Painting Tools: Brush / Pencil

Photoshop provides two tools for drawing (painting) directly to the image: The brush tool and the pencil tool. Both tools work basically the same way — you left-click and drag your mouse in the image to draw. Painting uses the currently selected foreground colour.

The Brush Tool

The brush tool paints with smooth edges. The options bar looks like this:

Settings:

• Brush: The size of the brush.
• Mode: The blending mode. For most work Normal will be the best option. Experiment with other modes to see what they do.
• Opacity: Anything less than 100% will allow the underlying image to be seen.
• Flow: Determines how quickly paint is applied. Lower setting produces lighter strokes.

The Airbrush Tool

The airbrush option allows you to apply gradual tones to an image, like a traditional airbrush.

The Pencil Tool

The pencil tool behaves much like the brush except that it has hard edges. The pencil tool options are the same as the brush tool, except:

• There is no airbrush option.
• There is an Auto Erase option. This paints the background colour over areas containing the foreground colour.

Note: To draw a straight line, click a starting point in the image, then hold down the Shift key and click an ending point.