Short Note on Photoshop Brush

Photoshop Brush

Adobe Photoshop has become undoubtedly one of the best solutions for image based services. Now with the development of the products it has introduced some wonderful tools for using brushes. These brushes have added an extra advantages to all the design services.  In this tutorial we’ll be showing you how to get the best from them. We will also discuss how to make your own brushes.

The basics
Let us first open a new blank document in Photoshop and the Brush Tool be brought by clicking on the Tools palette, or by hitting the ‘B’ on the keyboard.

Selecting Brush Tool from Tools palette

The brush size can be easily defined and differentiated in different sizes. To do this we have to just click on the Brush drop down list in the toolbar. Then you will see something like this:

Brush Size Chooser

This palette allows you to change the size and “hardness” of your brush, and also to choose from a predefined list of brushes that ship with Photoshop. If you use a particular size of brush a lot, and it’s not in the predefined list, you can save it by clicking on the little arrow at the top right of the palette and choosing New Brush Preset. Your brush will then appear in the list.

Defining your own brushes

That’s the basics of accessing your brushes, but what can we do with them now? One of the great features about the brushes in Photoshop is being able to create your own from virtually any shape you’ve drawn.

Here’s an example. In the grab below, I’ve created a flower from a photograph by selecting the colour from the petals, deleting everything else and filling the remaining image with black. You can see how to do this in our “Selecting stuff” tutorial. The flower is sitting on its own layer.

Defining Own Brush

If I simply go to Image > Define Brush Preset  (or Define Brush in earlier versions of the software), my shape will automatically turn up in the Brushes palette, and I can then “paint” with my new shape, which will take the colour of the current foreground colour in the Tools palette:

Painting with user defined brush

The Brushes palette

To get the best out of it though, you need to dig a little deeper for more options. If you simply paint with the default settings it really just gives you an ill-defined line or blob of your chosen shape. In CS2, though, you have a lot more control.

Open the Brushes palette (Window > Brushes) and on the left you’ll see an array of options to define what happens when you “draw” onto the canvas. For instance, the “Shape Dynamics” section allows you to experiment with multiple sizes and orientations of your chosen brush, all dynamically created on the fly as you draw.

One of the most important sections is “Scattering”. These controls allow you to create more diffuse patterns. Other options allow for control over opacity, colour etc. You can even add a pattern to your strokes, or use two brushes simultaneously.

Brush Palette

One of the great results of this massive range of controls is that the likelihood of “happy accidents” is increased, and you can get some very individual results with really very little effort. Try repeating strokes of the brush with different settings/colours on different layers.

Final Result

Credit: elated.com