Discover the Brushes Palette

This tutorial will get you more involved with the brush tool, options and the brush palette.

To bring up the brushes palette you can toggle the window here in the upper right corner of the options bar (when you are on a brush tool).

You can also choose to open it from the Window menu as shown (checkmark means that is already open).

When using brushes be aware of the what's going on in the layers palette. You’ll almost always want to make sure that you are on a new layer if you’re going to do some painting. Create a new layer by pressing the new layer icon that looks like a white piece of paper on the bottom of the layers palette.

You can choose a foreground color from any of the color choosing methods such as the swatch palette.

The foreground color is the color that you will paint with (until you change it).

You can choose brushes from the brush palette or the drop down menu in the options bar. The brushes palette gives you lots of options. Remember that you can only work with it when you are on the brush tool (B).

Take a look at the brush palette and scroll down to see the different kinds of brushes that you can choose to work with. Simply click to highlight one. On the bottom you’ll see a display of what the brush looks like (in black).

Remember that the foreground color is the color which you will ‘paint’ with. It is located here.

You can change it easily by clicking on the color picker to bring up the dialog box (yet another way to choose color).

To paint just click and drag. See how 'basic' this is? This was around since Photoshop -1.0

There are some pretty cool brushes, just scroll through and find some.

You can get a preview of the actual brush size when you increase or decrease the diameter by moving the cursor outside of the dialog box (once it gets too big to show in the preview display window).

You can also adjust the spacing of brushes. In the Basic Photoshop video training tutorials I show you how to make your own custom brushes out of anything.

See what happens in the layers palette if you just keep switching brushes and foreground colors, they’ll all end up on the same layer unless you create a blank invisible layer on which to work with.

It’s important to understand this and you’ll probably want the ‘paint’ on a separate layer than the background anyways. This also helps make it more disposable and you can ‘erase’ without erasing background pixels of the image itself. Layers are also covered in-depth in my Basic Photoshop video training tutorials.

They are all kinds of fun different options you can fool around with. Just go ahead and take a look at these different advanced brush options. Note that you have to click on the name field itself in order to enter that specific editing area (so it’s highlighted).

Here the grass brush had color dynamics already on.

  

With this you have all kinds of options as you can see.

Here I have the pink (how natural) grass brush on it’s own separate layer (create a new blank layer to paint on). This allows me to turn the layer on and off if I don’t want to see it anymore.

You can load more brushes into the brushes palette by clicking on the upper right fly-out menu.

Choose a set of brushes and then click append. Now this set of brushes is loaded and you can scroll through them and choose from this new set.

In the drop down menu at the top left of the options bar you will see your brush presets and where you can manage them. You can also add your own brush preset by having the brush the way you want it and then clicking on the icon as shown.

Now choose a name for your brush and it will be located in the drop down preset picker dialog box for easy access.

If you want you can take a look at the other presets.

  

You can then look at it’s option in the brushes palette and edit its attributes if you want (to any of the brushes) and then save it as a new ‘user-defined’ preset.

Note that when you switch off of the brush tool to the moVe tool the brushes palette will dim so you can’t move it. To get my complete Basic Photoshop training click here.