When you paint with the Impressionist Brush, you blur and blend the edges of the objects in your photo, just like in an Impressionist painting. At least that’s what’s supposed to happen. This brush is very tricky to control, but you can get some really interesting effects with it, especially if you paint on a duplicate layer and play with the duplicate layer’s Opacity setting. Usually, you’ll want a really low opacity with this brush, or some of the curlier styles will make your image look like it’s made from poodle hair. Changing the brush’s Mode setting (Burning) can also help control the effect.
To activate the Impressionist Brush, press B or click the Brush tool’s Tools panel icon, and then select it from the pop-out menu. This brush has most of the same Options bar settings as the regular Brush, but if you click the More Options button (the icon to the right of the Opacity setting), you’ll see three new settings:
Style determines what kind of brushstroke effect the brush will create.
Area tells Elements the diameter of the painting area, meaning how much area the actual stroke should cover. This is usually much larger than the size of the cursor itself.
Tolerance controls how similar in color the pixels the brush passes over have to be before they’re affected by the brush.
If you really want to create a hand-painted look, you may prefer the brushstroke filters (Filter→Brush Strokes); Using Filters explains how to use them. The Impressionist Brush isn’t really the best tool for creating true Impressionist effects, although its blurring qualities can sometimes be useful because it covers large areas faster than the Blur tool. The Smudge tool (The Smudge Tool) is another excellent—though time-consuming—way to create a painted effect.