Written By Steve Patterson

So far in our look at Photoshop's powerful and amazing Brush Dynamics, we've seen how we can dynamically control the size, angle and roundness of our brushes as we paint using the options found in the Shape Dynamics section of the Brushes panel, and how we can scatter multiple copies of our brush tip along each stroke with the Scattering options. In this tutorial, we'll look at the Texture options, which give us the ability to add a texture to our brush, perfect for creating the illusion of painting on a textured surface like paper or canvas, or just for adding more interest to the shape of our brush tip!

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To access the Texture options, click directly on the word Texture on the left side of the Brushes panel. Just as with the Shape Dynamics and Scattering sections that we looked at previously, we need to click on the word itself to gain access to the options. Clicking inside the checkbox to the left of the name will turn the Texture options on but won't let us change any of them:

Once you've clicked on the word Texture, the Texture options will appear on the right side of the Brushes panel. By default, the bottom half of the options are grayed out and unavailable. We'll see how to enable them a bit later on:

Choosing A Texture

Even though Photoshop calls them Texture options, what you'll usually be working with here is patterns, and we can use any of the patterns that Photoshop installed for us, as well as any patterns we've created ourselves. To choose a pattern, click on the pattern preview thumbnail at the top of the list of options:

This opens the Pattern Picker, which shows small thumbnail previews of all the patterns that are currently loaded into Photoshop. By default, there isn't much to choose from. That's because all we see are the patterns that Photoshop initially loads for us, but there are other pattern sets available. To load any of the additional pattern sets that Photoshop comes with, click on the small triangle icon in the top right corner of the Pattern Picker:

A fly-out menu will appear. If you look near the bottom of the menu, you'll see a list of other pattern sets we can choose from. To load one of them, simply click on its name. I'm going to select the first one - Artistic Surfaces:

Photoshop will pop open a small dialog box asking if you want to replace the current patterns with the new ones. Click on Append to simply add the new patterns in with the existing ones:

The newly loaded patterns will appear in the Pattern Picker after the patterns that were already loaded previously. To select a pattern, click on its thumbnail. I'm going to select the Parchment pattern, but you can choose any one you like. If you have Tool Tips enabled in Photoshop's Preferences, the name of each pattern will appear as you hover your mouse cursor over the thumbnails. Once you've chosen a pattern, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to close out of the Pattern Picker:

Even though I've selected a pattern, if I look down at the preview area along the bottom of the Brushes panel, I'm not seeing any changes to the appearance of my brush stroke (I'm still using the same standard round brush tip):

You may be seeing the same thing I'm seeing, or you may see your pattern clearly visible inside the brush stroke. The reason has to do with two main options that determine how our brush and our texture (pattern) interact with each other, which we'll look at next.

Mode

In the center of the Texture options is an option named Mode, which is short for Blend Mode (or Brush Mode, but I find it makes more sense to think of it as Blend Mode). This option is one of two main options (the other being Depth which we'll look at in a moment) that determine how the brush and the texture interact, or blend, with each other. If you click on the drop-down box to the right of the word Mode, you'll see a list of various blend modes we can choose from:

If you've been working with Photoshop for a while and using layer blend modes, most of the modes in the list, like Multiply, Overlay, Color Dodge and so on, will look familiar to you. Each of these modes will change how the texture appears inside the brush. The effect you get from each one will depend on the brush tip and texture you're using, so the easiest way to see what sort of results you'll get is by trying each mode out while keeping an eye on the preview of your brush stroke at the bottom of the Brushes panel.

The original mode I had selected was Color Burn, but as we saw in the preview area a moment ago, Color Burn completely blocked my texture from view. I'll select Multiply to see what effect I get:

If I look at the preview of my brush stroke, I see that my texture has suddenly appeared inside the shape of the stroke:

Let's try a different mode. I'll select Subtract this time:

With the Subtract mode selected, the texture is still visible inside the brush stroke, but it now appears much lighter:

Try each mode out with your brush and choose the one that gives you the results you're looking for.