I think a lot of the issues people have with digital art stem from the fact that not everyone has the time to drudge through each menu and find the things that work best, which is totally understandable. There are tricks with traditional brushes that probably take years and years of experience to understand. So I am going to make a quick LIST (are you surprised? I love lists. I should marry a list) of ways you can take advantage of the different settings and brushes in Photoshop without having to go on a hunt.
How To Get The Most Out Of Photoshop Brush Settings
Check out your tablet settings, and keep the preferences window open while you paint. You can adjust your brush firmness and softness on the fly. A lot of people don’t bother with this because it’s not handled through the program itself, but I find that it’s invaluable when adjusting to different challenges while painting. A soft brush will apply the “paint” more easily, with little to no pressure, while a firm brush will require a lot more oomph in order to get the full opacity/size of your brush stroke.
The first and foremost thing to know about Photoshop: you can make your own brushes. The “tip” of the brush is the shape you see in the brush selection pane. A brush tip is basically an image that Photoshop repeats in a certain way, according to its settings in the Brush window, to create a stroke of “paint”. This means that it’s ridiculously easy to create your own custom brushes, because it’s just an image. Open a small document (say 400×400) and make some random scribbles in the center. Then click “Define Brush Preset” (Edit > Define Brush Preset…) and it will present you with a name input. Name your brush whatever you want. Whatever tool you were using before should now be set to your new brush preset, which will be located LAST in your brush selection pane. (Scroll down.)
Now it’s time to open the Brush Window (Window > Brushes). I like to keep mine handy at all times, and save the brushes I use the most. To save a brush, create the brush you like via the Brush window and then right click on your open document to get to the brushes menu. It should pop up with a list of available brushes. Next to the input for the Master Diameter, there should be a little round button with an arrow; click that to get to the extended menu. There you should see the first option is “New Brush Preset.” Click that, save your brush, and then save your entire brush set by clicking “Save Brushes.”
Note: saving a custom brush will create another brush with the same tip image. You can delete the original pre-saved version (the one Photoshop automatically saved when you defined the preset), the one without the nifty settings, or you can keep it. As long as you remember which brush is which, you’ll be fine!
Here is a rundown of the different settings available in the Brush window.
Dynamic opacity is your friend in most painting situations. Some people prefer not to use it, but for blending it really can’t be beat in terms of speed and control. Combined with the tablet settings, you get almost unlimited control over how transparent your paint layers are; someone who’s been using a tablet with the same settings for a long time can usually feel the different “levels” of sensitivity that create transparent or opaque layers of paint. When you’re blending with dynamic opacity, it is easy to put down a solid color, then release some of the pressure on the pen and create a half-way tone between two colors; with the eyedropper tool, you can pick up that midtone and continue blending.
Shape dynamics is what makes the brush smaller when you apply less pressure and larger when you apply more. Pretty simple. But it can also do a lot more. Shape Dynamics is the menu that’s probably the most useful when creating a custom brush. From here you can edit the angle jitter (it rotates the brush at random, creating a more organic, spontaneous feel), size jitter (randomizes the size of the brush, also controllable by different means such as pen pressure, pen tilt etc.) and roundness jitter, which creates alternating “flat” brushes mixed in with the usual round ones. Play around with these to really understand what they do.
Brush Tip Shape is your general editing pane for the shape of the “tip” (the little picture you see when selecting the brush). From here, you can change its diameter, spacing, angle (including a handy “flip” feature, if you’re using an angled brush and you need to angle it the other way), and “hardness”, which only applies to round brushes. Spacing is great for creating things like jewelry or patterns very quickly. You can make a great “star” brush if you take a round brush and space it out very far, with size jitter.
Scattering is another way to make great, natural-looking brushes. You can control the count (how many tips are included in the scatter), how wide apart the tips are scattered, and even how random the count is.
Dual Brush is not something I’d recommend for beginners, but it can be a nifty tool if you want to experiment to get different effects. It basically combines brushes, using one brush for the general shape of the stroke and another for the “fill” (texture inside the stroke). This can lead to some pretty crazy combinations, so definitely fiddle with this to get a feel for how it works.
Texture is one I never bother with, personally, but if you’re really into making super-detailed or grungy brushes, you can use this pane to add a texture to any brush. I would not suggest using the default Photoshop textures, as it’s almost always very obvious when people do this.
Color Dynamics is pretty self-explanatory, though it took me forever to figure out. You choose two colors (your foreground/background – see those two blocks of color under your vertical toolbar?) and Color Dynamics will actually shift the color of the paint you’re using between them. You can choose the colors white and black, for example, and Color Dynamics will paint white if you press down very hard, shades of grey when you’re painting normally and black when you’re barely touching the tablet. For that level of control you might want to play around with your tablet settings to get the right balance down. But it can do more than just this; it can actually jitter between Hues (giving you random colors), Saturation, Brightness (values) and even Purity, which you can adjust to decide how far your color can stray from the original color. It’s a really nifty menu and you can do a LOT of neat stuff with it, but don’t overuse it.
Here’s a trippy example, made with the default brush set on “saturation” jitter:
The last five options, which don’t have menus of their own, are Noise, Wet Edges, Airbrush, Smoothing and Protect Texture. Noise adds grit. Wet Edges…makes your brush look like it has wet edges, I guess. I’m not certain what Airbrush does but I think it has to do with continuing to add paint even after you’ve stopped moving your stylus. I don’t know what Smoothing does but I always have it turned on, along with Protect Texture. In 99% of cases you won’t need to worry about these checkboxes.
With this many options for brushes, there’s really no need to use the sidebar tools like blur, dodge and burn, or smudge to paint. They’re handy for very quick fixes, but as painting tools (in my opinion) they always come in second to pure brush work. With custom brushes (or even edited defaults) you can create an array of very subtle effects, and you can be completely in control. I tend to use abstract brushes but you can make some really nice terrain brushes too; a lot of concept artists use custom terrain/environment brushes for speedpaints.
Hope that was helpful!
