Step 7: Open The Brushes Panel

We've seen how to select a basic, ready-made brush using the Brush Preset picker, but if want more control over how our brush behaves, we need Photoshop's main Brushes panel, which gives us full access to some truly amazing options. We'll save our detailed look at the Brushes panel and all of its controls for another tutorial, but let's take a quick look at a few ways we can use it to alter the appearance of our brush strokes.

To open the Brushes panel, either go up to the Window menu at the top of the screen and choose Brushes from the list, or press the F5 key on your keyboard (press it again to close the panel), or click on the Brushes panel toggle icon in the Options Bar (click it again to close the panel):

This opens the main Brushes panel, the big brother of the Brush Preset picker we saw earlier. By default when you first open the Brushes panel, the Brush Presets option is selected in the top left corner of the panel, which displays the same small brush icons along the right that we saw in the Brush Preset picker. To select a brush, simply click on its icon. Scroll down the list to your newly created brush and click on its icon to select it if it's not selected already. The very bottom of the Brushes panel displays a preview of what the brush stroke currently looks like. Since I haven't made any changes yet, the preview looks exactly the same as the brush stroke I painted a moment ago:

Step 8: Adjust The Brush Tip Spacing

Click on the words Brush Tip Shape directly below the Brush Presets option in the top left corner of the Brushes panel:

In the real world, if you were to paint with an actual brush, the brush would lay down a continuous coat of paint on the paper, but that's not how Photoshop works. Instead, Photoshop "stamps" the document with your brush tip as you drag your mouse. If the stamps appear close enough together, it creates the illusion of a seamless brush stroke, but if the stamps are spaced too far apart from each other, the individual stamps become obvious and the brush stroke appears ridged. Depending on the effect you're going for (like creating a dotted line, for example), you may want a lot of spacing between the stamps, but in most cases, a seamless brush stroke is more desirable.

With the Brush Tip Shape option selected in the Brushes panel, we can control the spacing between the stamps with the appropriately-named Spacing option at the very bottom of the panel. Spacing is controlled as a percentage of the width of your brush tip, and by default, it's set to 25%, which means that if the width of your brush tip is 100 pixels, Photoshop will lay down a new stamp every 25 pixels as you drag your mouse:

For a smooth brush stroke, this default setting is usually too high. I'm going to lower mine down to around 13%. To lower the Spacing amount, either drag the slider towards the left or enter a specific value directly into the input box. You'll see the preview of the brush stroke updating to reflect the changes to the spacing:

Now, if I paint a stroke with my brush, it appears smoother because the individual stamps are closer together:

Step 9: Select The Shape Dynamics Option

Click directly on the words Shape Dynamics below the Brush Tip Shape option we selected a moment ago, which gives us options for dynamically controlling the size, angle and roundness of the brush tip as we paint. Make sure you click on the words themselves. Clicking inside the checkbox to the left of words will turn the options on but won't give us access to their controls:

Step 10: Set The Angle Control To "Direction"

The main problem with the look of my brush stroke is that no matter which direction I paint in, those horizontal lines that make up my brush tip remain, well, horizontal. Let's fix that so the brush tip will follow the direction of my mouse cursor. With the Shape Dynamics option selected, change the Control option for the brush tip Angle to Direction. Again, you'll see the brush stroke preview at the bottom of the panel update to reflect the change:

I'll paint another stroke with my brush, and this time, things look much more natural. The brush tip is following the direction I'm painting in:

Step 11: Set The Size Control To "Pen Pressure" (Requires Pen Tablet)

If you're using a pressure-sensitive pen tablet like I am, you can tell Photoshop that you want to control the size of the brush with your pen. With the Shape Dynamics options still selected, change the Control option for the brush tip Size to Pen Pressure:

With the Pen Pressure option selected, I can easily control the size of the brush stroke on the fly, giving my custom brush an even more natural look:

Obviously, this is just a taste of the amount of control the Brushes panel gives us over the behavior of our brush, but in just a few short steps, we've managed to design and create a brand new custom Photoshop brush from scratch, and we've gotten a glimpse of how powerful the various dynamic brush controls in the Brushes panel really are. We'll cover the Brushes panel in much more detail in another tutorial.

And there we have it!

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