Photoshop Elements 9: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Drawing with Brushes, Shapes, and Other Tools

If you’re not artistically inclined, you may feel tempted to skip this chapter. After all, you probably just want to fix and enhance your photos—why should you care about brush technique? Surprisingly enough, you should care quite a lot.

In Elements, brushes aren’t just for painting a moustache and horns on a picture of someone you don’t like, or for blackening your sister’s teeth in that old school photo. Lots of Elements’ tools use brushes to apply their effects. So far, you’ve already run into the Selection brush, the Clone Stamp, and the Color Replacement brush, to name just a few. And even with the Brush tool, you can paint with lots of things besides color—like light or shadows, for example. In Elements, when you want to apply an effect in a precise manner, you often use some sort of brush to do it.

If you’re used to working with real brushes, their digital cousins can take some getting used to, but there are many serious artists now who paint primarily in Photoshop. With Elements, you get most of the same tools as in the full Photoshop, if not quite all the settings available for each tool. Figure 12-1 shows an example of the detailed work you can do with Elements and some artistic ability.

This chapter explains how to use the Brush tool, some of the other brush-like tools (such as the Erasers), and how to draw shapes even if you can’t hold a pencil steady. You’ll also learn some practical applications for your new skills, ...