Roundness

The third aspect of the brush that we can dynamically control using options in the Shape Dynamics section is its roundness. Before we continue, I'm going to switch back to one of Photoshop's standard round brushes by clicking on its thumbnail in the Brush Tip Shape section of the Brushes panel. I'm doing this only to make it easier for us to see the effect we're having on the brush. You can use any brush tip you like. Once I've chosen my new brush tip, I'll switch back over to Shape Dynamics:

The term "roundness" here can be a bit misleading since it has nothing to do with whether or not the shape of your brush tip is actually round. It may help to think of roundness as "flatness", since what we're really doing is flattening the brush tip as we paint. A roundness value of 100% simply means that the brush tip looks completely normal, just as it appeared in its thumbnail when you selected it, whether it's an actual round brush like the one I've chosen, a leaf brush, snowflake, chalk brush, or whatever the case may be. By choosing a way to dynamically control the roundness, we can squish and flatten the brush tip along the length of the stroke.

Just as we've seen with the Size and Angle sections, the Roundness section contains its own Control option, and we simply click on its drop-down box to choose a control method from the list. The options for controlling the roundness are pretty much the same as what we're given for controlling the brush's size:

Fade
Choosing Fade in the Control option will tell Photoshop to gradually reduce the roundness of the brush over a specified number of steps. Once again the default number of steps is 25, but I'll reduce it to 10 and I'll increase the spacing between the brush tips so we can see what's happening. The brush starts out with its regular shape and gradually flattens, reaching its minimum roundness value on the last step:

Choosing Pen Pressure allows us to control the roundness of the brush based on the pressure being applied to the tablet with the pen. Pen Tilt makes it possible to adjust the roundness as we paint by tilting the pen. Holding the pen at a normal 90° angle from the tablet will set the brush to maximum roundness. Tilting it in any direction will reduce the roundness. Here, I've set the roundness control to Pen Tilt and painted a simple horizontal brush stroke, tilting the angle of the pen as I continued along the stroke:

Minimum Roundness
If you don't want the brush tip to flatten completely, we can control how flat it can become using the Minimum Roundness option. The default value is 1%, which means 1% of the brush tip's normal size. I'm going to increase it to 25%:

I'll set the roundness control back to Fade and lower the number of steps to 5. Once the roundness reaches 25% of its original size, it remains at that level for the remainder of the stroke:

Roundness Jitter
Lastly, the roundness section includes the same Jitter option we've seen with the Size and Angle sections, and as with those other two sections, Jitter is completely separate from the Control option. Dragging the Jitter slider towards the right will add randomness to the roundness of the brush as we paint. Use the Jitter option on its own or combine it with any of the Control options:

And there we have it! Photoshop's Shape Dynamics options in the Brushes panel make it fun and easy to dynamically control the size, angle and roundness of our brushes as we paint! But that's just the beginning of what we can do with our brushes. Up next, we'll look at the Scattering options!

Or, jump to any of the other Brush Dynamics categories using the links below:

• Texture
• Dual Brush
• Color Dynamics
• Other Dynamics

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