Photoshop Brush Tutorial: Brush Presets

By default, Photoshop comes with quite a few brushes already installed for us, and we can view these brushes easily by selecting the Brush Tool from the Tools palette and then clicking on the Brush Presets Picker up in the Options Bar, which we looked at in the Brush Tool Options section. The Brush Presets Picker doesn't really give us much control over the brushes though, other than changing the size of the brush, and the edge hardness values if we're selected one of the standard round Photoshop brushes. All we can really do here is select from a bunch of pre-made brushes, with very little in the way of options for them. Surely a program as powerful as Photoshop can throw a few more possibilities our way.

Well, as luck (and the fine folks at Adobe) would have it, there is actually another area inside Photoshop where we can view the exact same Brush Presets information, assuming you're using Photoshop 7 or above. But first, let's quickly recap the old Brush Presets Picker dialog box, if only to remind ourselves of how completely and utterly boring it really is.

The Standard Brush Presets Picker

As we saw in the Brush Tool Options section, the Brush Presets Picker allows us to scroll through a preview of all the pre-made brushes that install with Photoshop, as well as any brushes we've created ourselves. The preview shows us the brush size in pixels, the brush tip shape, and an example of what the brush stroke will look like if we were to select that brush.

Above the scrollable preview area are a couple of options, one which allows us to change the brush size (its "Master Diameter"), and another which changes how hard or soft the brush edge is (an option that's only available for Photoshop's standard round brushes, not the "sampled" brushes that look like actual interesting shapes).

And that's about it really. There's not a whole lot going on here. Pick a brush, change its size, give it a hard or soft edge (if available), and away you go. Boring.

Brush Presets, Episode II - A New Hope

Okay, so for all your Star Wars fans out there, "A New Hope" is actually Episode IV, not Episode II. I couldn't very well call it "Brush Presets - Attack Of The Clones", now could I? After all, I'm saving that title for the section on the Clone Stamp Tool. (In an interesting and related bit of trivia, one of the two brothers who initially created Photoshop, John Knoll, is now Visual Effects Supervisor at George Lucas' visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic. And there's your Star Wars/Photoshop trivia for today.)

Seriously though , there is another area where we can view the Brush Presets, and it's a much, much better place. Over in the Palette Well, which actually appears as part of the Options Bar way over on the right hand side of the screen, you'll see three palettes docked by default in there. Only the name tabs of the palettes are visible. One of them says "Brushes". This, not the Brush Preset Picker, is where we want to be. Go ahead and click on the Brushes tab in the Palette Well. This brings up the fully charged Brushes palette, and if playing around with brushes is your thing, say hello to your new best friend.

Photoshop's Brushes Palette

Photoshop's full Brushes palette is where all the fancy brush options and controls are found. It may look intimidating at first, but spend a little time with it and you'll realize that it's not difficult at all.

If your Brushes palette looks different than the one in the screenshot on the left (minus the yellow highlighting), click on the words "Brush Presets" in the upper left corner of the palette. This will bring up the same Brush Presets information that we saw in the old Brush Presets Picker in the Options Bar. I've highlighted the areas that are the same as the Brush Presets Picker. Once again we have our scrollable preview area on the right so we can scroll through the pre-made brushes, we can still see a preview of the brush tip shape, the brush stroke, and a number representing the brush size in pixels, and we have a Master Diameter slider bar below it to change the size of the brush. The only thing that seems to be missing is the Hardness slider, but if you click on the words "Brush Tip Shape" directly below the words "Brush Presets", the main panel of the Brushes palette is updated with options to change the brush tip shape, and these new options include the Hardness slider.