The Painting Tools

Now turn your attention to the Painting tools. For the rest of this hour , you'll be working with the Brush, Eraser, and Pencil tools.

Try it Yourself

Working with the Painting Tool

Before you go any further, why not stop and try some of these tools? Follow these steps:

1.	Create a new document, making the page big enough so that you have some elbow room. The default size , 7 by 5 inches, is fine.
2.	On the right side of the screen, look for the Swatches palette. If it's missing, open it from the Window menu. Click the tab to bring it forward, if necessary. Clicking Swatches opens an electronic paintbox. For now, just click any color you like.
3.	Press B to select the Brush from the toolbox.
4.	Click the down-pointing triangle next to the Brush icon in the Tool Options bar to open the Brushes menu. Choose a brush tip.
5.	Press and hold the mouse button as you drag the brush over the canvas to paint.
6.	Try the Pencil and Eraser tools, too. Press Shift+B to switch from the Brush to the Pencil and then press E to switch to the Eraser. See what changing the options does for each tool.

The Airbrush

The Airbrush is represented as an icon on the Tool Options bar when the Brush tool is active. Simply click the icon to change the Brush tool's behavior to that of an airbrush. It applies paint by spraying, rather than brushing. It's like an artist's airbrush that uses compressed air to blow paint through an adjustable nozzle. The Airbrush applies paint with diffused edges, and you can control how fast the paint is applied. You can adjust it to spray a constant stream or one that fades after a specified period. Experiment with different amounts of pressure and different brush sizes and shapes .

Remember that the longer you hold the Airbrush tool in a single spot, the darker and more saturated a color becomes, just as if you were spraying paint from an aerosol can.

Figure 7.9 shows a drawing done with just the Airbrush. The spotty effect comes from using a blending mode called Dissolve. (You'll learn about blending modes in Hour 8, "Digital Painting.")

Figure 7.9. Varying the pressure and changing brush sizes gives the picture some variety.

The Brush

The Brush tool is the workhorse of all the Painting tools in Photoshop. Press B to use the Brush, or select it in the toolbox. The Brush behaves very much like the Airbrush, except that paint is applied more evenly. That is to say, if you hold the mouse clicked in one area, paint does not continue to flow onto the canvas.

Better Brushes

Although you can press Caps Lock to get a precise painting cursor, there is an even better way. Instead, choose Edit Preferences Display & Cursors (Windows) or Photoshop Preferences Display & Cursors (Mac OS). In the dialog box that appears, look at the Painting Cursors section. Theres an option that allows you to choose from the following choices: Standard, Precise, and Brush Size. Choose Normal Brush Tipthis changes your painting cursor from a paintbrush or a crosshair to a shape that is the size of your brush.

If you need to paint a straight line, constrained either vertically or horizontally, hold down the Shift key as you drag the brush. To draw a straight line between two points at any angle, click the canvas once to set the first point, and then Shift+click to mark the end point. A line draws itself between the two points. Figure 7.10 shows some work with the Photoshop brushes. The artist started with a gradient. Then she used a smooth, moderate- sized , Wet Edges brush, and finally she used a brush that simulates grass. These are included in the default brush set.

Figure 7.10. This picture was painted with several different brushes.

The History Brush

The History Brush is a very useful tool when you're making changes in an image and aren't sure exactly how much change to make or where to make it. It enables you to selectively restore parts of the picture in which you've made a change, by selecting a brush size and painting out the new image with the old one. In Figure 7.11, the glass distortion filter has been applied to a photo, and then the History Brush was used to undo the effect of the filter in one area of the photo.

Figure 7.11. Notice that only the area where I've applied the History Brush is clear.

To use the History Brush, click the box at the left side of the History palette next to the image or state you want to use as the source. In Figure 7.11, I clicked the original image because I wanted to restore parts of it in the altered version. Then, click the History Brush, choose a brush shape, and start painting.

The Art History Brush

The Art History Brush shares space on the toolbox with the History Brush, and you can press Shift+Y to toggle between them. The Art History Brush tool paints with a variety of stylized strokes, butlike the History Brushit uses the source data from a specified history state or snapshot. Following the motto "different strokes for different folks," it enables you to choose from a menu of different kinds of strokes. Then you paint onto the image with the chosen stroke and change your image into something perhaps resembling an impressionist watercolor, pointillist oil, or some other artistic style. Figure 7.12 shows the Art History Brush's Styles menu on the Tool Options bar.

Figure 7.12. Curls imitate Van Gogh at his wildest ; Dab does Monet; and Loose Medium resembles a Renoir. Experimenting with these is fun!

In Figure 7.13, I've applied the Art History Brush to a photo, and then gone back into it with the History Brush to restore some of the edges and detail.

Figure 7.13. Combining the Art History Brush and the History Brush enables you to restore some of the original image after you've changed it.

Try it Yourself

Apply the Art History Brush

Try the Art History Brush by following these steps:

1.	Start with an open image that you've modified extensively since you opened it (such as by applying a filter). On the History palette, click the left column next to the state you want to use as the source for the Art History Brush tool. You'll see a brush icon appear next to the thumbnail image.
2.	Click the Art History Brush. The Art History Brush tool is grouped with the History Brush tool in the toolbox.
3.	Set the blending mode to normal for now (you'll learn more about blending modes later). Set the opacity to 75%. You can change it as you see the effect.
4.	Choose an option from the Style menu. This choice controls the shape of the paint stroke.
5.	For Area, enter a value to specify the area covered by the paint strokes. Larger sizes mean larger areas covered and more paint strokes.
6.	Enter a Tolerance value or drag the slider to limit the regions where paint strokes can be applied. A low tolerance lets you paint unlimited strokes anywhere in the image. A high tolerance limits paint strokes to areas that differ significantly from the color in the source.
7.	Select a brush shape and start painting.

The Art History Brush is capable of some really nice effects, if you spend time learning to work with its settings. Like any complex tool, it takes practice to use correctly.

Color Replacement Tool

This is one of the most useful tools in Photoshop CS2. It functions like any other paintbrush, except that when you paint over an existing scene, it replaces the predominant color with whatever happens to be the foreground color in the toolbox. More importantly, it only changes the color, not the saturation or value. If you had a blue sky with lots of white fleecy clouds, and you wanted an orange sky with the same white clouds, no problem. Choose your shade of orange and apply the brush to the sky. Go ahead and paint right over the clouds. The orange won't affect them except to the same natural degree that the blue did.

Red Eye Tool

Similar to the Color Replacement tool, this tool is designed exclusively for fixing the photo problem known as red eye. You've seen itglowing red " devil " eyes in portraits of people, and blue or green "alien" eyes in pictures of animals. It's caused by light reflecting off of the back of the eye, and usually happens only with flash photography or in a very bright light. To fix red eye with this brush, just choose an appropriate eye color, dark brown or black, and paint over the red eye. We'll discuss this in greater detail in Hour 22, "Photo Repair-Color."

The Eraser

The next tool in the toolbox that we'll investigate is one that most of us, unfortunately , have to use far too often: the Eraser tool. You'll quickly learn that the hotkey to switch to the eraser is E. One nice thing about the Eraser is that its actions, too, can be undone, so if you happen to rid the canvas of an essential element that you wanted to keep, just choose Edit Undo to restore.

The Eraser tool is unique in that it can replicate the characteristics of the other tools. It can erase with soft edges as if it were a paintbrush painting with bleach. It can erase a single line of pixels, as if it were a pencil, or it can erase some of the density of the image, as if it were an airbrush. Of course, it can also act as an ordinary block eraser, removing whatever's there. The Options bar settings enable you to determine how the eraser will work: whether it will be a block or a brush, how much you want to erase, and even whether you want to erase to a step on the History palette or to the background color. The Eraser's Options bar is shown in Figure 7.14.

Figure 7.14. The Eraser and its options.

The Opacity slider controls how much is erased. This is useful for blending parts of images, and it also can create a nice watercolor effect.

The Fade option, found in the Control pop-up meu in the Brushes Palette's Color Dynamics section, works just like the Fade option when you're using the Airbrush option with a painting tool. When the Fade option is turned on, after a specified number of steps the Eraser no longer erases. This is useful to create feathering around irregularly shaped images. Set the Opacity slider to around 75%, set the Fade to about eight steps, and then drag away from the image you want to feather.

Instead of erasing to the background, you can choose Erase to History. This option (which appears as a check box in the Options bar) lets the Eraser work with the History palette, so you are actually erasing to an earlier version of the picture. Before you begin to erase or make any other drastic changes to your picture, you can take a snapshot of it by choosing New Snapshot from the History palette.

Experiment with this tool until you really understand what it's doing. It can save you lots of time when you're trying new techniques.

The other two erasers in the set are the Background Eraser and Magic Eraser. They share space in the toolbox with the regular Eraser. These erasers make it easier for you to erase sections of a layer to transparency. This can be helpful, for instance, if you need to delete the background area around a hard-edged object. The Background Eraser tool lets you erase pixels on a layer to transparency as you drag. By specifying different Sampling and Tolerance options, you can control the range of the transparency and the sharpness of its boundaries. In Figure 7.15, with the Sampling: Background Swatch option turned on in the Options bar, I've set the background color to the color of the background in my photo and am using the Background Eraser to remove only the card and the table beneath the mug. I can drag the eraser over the mug handle and remove only the stuff that shows through the hole in the handle.

Figure 7.15. You have to be very careful when the foreground object has colors similar to the background.

When you click in a layer with the Magic Eraser tool, the tool automatically erases all similarly colored pixels to transparency. You can choose to erase only contiguous pixels or all similar pixels on the current layer.

Try it Yourself

Use the Magic Eraser Tool

Now, you can try the Magic Eraser. Pick any image that has an area of fairly even color, such as the sky.

1.	Select the Magic Eraser. The Options bar will change to show its options.
2.	Enter a Tolerance value. The tolerance defines the range of colors that can be erased. A low tolerance erases pixels within a range of color values very similar to the pixel you click. A high tolerance erases pixels within a broader range.
3.	Specify the Opacity to define how much is erased. An opacity of 100% erases pixels to complete transparency. Lower opacity erases pixels to partial transparency.
4.	Set up the remaining options as needed: Choose Sample All Layers if you want to sample the erased color using combined data from all visible layers . Choose Anti-alias to smooth the edges of the area you erased. Choose Contiguous to erase only pixels of the same color contiguous to the one you clicked, or leave it unselected to erase all similar pixels in the image.
5.	Click in the part of the layer you want to erase. All similar pixels within the specified tolerance range will be erased to transparency.

In Figure 7.16, you can see the results of using the Magic Eraser tool. First, I isolated the sky by lassoing it. I did this because it was otherwise too close to the color of the pond. I've clicked three times to remove this much of the background. You might have to make several selections to erase all of the area you want to remove. You might also need to use the regular Eraser to clean up pixels that the Magic Eraser misses. But this tool is by far the fastest way to remove the background from an image. You'll use it a lot in Hour 20, "Compositing," when you work on composite images.

Figure 7.16. The Magic Eraser removes all pixels that are similar to the one you click.

The Pencil

The Pencil tool, in large measure, works like the Brush tool, except that it can create only hard-edged linesthat is to say, lines that don't fade at the edges as paintbrush lines can. Click the Pencil tool in the toolbox or press B to select it. (Press Shift+B if the Brush tool or the Color Replacement tool is selected.) The Pencil tool shares space in the toolbox with the Brush and the Color Replacement tool. Selecting it activates its options on the bar, as shown in Figure 7.17.

Figure 7.17. The drawing was done with a one-pixel pencil.

You can set the diameter of your Pencil in the Brush menu on the Options bar. You can also set all the other options, just as you have with all the other tools up to nowI won't bore you with a recap.

The Pencil tool does have one option, though, that you haven't seen in the tools you've read about so far.

In the Tool Options bar, there is a check box for Auto Erase. When you turn on Auto Erase, any time you start to draw on a part of the canvas that matches the current foreground color shown in the toolbox, your pencil becomes an eraser and will erase to the current background color until you release the mouse button.