Where Are the Photoshop Brushes?

While this may seem obvious, there may be a few of you who don't know where the brushes are located. Never fear; they are easy to find. Figure 13.1 shows the location of the Brush tool in Photoshop.

Figure 13.1: The location of the Brush tool in Photoshop.

The Brush tool is the fourth icon on the left side of the toolbar. If you click this icon and hold down your mouse button, the icon will change to the Pencil tool. Figure 13.2 shows the Pencil tool.

Figure 13.2: The submenu item showing the Brush tool and the Pencil tool.

The Pencil tool is a very small version of the brush. You can increase its size , but you should have no reason to do so. Leave the Pencil tool small for fine work and use the Brush tool for painting. The keyboard shortcut is 'B' for both tools.

When you click the Brush icon, notice that the Options bar at the top of the screen changes to reflect the currently selected tool, as shown in Figure 13.3.

Figure 13.3: The Brush Options bar.

The first icon on the Options bar is the Tool Preset Picker. When the Brush tool is selected and the Preset Picker activated, Photoshop displays three brushes by default. This is a great place to add and store your most commonly used brushes to have them close for easy access. Figure 13.4 shows the Tool Preset Picker menu.

Figure 13.4: The Tool Preset Picker menu.

New in Photoshop CS is also a Tool Presets tab (Figure 13.5) that also stores your most commonly used brushes along with any other frequently used tools you may care to add. It is located on the right side of the Photoshop screen next to the Brushes tab.

Figure 13.5: The Tool Presets tab.

The next icon on the Options bar is the Brush Picker (Figure 13.6). Click this icon and you will be presented with a visual display of all your currently loaded brushes. The default selection is large and presents you with more than enough brushes to paint almost anything with. You will also notice two controls that are available when this palette is open : Brush Diameter and Brush Hardness (indicated by red arrows).

Figure 13.6: The Brush Picker with Brush Diameter and Brush Hardness highlighted.

You have a number of options for previewing what your brush looks like. The default display, shown in Figure 13.6, shows a small icon of the brush profile and what a typical stroke will look like. Sometimes you may want to switch to a larger display of the brush profile. You access the control panel for the Brush Picker by clicking on the small triangle within the circle on the right side of the picker. Clicking on the triangle will give you a number of options for displaying your brushes along with available brush libraries you can load. Figure 13.7 shows the Brush Picker with the large thumbnail option selected within the control panel.

Figure 13.7: The Brush Picker with large thumbnails of the brush profiles displayed.

The third item on the Options bar is the mode selector (Figure 13.8). These modes are similar to the modes that you can apply to individual layers. You must remember, though, that unlike layers that can be deleted, changed, and manipulated, brush modes are permanent in comparison. Notice also that Behind and Clear are grayed out in the menu. This is because these modes do not work on the background layer. Refer to the Photoshop manual for a more in-depth discussion of the modes.

Figure 13.8: The Brush Mode menu.

The next menu item on the Options bar is Opacity. This option is self-explanatory; it lets you specify how opaque or transparent individual pixels will appear when you are painting. Figure 13.9 shows the same brush using various opacities for its strokes.

Figure 13.9: The Brush Opacity slider along with an image showing strokes using various opacity settings.

When you decrease the opacity of the stroke, you are able to see the underlying strokes. You can alter the opacity of the stroke by using the slider under the Opacity setting or by entering a numerical value.

The next-to-last item on the Options bar is Flow. Flow visually looks fairly similar to Opacity but isn't. The Flow slider determines how quickly and evenly your digital paint is applied. When you use a high setting, the pixels are filled in quickly and very closely spaced together. As you gradually reduce the flow, the pixels are not filled in as quickly or as evenly. You can see the results of gradually reducing the flow in Figure 13.10. As with the opacity, you can change the amount of flow by moving the slider or entering a value.

Figure 13.10: The Flow slider and an image showing strokes using different flow settings.

The final item on the Options bar is the Airbrush icon, shown in Figure 13.11. Clicking and holding this icon will cause digital paint to be deposited as long as you hold your stylus pressed to the tablet. It will do the same if you are painting with the mouse and hold down the left mouse button.

Figure 13.11: The Airbrush icon.

Moving across the Options bar you are able to pick a brush preset. Using that preset you can paint in any of a number of different modes selected from the drop-down list. Once you have selected the brush profile and mode, you can then change either the brush opacity or brush flow, or both. Finally, by clicking the Airbrush icon, you can determine if the brush will continuously deposit paint while holding down either the left mouse button or your stylus.

It is also worth noting that you can change the default size and opacity of your brushes using keyboard shortcuts. Using keyboard shortcuts can dramatically increase your speed when painting. Consult your Photoshop documentation for the specific shortcut keys for the brushes.

That's about it for our simple explanation of how to pick a brush and change a few of the brush settings using the Options bar.

In the next section, we will dig deeper into the workings of the more advanced brush controls available in Photoshop.