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 for each tool. Figure 12-1 shows an example of the detailed work you can do with Elements and some artistic ability.
Figure 12-1. This complex drawing by artist Jodi Frye was done entirely in Elements. If you learn to wield all of Elements’ drawing power, you can create amazingly detailed artwork. You can see more of Jodi’s work at her website, http://jodifryesgraphicimages.weebly.com.
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, like dodging and burning photos to enhance them, and a super easy method of cropping your photos in sophisticated, artistic ways—a technique scrapbookers love.
Tip
If you have an iPad and like to fingerpaint, you can create drawings on your iPad in Adobe’s Eazel app and send them directly to Elements to use in your projects. To learn more, head to www.photoshop.com/products/mobile/eazel.
If you look at the Tools panel, you’ll see the Brush tool’s icon below the Eraser (in a single-column Tools panel) or below the Clone Stamp (in a two-column Tools panel). Don’t confuse it with the Selection brushes, which are up above the Crop or Type tool, or the Smart Brush (Correcting color with a brush), which is below the regular Brush tool or to the right of it, depending on whether you have one column or two. To activate the Brush tool, click its icon or press B.
The Brush is one of the tools that includes a pop-out menu in the Tools panel—you can choose between the Brush, the Impressionist Brush, the Color Replacement tool, and the Pencil tool. You can read about the Impressionist Brush and the Pencil tool later in this chapter, and about the Color Replacement tool on The Color Replacement Tool. This section is about the regular ol’ Brush tool.
The Options bar (Figure 12-2) gives you lots of ways to customize the Brush tool. Here’s a quick rundown of these settings (from left to right):
Figure 12-2. The Brush tool’s Options bar. By changing the settings shown here as well as the hidden settings—click the Additional Brush Options button to see them—you can dramatically alter any brush’s behavior.
Brushstroke thumbnail. This squiggle shows the stroke you’d get with the current settings. Click it to display the Brush palette. Elements gives you a bunch of basic brush collections, called libraries, which you can view and select here. You can also download many more from various websites (see Stuff from the Internet).
If you click the palette’s drop-down menu, you’ll see that you get more than just hard and soft brushes of various sizes (see Figure 12-3). You also get special brushes for drop shadows, brushes that are sensitive to pen pressure if you’re using a graphics tablet—which you can also use with a mouse, but you don’t have as many options—and brushes that paint shapes and designs.
Figure 12-3. Elements gives you a pretty good list of different brushes to choose from, and you can add your own. Here you see just one of the many brush libraries included with Elements, the Default Brushes. (Page 407 explains how to make your own brushes.) Elements starts off displaying the brushes in the palette as black thumbnails on a dark gray background, but that’s hard to see. Fortunately, you can click the double arrows in the palette’s upper-right corner and choose Stroke Thumbnail for this black-on-white view.
Size. This slider lets you adjust the size of your brush cursor—anywhere from 1 pixel up to sizes that may be too big to fit on your monitor (2500 pixels is the maximum). You can also just type a size in the box. Figure 12-4 shows yet another way to adjust settings like brush size using your mouse. Or, as you’re working, you can press the close bracket key (]) to quickly increase brush size, or the open bracket key ([) to decrease it.
Figure 12-4. You don’t need to open drop-down menus like the one shown here that says “94%.” Just move your cursor over the word “Size,” and the cursor changes into a pointing hand with a double-headed arrow. Now you can “scrub” (click and drag) back and forth right on the Options bar to make changes—left for smaller or less, right for larger or more. This trick works anywhere you see a numerical pop-out slider (such as in the Layers panel’s Opacity menu).
Mode. Here’s where you choose the brush’s blend mode. The mode you choose determines how the brush’s color interacts with what’s in your image. For example, Normal simply paints the current Foreground color (you’ll learn more about all the mode choices later in this chapter).
Opacity. This lets you to control how thoroughly your brushstrokes cover what’s beneath them. You can use the drop-down menu’s slider or type in any percentage you like, from 1 to 100. The maximum—100 percent—gets you total coverage (at least in Normal mode). Or you can scrub, as shown in Figure 12-4.
Airbrush. Clicking this little pen-like brush icon just to the right of the Opacity setting lets you use the Brush tool as an airbrush. Figure 12-5 shows how this works.
Figure 12-5. As with real airbrushes, Elements’ airbrush continues to “spray” paint as long as you hold down the mouse button, regardless of whether the mouse is moving. Top: Here’s what you get with one click with the Brush tool in Regular (non-airbrush) mode. Bottom: Here’s the effect of one click with the same brush in Airbrush mode. See how far the color spread beyond the cursor (the circle)? Not every brush offers the airbrush option.
Brush Tablet Options. Click the tiny arrow to the right of the airbrush icon to see a bunch of checkboxes. If you use a graphics tablet, you can use these settings to tell Elements which brush characteristics should respond to the pressure of your stroke. (Graphics Tablets has more about graphics tablets.)
Additional Brush Options. Clicking this icon (which looks just like the Brush tool’s icon) brings up the Additional Brush Options palette, which offers oodles of ways to customize your brush, all of which are covered in the next section. If you’re using the Brush tool for artistic purposes, it pays to familiarize yourself with these settings, since this is where you can set a chiseled stroke or a fade, for example.
Tip
If you ever want to return a brush to its original settings, click the Reset button (the tiny black arrow) on the left end of the Options bar, and then choose Reset Tool from the pop-up menu.
To actually use the Brush tool, enter your settings—make sure you’ve selected the color you want in the Foreground color square—and then simply drag across your image wherever you want to paint.
Tip
If you’re used to painting with long, sweeping strokes, keep in mind that in Elements, that technique can be frustrating. That’s because when you undo a mistake (by pressing Ctrl+Z/⌘-Z), Elements undoes everything you’ve done while you’ve been holding down the mouse button. In tricky spots, you can save yourself some aggravation by using shorter strokes so you don’t have to lose that whole long curve you painstakingly worked on just because you wobbled a bit at the end. (The Eraser tool [The Eraser Tool] is handy for tidying up in these situations, too.)
One of the biggest differences between drawing with a mouse and drawing with a real brush is that, on a computer, it doesn’t matter how hard you press the mouse. But if you’ve got a graphics tablet, an electronic pad that causes your pen movements to appear onscreen instantly, you can replicate real-world brushing, including pressure effects. Graphics Tablets tells you all about using a tablet.
Tip
To draw or paint a straight line, hold down the Shift key while moving your cursor. If you click where you want the line to start, press and hold Shift, and then click at the end point, Elements draws a straight line between those two points. Remember to click first and then press Shift, or you may draw lines where you don’t want them.
Figure 12-6. Adobe calls these crosshairs the precise cursor. Elements sometimes makes your cursor look like this when you’re zoomed way out on an image. To get the normal cursor back, you can zoom in some, and read the box above for further advice.
When you click the Additional Brush Options icon on the right side of the Options bar, Elements displays a palette that lets you customize your brush. You’ll run into a version of this palette for some of the other brush-like tools, too, like the Healing brush. The palette lets you change how your brush behaves in a number of sophisticated and fun ways. Mastering these settings goes a long way toward getting artistic results in Elements:
Fade controls how fast the brushstroke fades out—just the way a real brush does when it runs out of paint. A lower number means it fades out quickly (very few steps), while a higher one means the fade happens slowly (more steps). Counterintuitively, leaving this setting at 0 means no fading at all—the stroke is the same at the end as it is at the beginning.
You can pick any number up to 9,999, so with a little fiddling, you should be able to get just the effect you want. If the brush isn’t fading fast enough, decrease the number; if it fades too fast, increase it. A smaller brush usually needs a higher number than a larger brush does. And you may find that you need to set the brush spacing (explained in a sec) in the 20s or higher to make fading show any visible effect.
Hue Jitter. Some brushes, especially the ones you can use to paint objects like leaves, automatically vary the color for a more interesting or realistic effect. This setting controls how fast the brush switches between the Background and Foreground colors. The higher the number (percentage) here, the faster the color varies; a lower number makes the brush take longer to get from one color to the other. Brushes that use hue jitter don’t put down only the two colors, but a range of hues in between. Not all brushes respond to this setting, but for the ones that do, it’s a pretty cool feature. Figure 12-7 shows how it works.
Scatter means just what it sounds like: how far the marks get distributed in your brushstroke. When you paint with a brush in Elements, you’re actually putting down many repetitions of the brush shape rather than a simple line. So if you set scatter to a low percentage, you get a dense, line-like stroke, whereas a higher value creates an effect more like random spots.
Spacing controls how far apart the brush marks get laid down when you paint. A lower number makes them close together, a higher number farther apart, as shown in Figure 12-8. Scatter controls randomness, including how far the marks appear above and below the stroke itself, while Spacing just determines how frequently the brush makes a mark along the path of the stroke.
Figure 12-7. Top: A brushstroke with no hue jitter. Middle: The same brushstroke with a medium hue jitter value. Bottom: The same brushstroke with a high hue jitter value. The colors used here are red and blue. It takes a fairly high number to get all the way to blue in a stroke this short. Some brushes, like this one, automatically do a little color shading, even without jitter turned on.
Figure 12-8. The same brushstroke with the spacing set at 5 percent, 75 percent, and 150 percent (respectively, from top to bottom). You may have wondered why some of the brushstroke thumbnails look like long caterpillars, when the brush should paint an object, like a star or leaf. The reason? Cramped spacing. The thumbnail shows the spacing as Elements originally sets it. Widen the spacing to see separate objects instead of a clump.
Hardness controls whether the brush’s edge is sharp or fuzzy. This setting isn’t available for all brushes, but when it is, you can choose any value between zero (the fuzziest) and 100 percent (the most defined edge).
Angle and Roundness. Painters don’t use only round brushes, and you don’t have to in Elements, either. If you’ve ever painted with a real brush, you’ll understand these settings right away. They let you create a more chiseled edge to your brush and then rotate it so that it’s not always painting with the edge facing the same direction.
There are some brushes in Elements’ libraries that aren’t round, like the calligraphic and chalk brushes. But you can adjust the roundness of any brush to make it more suitable for chiseled strokes, as shown in Figure 12-9.
Figure 12-9. Here’s the bottom of the Additional Brush Options palette. To adjust a brush’s angle and roundness, drag the black dots to make the brush rounder or narrower, and then grab the arrow and spin it to the angle you want. You can also type a number directly into either the Angle or Roundness box (or both).
The palette also includes a checkbox labeled Keep These Settings For All Brushes; turn it on if you want to make all your brushes behave exactly the same way. The checkbox only keeps the settings listed above it in the palette, though, not the ones below it.
If you modify a brush and like your creation, you can save it as a custom brush. Elements lets you alter any of the existing brushes and save the result—a great feature if you’re working on a project that’s going to last awhile and you don’t want to keep modifying the settings. (Don’t worry: When you modify an existing brush, Elements preserves a copy of the original.) To create your own brush, just:
Choose a brush to modify.
Select any brush in the Brush palette.
Make the changes you want.
Change the brush’s settings until you get what you’re after. The brush thumbnail in the Options bar reflects your new settings.
Tell Elements you want to keep the new brush.
Click the brush thumbnail to open the Brush palette, and then click the black double arrows on the right side of the palette and choose Save Brush. Elements asks you to name it; you don’t have to, but named brushes are easier to keep track of. The name will appear as pop-up text when you hover over the brush’s thumbnail in the Brush palette.
Click OK.
The brush shows up at the bottom of your current list of brushes. If you make lots of custom brushes, you may want to create a special set for them. The Preset Manager (When You Really Need Photoshop) can help you do that.
Deleting a brush is pretty straightforward: Select it in the Brush palette, and then click the double arrows on the palette’s right side and choose Delete Brush. Or you can Alt-click/Option-click the brush’s thumbnail in the palette. (The cursor changes into a pair of scissors when you hold down the Alt/Option key; simply clicking with the scissors deletes the brush.)
You can also make a selection from an image and save it as a brush (the next section explains how). Just remember, though, that brushes by definition aren’t any specific color, so you save only the shape of the selection, not the color of it. The color you get when you use the brush is whichever color you choose to apply. If you want to save a colored sample, try saving your selection as a pattern (The Pattern Stamp) instead, or using the Clone Stamp (The Clone Stamp) repeatedly.