Working with Brushes in Photoshop 7

Q. Where has the Brushes Palette Gone?

A. The Brushes Palette can be found in the "Palette Well" section of the Options bar (right hand side). It can also be accessed from the "Window" menu.

Q. How do I customise my Brush settings?

A. Details can be found in the Photoshop User Guide commencing at page 172.

A helpful set of tutorials describing various aspects of the Brush tool, including customisation can be found at the following URL:

<http://www.planetphotoshop.com/PeteBauer73.html>

Setting up Brush Presets in Photoshop 7 courtesy of Ann Shelborne
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To make some other brushes: click on Tip Shape and choose a shape, and adjust angle hardness or spacing.

Then go to Shape Dynamics and select your choices there. You will notice that you can control the amount of variation (“Jitter”) and set it to react to Wacom Tablet pressure/tilt etc. or set the effect to Fade in a pre-determined number of steps up to 255. You can also set any Dynamic to be “OFF” (remain constant).

In “Other Dynamics” you will find the controls for Opacity and Flow.

These two can also be adjusted from the top tool bar. Think of Flow as the valve on a spray-can: if you set it at 1% the color will build very, very slowly until it reaches the maximum value set in “Opacity”. A 50% Flow will build color more quickly. If you have the Airbrush button depressed on the top tool bar, any painting tool will function in Airbrush mode -- it will continue to spray paint until you release pressure on the stylus until the maximum designated opacity is reached. You can either click on the Airbrush icon on the top bar or use Shift Option P to toggle it on or off.

You can also use other panes in the Brush palette to introduce textures, color
variations, scattering etc. and make Brush Tips from any grayscale object.

When you have setup all the Dynamics for a special Brush, just click the New Page icon at the bottom of the palette to give it a new Brush Name (if you are wise you will enter your own descriptive label here, rather than using the default names) and click OK. If you now Control Click while using a painting tool, you will see that your new brush has been added to the bottom of the Presets. It can also be seen in the Brushes palette if you click on Brush Presets.

Once you have built your new Brush palette, Save it to a new name (“Retouching”) in Adobe Photoshop 7 > Presets > Brushes.

You can re-arrange the order that your Brushes appear in Brush Presets by opening Preset Manager and Command-dragging a brush to a new position. [You may prefer to change the viewing mode of this palette, from its pop-out menu, to Small or Large List.] Also, Control-clicking in this palette opens a contextual menu while Option-clicking deletes an item.

While painting (and this applies to ALL painting tools and erasers), Control-clicking will open the Presets List where you can change the brush size or select a new Tip on the fly.

Using the angle-brackets, < and > , after selecting a Preset will cycle you through the presets