INTRO TO THE TOOL

The brush tool paints a shape onto your image or canvas. If you click once, the shape is painted only once. However, if you keep the button clicked, then the shape is continuously painted as you move the mouse.

Examples

Here are a few examples of the default brushes in photoshop. In each case, you see a single click showing the basic shape and then you see how the brush looks when the button is held down and the mouse is moved.

SHAPE OF THE BRUSH

You can use just about anything you’d like for the shape of the brush. In fact, you can make your own shape. This has led to many people creating their own packages of brushes called brush sets. These custom brushes are often shapes that are not truly made to be repeated continuously. Instead, they are often most useful as single stamps. Here is a brush set that was taken from the internet:

ADDING EXIST BRUSH SETS TO PHOTOSHOP

A brush set comes in a .ABR file. To make a brush set appear in photoshop, all you need to do is place the ABR file in the proper folder.

In Photoshop Elements 5, the folder is:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 5.0\Presets\Brushes

You have to do this before loading up Photoshop. If you don’t, you will have to close Photoshop and load it up again.

FINDING BRUSH SETS

The Resource section for this course has some Brush Sets available to you. Check them out.

You can also find brush sets on the internet.

MAKING A BRUSH

Making a single brush simply requires that you create it and then you choose Edit > Define Brush.

MAKING A BRUSH SET

After you have made several brushes, you can save them as a brush set. To do this, you need to choose Edit > Preset Manager. Then, you need to select all the brushes you want in your set and click on save.

Remember to save your brush set to your H drive.