From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

Mixer brush - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

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Mixer brush

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- [Instructor] Drawing and painting in Photoshop is normally done with the brush tool, If I click and hold the brush tool icon here, in the toolbar, we will find an interesting variation of the brush tool and that's the mixer brush tool. At its most basic configuration, the mixer brush tool behaves exactly like the brush tool. By most basic configuration, I mean that here next to this color swatch in the options bar, under this little pull down arrow, we have load solid colors only selected. Also, these little buttons here are both activated. The wet setting is set to 0%, and the load is set to 100%. The load defines the amount of paint that is loaded into our brush. If it's set to 100%, we will never see the color ending. If we set it to a low setting, we will see that our brush stroke fades because the color that is loaded into the mixer brush tool is depleting. Normally, setting the load to 100% makes the most sense. If you now change the other settings of the mixer brush tool, we will see some very complex behavior. If we increase the VAT value to only 1%, we unlock a third value, the mix value. At 1% wet, our mixer brush tool starts to behave a little bit different from the brush tool. We see that we now have a smooth entry point into our brush stroke and a smooth exit point. With the mix setting, we can control how smooth this color application will become. Actually what we are controlling here with a mix value is how much of the color that is already on our digital canvas will be picked up by our brush stroke? With a different color, we will see that more clearly. The color that we apply is now mixed with a color that is already on the canvas. But actually, if we ramp up our mix value up to 100%, we will see that our mixer brush tool actually does nothing because now, 100% of the color that is already on the digital canvas will be picked up by our brush and that's why we don't see any effect, because the color that we have chosen as the foreground color has no effect at 100% mix. However, if we now ramp up the VAT value, we will see that our brush picks up the color that is already on the canvas and smears it along its path. A lower value will have a lesser effect and a higher value will make our stroke really smeary. And when we now lower the mix value, we will combine this smearing of color with the application of our foreground color, mixing it with the background, and we get some really interesting effects here. It gets even more wild when we now start to change the option here and uncheck load solid colors only. What we can now do is by holding the alt key on the keyboard, we will activate these little cross hairs here and if we now click on the canvas, the mixer brush tool will pick up the portion of the canvas here. We can actually see it in the swatch up here, and now we can paint with this color swatch. Let's turn down the mix value so that we can see the effect. We now have a multicolored brush tip, which is something that we normally cannot have in Photoshop but the mixer brush tool can do it. The mixer brush tool is a fascinating alternative to the brush tool and brings digital painting in Photoshop to a whole new level.

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