116. Paint an Area of a Photo with a Brush Before You Begin  110 About the Toolbox
113 Select a Color to Work With
See Also  115 Draw on a Photo with a Pencil
The Pencil draws lines; the Brush works in smoother, softer, and more variable strokes. For that and many other reasons, you probably will find the Brush a much more versatile tool. You can use it to fix someone's hair or darken their eyelashes. You can paint a flowery or leafy border around an image. Among the Brush tool's host of options are the standard settings for the brush tip preset, which takes care of the tool's Size, Mode, and Opacity. These options can be set separately (see 111 About Tool Options). Also on the Options bar, the More Options button reveals just what it promises: a collection of brush dynamics options you can apply to the brush before you paint onto a picture. The dynamics settings are not critical, nor do you need to concern yourself with them every time you pick up the brush. Instead, they come into play when you want to have fun making a quintessentially unique tool that you can perhaps save in a library and use later. (See 112 About Preset Manager for details on creating and saving presets.) Among the dynamics options are settings for the rate at which a brush stroke fades out, and the rate at which patterns repeat themselves or change color. 1. | Select the Brush Tool
Open an image in the Editor in Standard Edit mode and save it in Photoshop (*.psd) format. In the Layers palette, select the layer you want to paint on. Select the Brush tool in the Toolbox. You can click the tool's icon, or you can press the keyboard shortcut B.
| 2. | Set Tool Options
Select a brush tip, adjust its Size, and set other options such as Mode and Opacity as desired. Set the foreground color swatch at the bottom of the Toolbox to the color you want to apply with the brush.
| 3. | Specify More Options
To indulge yourself with settings that create unique and imaginative tools, click the More Options button on the Options bar to display Additional Brush Options. Adjust the settings for the following options to get the effect you're looking for:
 - Spacing. All brush strokes are actually made up of repeated points of an applied pattern. The appearance of a smooth and uninterrupted stroke is actually an illusion. For all brush strokes, the Editor determines how far the tool must travel on the image before it deposits another spot of paint. Each deposit is called a step. The Spacing setting expresses the gap between steps as a percentage of the brush's current Size setting. At 100%, for example, the pointer will leave gaps that are the same diameter as the brush Size. At a lesser percentage, the steps are spaced more closely together; and at a much lesser percentage, the spotting becomes unnoticeable. At 500%, the stroke leaves gaps that are five times the size of the brush Size. This might be what you want if you need an instant dotted line or a string of cloud puffs.
- Fade. This setting enables a brushstroke to "run out of steam," like a paint brush going dry. It is expressed as the number of steps before the brush runs out of paint. With a high Spacing value, set Fade low to be noticeable; if Spacing is set low, more steps will take place for any given brushstroke length, so set Fade higher to avoid running out of paint early. When Fade is set to 0, the brush never runs out of paint.
NOTE  | The Airbrush option of the Brush tool changes the meaning of the Spacing dynamics setting. Although the range of values remains the same, it changes to refer not to distance between points on the page, but to intervals of time. The Airbrush applies paint for as long as you hold the mouse button down. So if you hold it down and move the pointer slowly, the Airbrush determines how long a period of time to wait to deposit the next step, based on how high Spacing has been set to. See 117 Paint an Area of a Photo with the Airbrush for details. |
- Hue Jitter. This setting enables the brushstroke to vary the shade of each step, on occasion or often, between the foreground and background colors. When set to 100%, the brush frequently alternates between these two colors. At a lower percentage, the brushstroke varies less frequently; and at much lower percentages (but still above 0%), the brush occasionally applies subtle blends between the foreground and background colors.
- Hardness. Expressed as a percentage, Hardness governs the relative amount of each brushstroke step that is devoted to pure tone. The remainder is used for blending the paint color with its surroundings. For example, a 33% setting designates that the core one-third of the step is devoted to pure, unblended color. This is important, because if you choose a hollow brush tip such as an unfilled star, in order for some portion of each brush step to be pure color, the Hardness setting must be extended past the area of hollowness. At a 100% setting, no part of the brush stroke is made up of blended color (making the brush tip the equivalent of using the Pencil tool); at 0%, no part is made up of pure color.
- Scatter. Expressed as a percentage, the Scatter setting governs the maximum relative amount of displacement each step of the brushstroke can assume from the tip of the brush. Set at a high value, steps dance around the center of the tool. With an unusual brush tip pattern, such as stars, balloons, or blades of grass, a high Scatter setting lets you create instant pointillism and frivolity.
- Angle. This setting governs the tilt of the brush tip in degrees. Its range is 180° to +180°, with a positive setting twisting the brush tip counter-clockwise from straight east. With a round brush tip, this setting is inconsequential. For a wedged tip, however, the Angle setting enables you to tilt the brush the way you'd tip the nib of a calligraphy pen, enabling such effects as thin side-to-side strokes and thick downstrokes.
- Roundness. A deceptively named setting. Expressed as a percentage, it actually governs the height of the brush tip (measuring from bottom to top). More accurately, it's an expression of the relative "un-flatness" of the brush tip. For a round brush tip, a high Roundness setting does make the tip more circular, but for a different shape (even one that isn't round), a high setting doesn't make the tip any rounder but does make it taller. A low setting makes the tip flatter. You can create a perfect rectangular calligraphy tip using a square brush tip preset with an Angle setting of 30° and a Roundness setting of 40%.
TIP  | The changes you make to the dynamics of any brush tip are not automatically saved to the slot in the Brushes palette from which you originally loaded the brush tip. To save a brush tip you like and want to use again, use the Preset Manager. See 112 About Preset Manager for a description. To change brush tips at any time, right-click the image. The Brush Presets palette appears. Choose a new tip from the Brushes list and click the X button to dismiss the palette. Your image might have many layers whose contents simultaneously occupy a single point on an image. While you're painting, you can change from layer to layer as needed to see a list of all layers that have contents at a given point, hold down Ctrl and right-click that point. A pop-up menu lists the names of all layers at that point. Select a layer from this list and continue painting. |
To use the same dynamics settings for any new brush tip you choose, enable the Keep These Settings for All Brushes check box. When you change to a new tip, and with this option enabled, all your scattering, jitter, fade, and other dynamics are retained.
| 4. | Apply Brush to the Image
Begin the brushstroke by clicking and holding the mouse button where you want to start painting. For a pen tablet, position the pointer by hovering the pen, then tap and hold the pen where you want the brushstroke to begin.
To paint a freehand brushstroke, continue holding the button down as you drag the mouse. The brushstroke you paint follows your pointer.
To paint a straight horizontal or vertical line, press Shift now and continue dragging the mouse. The Editor senses whether you intend for the line to move up, right, left, or down, by the general direction in which you're moving the mouseit doesn't have to be exact.
To paint a straight line between points, release the mouse button. For a pen tablet, lift the pen. Move the pointer to where you want the end of the line to appear. Press Shift then click this point. You can continue painting from hereeither a freehand brushstroke or another straight line.
| 5. | View the Result
After you're satisfied with the result, make any other changes you want, then save the result in JPEG or TIFF format, leaving your PSD image with its layers (if any) intact so that you can return at a later time and make different adjustments if you want.
NOTE | If you use a soft brush tip and hold the brush still while depressing the mouse button, paint will slowly fill out to the edges of the tip, which gives the appearance of "building up." Set Step and Fade to a low value to get an airbrush that fades away at the end of the stroke. |
For most applications of the Brush tool, even with heavy dynamics settings such as Hue Jitter and Scatter, your brushstroke will be recognizable as a brushstroke. This isn't generally the tool you'll use to make a mark on your photo that's unnoticeable; when you want to not be noticed, use the Clone Stamp tool or one of the healing brushes instead. With that said, the maple leaves I've drawn here blend nicely with the leaves in the photo, giving you the impression of looking out across the lawn through a leaf-filled window. Again, this isn't a maple-leaf picture frame but a leaf-shaped brush tip with high Scatter and high Hue Jitter settings.
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