones.
In fact, you have grass right here.
So I can select that grass to start to erase, if you will, basically painting in black on this layer.
And I can start to again just kind of make it look like the grass is actually overlaying that text there.
How can you make your own brush?
Well, you can do that pretty easily.
In fact, jumping in here notice how I have this image.
You can take any item that you can select, and you can define it as a brush preset.
Now, I have that brush right there.
In fact, let's just change this to red on a new layer still using some of the different shape dynamics, adjusting the scattering so you can see how much it's going to scatter, and then adjusting the color dynamics as well.
With that done, just really just using those hearts you can see what we can get.
And really at this point, you can just have fun creating using the brushes in Photoshop.
But it doesn't have to stop there, because there happens to be a new Adobe Brushes app enabling you to create brushes on the go, if you will, and then sync those directly to Photoshop for you to use whenever you please.
So check that out and have fun exploring everything that brushes can do for you.
Contributor
Paul Trani
