The Photoshop team has lavished much attention on painting features. In this lesson, we’ll dabble with painting. If you like the experience, there’s the whole “Brushes & Painting” chapter in the Compendium! I’d suggest consulting it during these experiments too.
Tools that use a brush cursor can be customized with the Brush Settings panel. Configurations made there can be saved to the Brushes panel. Configuring is choosing (or creating) a brush tip and adding behaviors to it. These can leverage stylus and pressure-sensitive tablets. Brushes (a.k.a. presets) can be tool-specific or used by any brush-using tool.
To facilitate your experimental doodling, let’s make a layer structure that allows you to easily wipe the canvas clean without being too disruptive.
Now, here’s the challenge when experimenting. If you simply press delete/backspace, that whole layer will be destroyed. If you wanted to protect the pristine Background, you’d have to create another. But when there’s a selection active, delete/backspace removes only what’s inside the marquee, not the layer it’s on.
So, for quick erasure of my doodles but not my doodling layer, I marquee the whole layer with ⌘-A/Ctrl-A or by choosing Select > All. I simply choose not to notice those marching ants. When I want to wipe off the doodle layer, I hit delete/backspace and the layer is emptied but is still there, ready for more action.
That string of pearls indicates that a stroke isn’t really continuous, but is a series of overlapping dabs. The spacing controls how tightly they overlap—if they do.
In the top part of the Brush Settings panel, you’ll see brush tips. They’re used by the presets that are currently installed. Many are made from imagery. All the controls you’ve just been playing with can be used with those, too, except Hardness. Numbers in that window indicate the size of the tip in pixels.
The beginning and end of each stroke is rough like bristles were involved.
This is where days are lost. On the left side of the Brush Settings panel you’ll see the various categories of behaviors that a brush can enjoy. I’ll mention a couple here and leave you to explore with the “Brushes & Painting” chapter in the Compendium as your guide.
If the checkbox wasn’t checked, it is now. By highlighting the words, you can see the many controls on the right. You’re going to crank up one of those controls at a time, making a stroke to see its effects.
You get the idea! The other jitters are more subtle. Roundness Jitter randomizes each tip’s roundness, of course. Flip X and Flip Y Jitter randomly flip each tip either horizontally or vertically. One more:
The dabs move off perpendicular to the stroke direction. To make them also scatter along the stroke direction, check the Both Axes box. If the dabs get too spread out, you can multiply their number with the Count setting. Depending on the tip you choose, and other settings in this panel, this can provide interesting textures.
This has been just a taste. I hope you’re intrigued and plan to explore more.