Lesson on Everything About Page-design (LEAP) | March 2021

BRUSH BASICS​

1. What Is the Brush Tool in Photoshop?
The Brush Tool is a primary painting tool. It works like a traditional drawing tool by applying color using strokes. It's located in the standard toolbar, and its default shortcut is the letter B.

Photoshop includes several built-in presets, which are pre-made brushes ready to use.

2. The Basics
Brush Tip
The Brush Tip settings allow you to modify the way to add colors on a Photoshop document using the Brush Tool. When you click on the Brush Preset Picker in the default Options Panel, you will see several built-in presets. On many of the presets, you can easily adjust two very important values:

1. Size increases or decreases the size of the brush tip. The default shortcuts to increase or decrease are the [ key and ] key.
   
2. Hardness increases or decreases the brush tip's border strength. 0% means a soft border, and 100% a precise border.

Foreground Color
The color being applied by the brush tip is controlled by the Foreground Color, found at the bottom of the Tools toolbar. To change the brush color in Photoshop, click on the Foreground Color and use the Color Picker to choose a new color.

Brush Modes
Each time you paint something using the Brush Tool, you can choose a Blending Mode for the stroke. A Blending Mode is a way to change how a brushstroke interacts with the pixels behind the stroke. Let's try some of them.

Modes: Normal, Dissolve, Behind, and Clear

1. The first on the list is Normal Mode, which paints the color as is.
2. Dissolve Mode adds some noise at the edge of the brush stroke.
3. Behind Mode paints behind an existing stroke, even if they are both on the same layer.
4. And then Clear Mode. The “Clear” blend mode turns the pixels you paint on transparent, much like the Eraser tool.

Opacity
The Opacity value is a percentage of transparency; 100% means a full-color stroke, while a smaller percentage indicates a more transparent stroke.

Flow
The Flow setting controls the speed at which paint is laid down. Each pass of the brush over the same spot will build more and more paint. Unlike with Opacity, you don’t have to lift your brush, making it ideal for gradually building up things like color, light, and shadows!

Shortcut: (Thanks Dalis!)
1. CLICK and HOLD the ALT key (for mac is CTRL + ALT)
2. Then drag either up and down or left and right.
one is hardness other is opacity.

ADVANCED BRUSHES (part 1)​

Loading brushes
If you purchase a kit of brushes, you can load them just by dragging the "brushes" icon into photoshop. Alternately, you can click on the 3 lines at the top right of the brushes menu and then "import brushes"



Brush Settings (part 1)

1. Spacing - Lets start by exploring the Spacing, a very powerful option. Per default the spacing is set to 25% for the Brush. Play around to adjust the spacing for your brush, which will look different for each brush.




2. Shape Dynamics (Size/Angle Jitter)
Size Jitter
This setting controls the size of the brush tip each time a new shape is to be painted on the canvas — they don’t all have to share the same size. The higher the Size Jitter setting, the higher the range in size will be between the smallest and the largest leaf stamped on the page.
Angle Jitter
Angle Jitter changes the orientation, or angle, of your brush.



3. Scattering
This is how spread out the brush tips are. With a Scatter of 0% the leaf will be in a perfect horizontal line. In the image below you can see how the dots scatters out from this line when we move the slider to around 500%. If you click the check box labeled ‘Both Axes,’ the scatter will move both along the horizontal and the vertical axes.


Useful example....make your own confetti!

 

Thank you Christa for these screenshots from PSE =)









Loading Brushes and Scatter in PSE

 

Here is an example of using a brush in dissolve mode