Choosing a Brush Tip Shape in Photoshop

When you have Brush Tip Shape selected in the left column of the Brushes palette, a scrolling box shows the available brush tips. You can use the palette pop-up menu to choose various views, including text only, small and large thumbnails, small and large lists, and stroke thumbnail. (To access the pop-up menu, click the triangle in the upper right of the palette.)The 12 brush parameters that you can choose to apply and edit are arrayed in the left column. You can select any of these options to apply them to the currently selected brush.

Select an option to edit its characteristics. Here are the characteristics:
- Brush Tip Shape: These controls let you choose the size and shape of the brush tip, including the diameter, angle, roundness, hardness, and spacing.

- Shape Dynamics: These controls include the amount of jitter (randomness or variation produced when you draw a stroke, amount of fade, the size, the jitter angle, the roundness, and other options. The higher the value, the greater the amount of variance for each option. Some of these apply only when you are using a pressure-sensitive digital tablet. Check your digital tablet's instruction manual for more information on how to customize brushes for your tablet. The Flip X and Flip Y jitter option flips the brush shape across the horizontal axis (X) or the vertical axis (Y). For example, if your brush shape is an L shape and you select Flip X, your brush shape will be backwards L. Check Flip Y and your brush shape will an upside down L shape. Check both and it will be an upside-down, backwards L shape.

- Scattering: This parameter controls the amount and position of brush marks in a stroke. The higher the value, the higher the number of brush marks and the farther apart they are. When you have Both Axes selected, Photoshop distributes the brush marks radially, as if on a curve. The Count controls the number of brush marks at each spacing point. The higher the value, the greater the number of marks.

- Texture: This control allows you to impart a texture pattern to a brush stroke, either one of Photoshop's preset textures or one of your design. Select Invert to reverse the light and dark pixels in the pattern. Scale sizes the pattern in each stroke. Texture Each Tip renders each tip as it is stroked, giving a more saturated effect. Depth controls how prominent the pattern appears against the brush stroke. Minimum Depth specifies the minimum depth that the paint of each stroke shows through the pattern. Mode lets you choose one of Photoshop's blending modes.

- Dual Brush: You can use two tips to draw with a single brush. This option lets you select the characteristics of the second tip by using the same type of attributes — such as diameter, spacing, and scatter — applied to the first tip. You can also specify a blending mode between the two tips.

- Color Dynamics: This control uses your foreground and background colors to adjust how the color varies during a stroke, allowing you to create a multicolored brush. Slight variations give the stroke a more natural, organic look. You can introduce slight (or major) jitter to the hue, saturation, brightness, and purity of the colors, as well as some randomness between the foreground and background colors as you draw a stroke. Without color dynamics, the stroke color remains constant.

- Other Dynamics: These introduce randomness into the opacity and flow factors of a brush, again making the brush stroke look more natural and less machine-generated. You'll want to experiment with all the dynamics to see exactly how they can affect your image. Note that the Flow and Opacity settings in the Brushes palette do not override those settings in the Options bar.

Here’s a list of brush tip characteristics:
- Noise: Adds random pixels to brush tips, giving them texture and an organic quality. This option is more apparent in feathered brushes.
- Wet Edges: Makes the brush tip leave a stroke that looks more like watercolor, with paint building up along the edges.
- Airbrush: Gives the brush tip a soft, airbrushed look.
- Smoothing: Smoothes out the curves when drawing arcs with the brush. Again, this option is more noticeable when you use a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet.
- Protect Texture: Ensures that all brush tips that use a texture use the same texture. This allows you to switch back and forth between brush tips while painting and still achieve a consistent texture.

You can now lock any of the brush characteristics by clicking the small lock icon to the right of the characteristic. This ensures that the settings don’t change after you’ve gotten your brush just so. This works especially well if you want the size of your brush to be correlated with the amount of pressure you apply to a stylus when using a drawing tablet. By locking settings, you override any specifications set by preset brushes. You can choose the Reset All Locked Settings option from the Brushes palette pop-up menu to bring back the default settings of the brush. And finally, to clear all brush options, select Clear Brush Controls from the Brushes palette pop-up menu.