Photoshop Brush Tutorial: Brushes Overview

These days, with the amazing Photoshop brushes, Photoshop brush controls, and the ability for us to create and edit our own custom brushes, it's hard to believe that Adobe never meant for Photoshop to be a painting program (although they probably would have called it something like "Adobe Photo And Paint Shop" if they had).

Yet with the release of Photoshop 7, and continuing through Photoshop CS and Photoshop CS2, Adobe's powerhouse pixel pusher has taken its rightful place as one of the best painting programs on the market. Photoshop's various brush controls and options are guaranteed to not only provide you with countless hours of fun, but also to spark a virtually unlimited range of creative ideas and possibilities.

In this section, we'll look at:

• The difference between Photoshop's Brush and Pencil tools
• The Brush Tool options in the Options Bar
• Photoshop's Brush Presets
• Shape Dynamics
• Scattering
• More to follow!

Terminology

Brush tool? Brush tips? Brush presets? It can get a little confusing, so before we begin, we should clear up some terminology:

The Brush Tool
The "Brush Tool" is the tool you select in the Tools palette in order to be able to access Photoshop's brushes, brush options, brush controls, the Brushes palette, etc. The quickest way to access the Brush tool is to press the letter "B" on the keyboard.

The Brush Tip Shape
The "Brush Tip Shape " is the shape of the brush itself. Photoshop brushes come in two basic types - the standard round brushes and "sampled" brushes. The standard round brushes are, well, round. They've been around forever. The sampled brushes are much more interesting because they can be virtually any shape, since they're essentially pictures that you're using as brushes. Whichever one you've selected, whether it's a standard round brush or a brush that looks like a leaf, a blade of grass, a snowflake, whatever the case may be, that's your brush tip shape.

Brush Presets
Photoshop gives you two options when selecting a brush. You can select simply the brush tip shape or you can select a "brush preset", which is a pre-selected combination of the brush tip and the various options and brush control settings for the tip, such as its size, angle and roundness, shape dynamics, scattering, color dynamics, opacity and flow values, etc. You can view previews of all the available brush presets in the Brushes palette, and you can even create and save your own presets for use any time you need them.

Photoshop's brushes are incredibly powerful, not to mention fun to play and experiment with. Yet Photoshop includes another painting tool as well, the Pencil tool. Before we go dipping our brushes into a big ol' can of virtual paint, let's check out the difference between Photoshop's Brush and Pencil tools.