Chapter 1: Painting and Brushes

Overview

Photoshop's brush tools come in two basic flavors: paint tools and edit tools. The paint tools apply colors to your image, and the edit tools modify existing colors within it. Both sets of tools operate in the same fashion ” by dragging the cursor inside the image, just as you'd drag a real brush across a canvas.

The advantage of working in a computer-based medium, of course, is that the tools are virtual, making them more flexible and more forgiving than their traditional counterparts. This also lowers the premium on artistic ability ” which is not meant as a negative here. The tools which Photoshop provides are designed with options to fit varying levels of proficiency and experience.

Photoshop gives you two true paint tools ” the Brush and the Pencil ” and seven edit tools ” Blur, Sharpen, Smudge, Dodge, Burn, and Sponge. Figure 1-1 shows all the tools along with the keyboard shortcuts for selecting them.

image from book
Figure 1-1: Here you see the paint tools and edit tools available from the Toolbox's flyout menus .
Cross-Reference  

The Color Replacement tool could also be considered an edit tool, but it's covered separately in Chapter 11.

Note  

The Color Replacement tool, which was previously grouped with the Healing Brush and Patch tools, has moved in this version of Photoshop to reside with the brush and pencil tools.

Tip  

Most buttons in the Toolbox hold more than one tool, evidenced by the blackening of a tool button's lower right-hand corner. Simply click and hold a button to display a flyout menu of all the tools residing there (see Figure 1-1). Just as you can activate a tool by pressing its keyboard shortcut, you can press Shift plus the shortcut to cycle through each of a button's tools.

You can vary the performance of the active tool by using the controls in the Options bar along the top of your screen. If you don't see the Options bar, choose Window Options or double-click a tool icon in the Toolbox.



Photoshop CS2 Bible
Photoshop CS2 Bible
ISBN: 0764589725
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 95

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