How to Use the Photoshop Brush Tool – Basic Tips and Tricks (2021)

The Photoshop brush tool is one of the most powerful tools for enhancing your images.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to use brush presets, create your own brush from scratch, modify all of its properties, and play with both blend modes and pressure controls. Charles Cabrera covers the basics of the Photoshop Brush Tool in this beginner’s guide!

How to Use the Photoshop Brush Tool

This first tip for using the Photoshop Brush tool isn’t much of a secret. Rather than selecting the brush tool from the toolbar and taking your eyes off your work, better way to select it is by pressing B on the keyboard.

How to Use the Photoshop Brush Tool as an Eraser

Here’s another quick tip here I’m painting along the top of this Sky right here and I’m painting through this tree. I can use the Photoshop Brush tool as an eraser by just holding down the ~ key. And erasing over the area where I want to remove where I was painting. I have more pro level tips and tricks that make working with the Photoshop Brush tool faster and easier.

How to Reset Your Photoshop Brush Tool

If you have your brush to active and if you see that your brushes acting kind of peculiar, you can come here to the Options bar and click on this arrow right next to the brush tool and come over to this gear and come down here an where it says reset tool that will reset your brush tool.

How to Import and Export Brushes into Photoshop

Also on the brush tool options bar if you click on this arrow it will open the brush preset picker. So this is where you can choose all your different brushes. What you can do is you could share your brush or just save it off to another location. Just select the brush and come up here to this gear and say export selected brushes in name it and save it.

You can also delete an individual brush or a group of brushes. Again highlight the brush and come up here to this gear, and say delete brush and say OK. If you want to load a previously saved brush or, a brush library that you got from somewhere. You can click on Import Brushes and go to the location on your computer and say open and your brushes imported. So that’s saving and loading brushes.

How to Change the Brush Size using Keyboard Shortcuts

You can change the size and hardness of the brush, but then you have to keep on going back over into your image and checking the size and hardness and so you’re taking your eyes off your work.

An easier way is to change brush size and brush hardness with keyboard shortcuts. If I hold down control+option and click and drag on a Mac and control+Alt, right-click and drag on a PC, dragging right to left changes the diameter dragging up and down will change the hardness of my brush.

Now as long as I have my mouse down I can lift up off the keyboard and I could still change my diameter and the hardness of my brush. Alternatively, you can use the left and right brackets to change your brush size also.

How to Change Your Brush Cursor to Display Crosshairs

When using the brush tool, it often helps to know the exact center of your brush when you’re trying to paint. You can show a crosshair in the center by enabling it in Photoshop’s preferences. To open the preferences in Photoshop Command plus K on a Mac or control plus K on Windows.

Once the properties window is open, click on cursors. And right here where it says show crosshair in brush tip. Click that and say OK. Now you have a crosshair in the middle of your brushstroke. I now have the crosshair while I’m painting. And by the way, to paint a straight line like this, I’m just holding down the shift key as I paint.

How to Open the Brush Blend Modes Menu

Photoshop also includes Brush blend modes. Brush Blend modes are found at the options bar whenever the brush tool is active. So brush blend modes control how the brush interacts with the layer and how your brushstroke interacts with other brushstrokes. If you click here on the top of the options bar you see that the default is normal and this is a complete list of all the brush blend modes.

And most of these blend modes are the same as you’d find in the layers panel and they behave the same. Except that these ones affect the brush, not the layer. So here’s a tip. Instead of going up to the options bar, there’s a faster way to switch between these brush blend modes as you’re working.

To open the brush Blend modes menu, it’s Shift+ Right-click on Windows and Shift+control Left-click on a Mac. And here is the list of all your brush blend modes. And I could just choose whatever blend mode I want. Or I can come up here and say, edit the brush. And if I click on edit brush that brings up the brush panel and you can choose another brush or any other option.

How to Use Opacity and Flow When Using the Brush Tool

And other important brush tool option is opacity and flow. So the opacity value is a percentage of transparency. 100% Opacity is a full color stroke. If I wanted different opacity, like for instance 50%, I could just type in a 5 and then when I paint with that you can see that it is more transparent. If I go back over it again, It’s still the same 50%. If I let up on the mouse, click again it’s adding another 50% to it.

So with opacity you won’t be able to build a particular color stroke unless you let up on the mouse and then click down again. I like to work with opacity at 100%. But now that brings us to flow.

So flow settings control the speed at which to paint is laid down. So good way to change the flow values, hold down shift. In this case, I’m going to hit a two for 20%. I’m going to paint and as I keep going back over it’s a slow build-up of 20% and so that’s probably a better way to work is to have your opacity at 100%. And have your flow determine how fast your color stroke comes onto your image.

How to Use the HUD Color Picker

Many times with our brush tool, we may want to change the color that we want to paint with. And we may have come over here to this color swatch. Over here, clicked on it, and chose our Hue and our lightness and our saturation and just said OK.

But there’s a better way with something called the heads up display color picker. Now if you’re on Windows it’s Shif+t Alt right-click in on a Mac it’s press and hold command+control option and left-click. And here is the heads up display color picker.

You come over here to your hue and select Hue. With your mouse down, slide over to the Hue Cube and you can drag vertically inside the cube to set the brightness of the color and drag horizontally, to set the saturation. And if you look at the color swatch over on the left the background color is changing right as you’re doing this. And at this point you can release all the keys on the keyboard and as long as the mouse is down you can continue to make your adjustments. And then you can paint in any of the areas on your image.

Now you can change the size of your heads up display color picker going back into the Preferences, Command+K on Mac and with general selected at the top here is HUD color picker and the Hue strip in this case was medium and I can change it to large. That’s what the large heads up display color picker looks like.

And you could select a hue wheel. Also, I’ll select Hue wheel medium. Command+option+control, left-click, and just by selecting the circle in the wheel. I can change my Hue. Continue to hold the mouse down and click on the circle in the hue cube and adjust my brightness and saturation, to something I like, and paint.

How to Make a Leaf Custom Brush

Now we’re going to create a leaf brush and it’s going to be quick and easy. So first I want to do is I want to get rid of some of these extra leaves. Here I’m going to use my eraser tool and justice paint over some of these. I don’t want that many leaves in my brush, that’s good.

And now I’m going to come to image adjustments, Hue and saturation. You don’t wanna take the lightness all the way down to minus 100 and say, OK. I want to crop this image and make it a little bit smaller. Something like that. Click the check mark. And then I’m going to come to edit Define Brush preset. Not going to worry too much about the name right now, I’m just going to say OK.

And now I want to use my brush settings. So I want to come up here to Window where it says brush settings. Click on that going to start off with our brush tip shape. Click on spacing and it should be 45%. Next click on shape dynamics. Change the size jitter to 48. If using a pen tool, set control to pen pressure, minimum diameter should be 10. Angle jitter should be 100 And a roundness Jitter of 19.

And next under scattering a scatter of 93. An count should be 2 and count jitter should be 20. And for using like a Wacom tablet, set your control to pen tilt. I’ll leave that off and click on color dynamics. Hue jitter should be 6. Brightness Jitter should be 18. Everything else should stay the same.

Come down here and click on this plus which is creating a new brush. Just name this. be sure Include Tool s

Settings is checked and say OK. And now if I come up here and say new. It’s just creating a new document. And we can paint on this new document and there’s our custom leaf brush.

See the previous blog article here 👉 https://charlescabrera.com/how-to-use-a-lut-in-photoshop-2-minute-tip/

Checkout my photography website here 👉 https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com