Week #6
May 3 - 8
🖌️ Painting with Brushes in PS 🖌️
painting tools in PS
The Brush tool and the Pencil tool work like traditional drawing tools applying color with brush strokes. Tools like the Mixer Brush, Eraser tool, Blur tool, Burn, and Smudge tool modify the existing colors in the image.
Basic Brushes
The Shortcut for the brush tool is letter B. From the Window menu or the Toggles in the tool's menu bar, you can have access to the brush panel and Brush setting panel. To adjust the size of the brush, press the left bracket key ( [ ) repeatedly to make the cursor smaller or the right bracket key ( ] ) to make it larger. Or you can hold Alt+Ctrl (pay attention: Ctrl not Command) and drag your mouse to the right or left.
There are several built-in brush strokes with different shapes. You can apply color gradually, with soft edges brushes. The Brush Settings panel lets you modify existing brushes and design new custom brushes.
Through the tool menu, you can have access to Brush Panel, Brush Setting Panel, change the opacity, and adjust the value for flow and smoothness!
Opacity Vs Flow
if you paint with 50% Opacity, you couldn’t lay more than 50% of color down on your canvas until you picked up your brush and applied it again. Flow seems similar to opacity because allows you to build up color over and over again, but there is one big difference. Setting a Low Flow rather than Opacity will give you better results.
Adjust the size/hardness of a brush
As I mentioned, you can hold Alt+Ctrl (pay attention: Ctrl not Command) and drag your mouse to the right or left. If you hold Ctrl+Alt and drag your mouse vertically (up and down) you can change the harness of your brush
Import brushes
You can import a wide variety of free and purchased brushes into Photoshop. In the Brushes panel, from the flyout menu, choose Get More Brushes.
With Photoshop running, double-click the downloaded ABR file and open it with photoshop (choose Photoshop as an application to run it). The new brush pack is now displayed in the Brushes panel!
Another website to get brushes:
Some Tips:
You can pick a color with the eyedropper tool in order to quickly change the brush color! choose a brush (B) and hold Alt and click, it will pick the color for you!
Instead of Opacity, work with lower Flow for better blending.
Hard brushes are good for sketching or filling the shape.
Soft round is good for blending.
The low opacity of the eraser tool is good for adding highlights.
Texture brushes are good to mimic the texture of the surface we paint on.
Work with alternative tools in the toolbar such as: Blur, Smudge, Burn, Dodge.
Color Replacement Tool
This tool simply changes the color of pixels in your image. The Color Replacement Tool is nested behind Photoshop's regular Brush Tool in the Tools panel.
Mixer brush:
The Mixer brush takes the pixels from underneath layer/layers and blends them together. It is a very powerful tool to blend colors. It works with all kinds of brushes, so don't be confused! Choose the Mixer Brush and then change the brush from the option bar of the tool! You can load any color by selecting the Color toggle in the Option bar!
Tips:
Different brushes have different dry out.
Experiment with Presets and see how different options have different values in them.
Value 0 for the Load means no color.
Settings act differently based on the brush tip.
When the color is wetter, it becomes less saturated but it lasts longer on the brush.
When Wet is 0, you can't mix the color with other colors.
You can sample color with holding Alt, it clones the color with the mixer brush.
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