Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

(Re)Introducing the Brush Tool

You’ve already used the Brush tool for all kinds of things in previous chapters: editing layer masks, creating selections, colorizing grayscale images, and so on. In this section you’ll learn how to paint with it, and these days it’s a more realistic experience than ever before. But first you need to understand a bit more about how this tool works. Grab the Brush tool by pressing B or clicking its icon in the Tools panel (see Figure 13-11).

Figure 13-10. Though the Color panel stays nicely tucked out of the way in the panel dock, it’s much smaller than the Color Picker, making it a little tough to see. If your eyesight is really good, you’ll probably enjoy using it because it takes up so much less space. This panel is also customizable; you can use its menu to control what it displays. Here, the sliders are set to RGB, and the spectrum bar at the bottom is set to Grayscale.

Tip

You can control brush size and hardness with a keyboard shortcut: Control-Option-drag (Alt+right-click+drag on a PC) left or right to change the size, or up or down to change the hardness. When you use this trick, you’ll see brush diameter, hardness, and opacity info appear next to your cursor.

Figure 13-11. As you can see, the Brush tool has a slew of options. They let you adjust the ...