From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Introducing the Brush tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Introducing the Brush tool

- [Narrator] All right, I'll start by introducing you to the primary painting tool inside Photoshop, which is the brush tool. And we'll be painting inside this image here from the Dreamstime image library. All right, now, to get to the brush tool you click on this icon right here, and if you're not seeing it by the way, then click and hold on that tool to bring up a fly out menu and select the brush tool from the top of the fly out menu. Notice it has a keyboard shortcut of B for brush. Now by default, this tool paints a very thin soft line. And incidentally to reset any tool to its factory default settings in Photoshop, you go up to its icon on the far left side of the options bar. You right click on it, and you choose reset tool. And now notice, if I start painting and I'm just painting with a mouse, which is why it looks pretty bad right now, then I'll be painting with the foreground color which by default is black. But you can change that color to anything you want by clicking on that color swatch, to bring up the color picker dialog box. And I'll just go ahead and change this guy to a fairly robust shade of red. So the heat value is zero degrees, the saturation is 100%, the brightness is 70%. Who cares, it's a color. And now notice as soon as I started painting again, I am now painting with that shade of red. All right, but let's say that you don't want this tiny little soft brush. Well, then you can go up here to the options bar, and click on this guy right here, and then you can change the size which is going to be the diameter of the brush, and you could increase the hardness as well so that it's not so terribly soft, or if you like, you can check out these folders here. So, I'm going to twirl open general brushes, by clicking on it's twirly triangle, and I'll scroll down a list until I come to this guy, hard round pressure size. And I'll just go ahead and select it. And I might increase the size value to something like let's say 80 pixels, and then I'll press the Enter key or the return key on the Mac to dismiss that panel. And now notice if I drag, I end up with a much thicker brushstroke. All right, now the interesting thing about the brush tool is that it doesn't lay down a continuous brushstroke the way you would think, rather it's laying down dollops of paint that start off life as a circle. So it's laying down a ton of circles in a row. And so notice if I right click on the brush tool once again, up here in the options bar and choose reset tool, and then I click on that icon. And this time I dial in a size value of 80, and I changed the hardness to 100%, but I don't select any of the predefined settings. I'll just go ahead and twirl that folder close. And I start painting a brushstroke. You may notice that it's a little bit lumpy and it's kind of hard to see in this case. So what I'm going to do, is go to the window menu and choose the brush settings command. Because there's a setting I want you to know about right up front. So, there's our size value, there's our hardness value, we've already seen those guys. Here's spacing, do you see how lumpy this brushstroke is, the brushstroke preview? Well, if you were to crank that value up, it's going to get lumpier and lumpier still. And that's because Photoshop is laying down dollops of paint. And so notice if I start painting like so, I am going to get not so much a lumpy brushstroke at this point, but almost a dotted line. If you want a nice smooth brushstroke, then you want to take this value down to 10%, or lower at which things are going to be very smooth indeed. In order to demonstrate that, I'll just go ahead and swap my foreground and background colors. So my foreground color is white. And I will paint another brushstroke. Now, the only thing about reducing the spacing value, is it's going to make it harder for Photoshop to keep up with you. So, if I take that spacing value way down to one, then you can see, well, actually it's doing pretty good on this machine, but depending on the speed of your system, it may have problems keeping up. And notice right there that I have this flat area. I also have another flat area over here at this point in the brushstroke. Which is why I recommend a spacing value around 10%. But I just want to point that guy out, because it currently only exists in the brush settings panel. You can't get to it from the options bar as you can see right here. And by the way, you can get to all those options by just right clicking inside the image window as well except again, that settings value is missing. And then in dismiss this panel by the way, all you have to do is press the Enter key. And even though we haven't created anything pretty so far, those are a few basics of working with the brush tool including how to change the color, how to change the size and hardness, and how most importantly, to get to that spacing value.

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