This time I’ve got for you a really basic guide, which is useful for beginners and people interested in learning a little bit more deeply the power of Photoshop’s Brush Tool. Every single Photoshop user has dealt with the brush tool at least once, but not everyone knows how to explode its full potential.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to use the brush presets, create your own brush from scratch and modify its properties, play with blend modes and pressure controls, besides some useful tricks. How much do you know about Photoshop’s Brushes?

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Want access to the full PSD files and downloadable copies of every tutorial, including this one? Join Psd Plus for just $9/month. Below is one of the brushes we’ll be creating in this tutorial.

What is it?

The Brush tool is a basic painting tool. It works like a traditional drawing tool by applying the color using strokes. It’s located in the standard Tool Bar and its default shortcut is the letter B.

The Brush Tool works by adding a shaped mark on a layer, and if you continue pressing the mouse button or the pen on a tablet, several marks will be added creating a stroke until you release the pressure. The essentials options for the brush tool are: Brush Tip Shape, Blending Mode, Opacity and Flow. You must understand those concepts before moving forward with the advanced settings.

Photoshop includes several built-in presets, that are in fact pre-made brushes ready to use.

Part 1 – Basics

Brush Tip

This is the most basic option for any Photoshop User, the Brush Tip settings allow you to modify the way to add colors on a Photoshop document using the Brush Tool. By clicking on the Brush Preset Picker in the default Options Panel you will see several built-in presets. On many of the presets you can easily adjust two very important values:

• Master Diameter increases or decreases the size of the brush tip. The default shortcuts to increase or decrease are the Left Bracket key and the Right Bracket key respectively. Photoshop CS4 enables a dynamic way of doing it by Ctrl + Option (Mac) + Click or Alt + Right Click (Win) and Drag.
• Hardness increases or decreases the brush tip’s border strength, 0% means a really soft border (color fades out) and 100% a precise border. The shortcuts to increase or decrease hardness percentage are the Left Bracket key and the Right Bracket key respectively. In CS4 you can dynamically modify this value by Ctrl + Option + Shift (Mac) + Click or Alt + Shift + Right Click (Win) and Drag.

You can even combine Foreground and Background colors (we will see this feature forward). Most of the time the color that is applied by using the brush tip is the Foreground Color.

Preset Picker Contextual Menu

There are many useful tools at the Brush Preset Picker menu including Create a New Preset, Edit it, and Delete. Then there are some options to display the list of brushes in the Preset Picker panel, below there are several examples of this. Besides, you can easily Manage the Brush list by loading, saving and replacing brushes in the list, or Append one of the existing Brush collections. We will see more about preset creation shortly.

Brush Blending Modes

Each time you paint something using the Brush Tool you can chose a Blending Mode for the stroke. A Blending Mode is a way to mix the colors with the object(s) behind them using several mathematical formulas working over the RGB values of each pixel. Let’s try some of them.

Modes: Normal, Dissolve, Behind and Clear

Let’s review some of the basic Blending Modes.

• The first on the list is the Normal Mode, which paints the color as is without applying any transformation to the color pixels.
• The Dissolve Mode adds some noise at the edge of the brush stroke.
• Behind Mode paints behind an existing stroke even if they are both on the same layer.
• By using the Clear Mode you can delete a section of an existing stroke.

More Blending Modes

The Following Blending modes are just the same that can be applied to the Layers, below you can see some examples of blending modes, and some applications. They are fairly useful for adding color to objects (Darken, Multiply, Overlay) or add some lights (Lighten, Color Dodge). You have a lot to experiment with here, no matter how many years you have been using Photoshop, you never stop learning about Blending Modes.

Opacity

The Opacity Value is a percentage of transparency, 100% means a full color stroke, a small percentage means a more transparent painting.

3. Flow

The Flow value is a percentage that sets the rate of color applied. Each time you press the mouse button the amount of color applied is controlled by the Flow percentage, besides it cannot exceed the Opacity percentage unless you click again in the same place.

Brushes Panel

The Brushes Panel is the right place to create, edit, save and load a particular brush behavior or Brush Preset. You can customize several things here like the brush tip shape, scattering, opacity jitter, flow jitter, Background/Foreground jitter, configure controls for each variation and more.

To show the Brushes Panel go to Window > Brushes, or press the F5 key. You need to select the Brush Tool on the Tools Panel to enable the Brush Preset options.

As you can see, as soon as you show the Brushes Panel you can click over the Brush Presets option on the left and then in the main area a list of all the active brushes. Try them before moving forward in this guide, paint some random strokes using different presets and see what happens. Next we’ll create a Custom Brush, and apply several variations to it.

Creating a Brush Tip from an Image

One of the most powerful features of Photoshop is the ability to create custom brushes from scratch using any image as a source. This time we’ll make a brush using this image of a nice leaf.

Step 1

Open your image in Photoshop, and double-click on the "Background" Layer in the layers palette to make it editable. Then Go to the Channels panel (go to Window > Channel) and duplicate any of them (you can duplicate a channel by dragging the layer over the Create New Channel button at the bottom). I’m choosing the Green this time, then hide the other channels for awhile.

Then, With the "Green copy" channel selected hit Command + I to invert the colors, Then adjust the levels a little bit to make the leaf whiter. Finally, hit Command (Ctrl) + A to select the entire image, hit command (Ctrl) + C to copy the "Green copy" channel to the clipboard and then delete it. Remember to turn on the visibility of the RGB channel before moving forward.

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