Digital Painting


Until now, we've been looking at Photoshop as a tool specifically for working with existing images and photographs. In reality, there's a whole other side to Photoshop, in which your screen is a canvas and your colors are paints and your pressure- sensitive tablet (or mouse) is your paintbrush.

Choosing Colors

Photoshop enables you to choose colors in just about any way you desire. You can specify colors in RGB, CMYK, HSB, Lab, or Hexadecimal. Additionally, Photoshop ships with many different industry-standard custom color libraries such as Pantone and TOYO.

You can choose colors in Photoshop in any of several ways:

  • Click on the Foreground or Background color proxy in the toolbox Photoshop presents you with the Color Picker (see Figure 5.64), where you can choose just about any color, including industry-standard spot colors (by clicking on the Color Libraries button).

    Figure 5.64. The Photoshop Color Picker.


  • Click on the Foreground or Background color proxy in the Color palette Photoshop presents you with the Color Picker, as just described (see Figure 5.65).

    Figure 5.65. The Foreground and Background color proxies in the Color palette.


  • Click anywhere on the color ramp at the bottom of the Color palette This changes, depending on the color mode you have selected, and also provides quick shortcuts to black and white (see Figure 5.66).

    Figure 5.66. The color ramp in the Color palette.


  • Adjust the color sliders in the Color palette You can choose to use the sliders to choose a color by eye, or you can enter values directly for a specific color.

  • Choose a color from the Swatches palette You can store your own custom colors as well as access other color libraries from the Swatches palette flyout menu (see Figure 5.67).

    Figure 5.67. Choosing a color library from the Swatches palette.


  • Use the eyedropper tool Sample a color from any area on your document or screen.

By the Way

To quickly fill an area with the Foreground color, press Option+Delete (Alt+Delete).


Gradients

Before soft drop shadows became the latest design fad, there were gradients: fills that fade gradually from one color to another, sometimes with multiple colors (that is, a color spectrum). Gradients can also fade from a color to transparent.

Creating gradients in Photoshop is quite easy, and there are basically two ways to accomplish the task. The first way is to add a Gradient Overlay layer effect, as discussed earlier when talking about layer styles (see Figure 5.68). The secondand far more popularway is to use the Gradient tool.

Figure 5.68. The Gradient Overlay settings in the Layer Style dialog box.


With the Gradient tool selected, the Tool Options bar changes to reflect the different options you have for applying gradients. Click on the pop-up arrow to get a list of predefined gradients (see Figure 5.69), and you can choose from any of five types of gradients: linear, radial, angle, reflected, and diamond.

Figure 5.69. Choosing a predefined gradient from the Tool Options bar.


To apply a linear gradient, with the Gradient tool selected, position your cursor at the point you want the leftmost color of the gradient to begin. Press and hold the mouse button while you drag to the place where you want the rightmost color of the gradient to end (see Figure 5.70). When you release the mouse, Photoshop applies the gradient.

Figure 5.70. Dragging with the Gradient tool to apply a gradient.


By the Way

If you don't have a selection made, using the Gradient tool results in a gradient that fills the entire layer.


By the Way

You can drag your gradient outside of your selection, or even the document window, so that only a portion of the gradient is applied.


You can also create your own gradients by clicking on the gradient proxy in the Tool Options bar to open the Gradient Editor (see Figure 5.71). Click on the New button to define a new gradient. Add a new color stop by clicking in an empty area under the gradient. You can edit the colors by double-clicking on the color-stop arrow. Arrows that appear above the gradient are opacity stops, and they let you define the transparency of the gradient at a specific point. You can have as many stops as you want in your gradient. The little diamonds that appear in between the color stops are the midpoint of that section of the gradient; at that point, there's 50% of each color. You can adjust those points by dragging them left and right as well.

Figure 5.71. The Gradient Editor dialog box.


By the Way

Remember that using the Quick Mask feature along with the Gradient tool can help you create faded selections in the blink of an eye.


The Brush and Pencil Tools

To draw or paint with Photoshop, you can use either the Pencil tool or the Paintbrush tool. The Pencil tool is akin to the speedball inking pens of yesterday, enabling you to lay down solid pixels using different brush shapes (see Figure 5.72). It's great for touching up small areas or for drawing lines and the like. The Paintbrush tool, on the other hand, has more of an organic feel to it, and you can even set it to act and feel like an airbrush (see Figure 5.73). To use these tools, simply choose a brush shape from the pop-up menu in the Tool Options bar (see Figure 5.74) and have fun painting.

Figure 5.72. Drawing with the Pencil tool.


Figure 5.73. Drawing with the Paintbrush tool.


Figure 5.74. Choosing a brush from the Tool Options bar.


Did you Know?

Pressing the bracket keys ([ and ]) on your keyboard is a quick way to increase or decrease your brush size.


The power of the Brush tool comes from the brush engine inside Photoshop.

The Brush Engine

Historically, when it came to organic painterly drawing, Photoshop had always played second fiddle to another program, called Painter. But that changed when Adobe introduced the new brush engine back in Photoshop 7.

Let's take a closer look at the incredibly powerful brush features. Click once on the button that appears at the far right of the Tool Options bar when the Brush tool is selected (see Figure 5.75), or choose Window, Brushes to open the Brushes palette. Along the left side of the palette are all the settings you can apply to a brush; the right side contains all the specific controls for each setting, and the bottom features a real-time preview of your brush (see Figure 5.76).

Figure 5.75. The Brushes palette icon in the Tool Options bar.


Figure 5.76. The Photoshop CS2 Brushes palette.


Did you Know?

Want more brushes? You can access hundreds of brushes from the Brushes palette flyout menu.


Click on each of the settings along the left to customize the behavior of your brush. With these settings, painters and illustrators can finally get the control they want and need right in Photoshop. For example, the Jitter attributes allow for a level of randomness that gives the brushes a real hand-drawn quality. When you're done finding the right settings for your brush, you can save them to use again later.

Defining Your Own Brush

Photoshop's brush engine lets you define your own custom brush shapes. Start with a grayscale image, and silhouette it. Then select it and choose Edit, Define Brush Preset (see Figure 5.77). Give your custom brush shape a name, and when you choose the Brush tool, you'll see your custom shape appear in the Brush Tip Shape list.

Figure 5.77. Defining a custom brush shape.


History Brush

Adobe hasn't invented time travel just yet (I'm sure it will be in the next version, though), but there is a way to go back in time using Photoshop's History Brush.

The History Brush paints in your current file (or canvas) using pixels from a snapshot or a previous state of the file. For example, say that when you first opened your file, the sky in the photo was blue. Then you changed that blue color to orange. If you select the History Brush and indicate the source to be the original snapshot, painting with the History Brush will produce blue pixels as you paint on the sky. This is one way to get the popular "one splash of color in a black-and-white photo" effect.

By the Way

Know Your History

Although Photoshop doesn't have multiple undos (as InDesign and Illustrator do, for example), it does have something called the History palette, which records each step you make as you work. You can step backward one step at a time, or you can jump to a previous step by clicking on the entries in the History palette (see Figure 5.78). Clicking on the Create New Snapshot button freezes the state of your document in time. This snapshot of your document can be used as a reference for other functions (such as the History Brush). Snapshots are stored near the top of the palette; the bottom part of the palette is a running history of the file itself (since the last time it was opened).

Figure 5.78. The top section of the History palette contains snapshots; the lower section takes note of each step you take.



To use the brush, select the History Brush from the toolbox (see Figure 5.79) and then open the History palette. To the left of each entry in the History palette is an empty square, and clicking there selects it as the source for the History Brush (indicated by an icon).

Figure 5.79. Choosing the History Brush tool from the toolbox.


Art History Brush

A variation of the History Brush, the Art History Brush lets you paint pixels from a previous history state or snapshot, but with a twist. Instead of just copying the pixels exactly, you can paint with artistic brushes, giving a really creative look to your photos. With the Art History Brush's default settings, and using the same method as with the History Brush, the brush seems to produce very odd results. To best see the effect, you should create a new blank layer and fill it white. As you paint, you can easily see how the Art History Brush is re-creating the art that was in the snapshot, yet with a very stylized look (see Figure 5.80).

Figure 5.80. Painting with the Art History Brush on a new white layer.


In the Tool Options bar, you can adjust any of several options for the Art History Brush. It's a good idea to decrease the brush size to 35 pixels so you can better see the effect. You'll also want to experiment with the options in the Style pop-up menu (see Figure 5.81). Additionally, you can choose just about any brush shape and size via the Brushes palette.

Figure 5.81. Choosing a style from the Art History Brush's Tool Options bar.


Did you Know?

Remember, if you ever get tool settings just right and you know you're going to want to use that combination of settings again in the future, you can save it as a tool preset.




Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Creative Suite 2 All in One
Sams Teach Yourself Creative Suite 2 All in One
ISBN: 067232752X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 225
Authors: Mordy Golding

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net