Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Painting in Photoshop

Many artists who learned to sketch and paint using pencils, oils, and brushes have come to love the creativity that the digital realm affords. Heck, the biggest advantage is that there aren’t any brushes to clean or paints to mix! And you can’t beat the infinitely forgiving undo command. Most important, as you can see in Figure 12-1, there’s no limit to the kind of artwork you can create in Photoshop.

If you’re a traditional artist, the techniques covered in this chapter will set you on the path of electronic creativity. You’ll learn how to use Photoshop’s color tools and built-in brushes to create a painting from start to finish, in full step-by-step detail. You’ll also discover how to load additional brushes, customize the ones Photoshop provides, and create new brushes of your very own.

If you’re a graphic designer or photographer, there’s a ton of info here for you, too. Just take a minute to think about how much time you spend with brushes when you’re working in Photoshop. Whether retouching an image with one of the healing brushes (The Spot Healing Brush), painting on a layer mask to hide an adjustment (Layer Masks: Digital Masking Tape), or duplicating objects in your image using the Clone Stamp tool (Cloning Between Documents)—all of those things (and more) involve either the Brush tool itself or a tool that uses a brush cursor. For that reason, learning how to work with and customize brushes is extremely important. Plus you’ll learn all kinds ...