Photoshop Brush Tutorial: Brush Controls Overview

Written By Steve Patterson

Adobe completely revamped the Photoshop brushes engine with the release of Photoshop 7, catapulting the industry standard image editing program into the limelight as one of the best digital painting programs on the market. In fact, they did such an amazing job that Photoshop's brushes remain virtually unchanged through Photoshop CS and Photoshop CS2.

Thanks to its dynamic brush controls, Photoshop now gives us the ability to change virtually every aspect of our brush while we're painting. That's right, while we're painting. We can let Photoshop make random changes for us, or we can give ourselves complete and precise control using things like pen pressure, assuming you're using a pen tablet of course, as every serious Photoshop user should be. We can even use combinations of random brush changes and precise control.

So what sort of things do we have control over?

Shape Dynamics

With Shape Dynamics, we can change the size of our Photoshop brush, the angle of our brush, and the roundness of our brush. Photoshop can make changes randomly to any or all of these brush properties, or we can control them ourselves, or both!

Scattering

Scattering gives us the ability to, well, scatter our brush tips around while we're painting. It also allows us to tell Photoshop to use more than one copy of our brush tip at a time, up to a maximum of 16 brush tips at once! We can even have Photoshop choose a random number of brush tips for us while we're painting. Combine multiple copies of the brush tip with scattering for some crazy, chaotic brush effects!

Texture

Texture allows us to use a texture with our brush rather than simply using solid colors! Photoshop comes installed with lots of different textures for us to use, or we can create and use our own!

Dual Brush

If you ever thought mixing paint colors together was fun, try mixing brushes! Dual Brush lets us combine two completely different brush tips together into one!

Color Dynamics

Why settle for using the same color throughout the entire length of the brush stroke when you can use multiple colors! With Color Dynamics, we can set a foreground and background color in the Tools palette and then dynamically change between them while we paint, using any colors that fall between them in the color wheel. We can change the hue, the brightness, the saturation, and the purity of the color, all while we're painting!

Other Dynamics

Falling under the category of Other Dynamics is Opacity and Flow, giving us dynamic control over the paint's transparency and over how much paint is being applied to the canvas. Again, we can give ourselves precise control over these properties, or we can allow Photoshop to make random changes for us, or both!

Photoshop also gives us the ability to add noise to our brush, a wet edges effect, and an airbrush option, which replaces the actual Airbrush tool found in previous versions of the program. With all of these dynamic controls available for Photoshop's brushes, we can create virtually any effect we can imagine.