Adobe Photoshop Basics

Brushes
In Photoshop 5, the brushes reside in a floating palette. In Photoshop 6, the brushes palette is attached to the option bar as a drop-down menu. In Photoshop 6.01 only, you can also access the brushes palette by right-clicking in the document when any painting tool is active or by pressing the enter key.

Photoshop comes with a set of standard brushes with many more brushes available on your Photoshop CD which you can find by searching for ABR files. The shape, hardness, and spacing of the round brushes can be modified, and you can also create your own custom brushes from any selection. You can only adjust spacing on custom brushes. You reset, save and load brushes through the brushes palette menu.

We'll do some exercises with custom brushes a little later in this lesson. For now, I'll just introduce you to some basic brush palette functions. Obviously, you can select a brush by clicking on it in the palette. When you're painting, though, it can be cumbersome to go to the brushes palette every time to need to adjust the size or shape of your brush, so there are some keyboard shortcuts that are very beneficial to learn. The shortcuts changed between versions 5 and 6, so I will explain them separately.

Photoshop 5:

• Double clicking on a brush allows you to change the diameter, hardness, spacing, angle, and roundness. When you make adjustments by double clicking the brush, it changes that brush in your brushes palette.
• If you want to make a new brush without changing an existing brush, choose New Brush from the palette flyout menu.
• To cycle through the brushes in the palette while painting, use the bracket keys [ and ] to cycle through the brushes in your palette.
• Holding the shift key down while pressing the bracket keys will take you to the first or last brush in the palette.

Photoshop 6:

• Clicking on the brush preview in the options bar allows you to change the diameter, hardness, spacing, angle, and roundness.
• When you make adjustments to a brush you can click the preset button to add it to the brushes palette. You can also choose New Brush from the palette flyout menu to make a new custom brush.
• To adjust the brush size on-the-fly while painting, use the bracket keys [ and ].
• Holding the shift key down while pressing the bracket keys will adjust the hardness of the brush.

Go ahead an experiment with the brush options. You can return to the default brushes at any time by choosing reset brushes from the brush palette menu.

Fading Brush Strokes, Fills, and Filters
All the painting tools have the ability to be faded using the Fade command. In Photoshop 5.x, this command is under the Filter menu. In Photoshop 6.x, it was moved to the more logical Edit menu. After applying any paintstroke, fill, or filter, you can select this command to fade it back so it blends with the original pixels. You can also use it to apply a blend mode if you forgot to set the blend mode before applying paint.

Continue on to learn about the Pencil, Paintbrush, and Airbrush tools.

Next > Pencil, Paintbrush & Airbrush