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Photoshop 4 Beginners - Brush Up Your Photoshop Skills - part 2 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

by Mike McNamee Published

A number of the terms are unfamiliar, obscure even. 'Jitter' is the most important new term. The brushes can interactively change as they are swept across the image. The change can be colour, saturation, size, orientation, etc, and jitter is the size or range of that change - more jitter equals more variation. Another important thing to remember at the outset is that you can brush colour onto an image (as though you are adding paint strokes to a piece of paper or canvas) but that a more frequent use of the brush is likely to be painting onto mask, in which case you will be using only grey paint (from black to white with 256 variants in total).

Another common, working theme lies in the 'Control' drop-down. Here the options are: Off, Fade, Pen Pressure; Pen Tilt, and Stylus Wheel. This menu item is marked with a shriek in a triangle unless a graphics tablet is connected to the computer. Although there are a number of graphic tablets on the market, the undoubted leader is Wacom which leads nicely to the review of their latest offering at the end of this feature. It is sufficient to say at the moment that the features of the drop-down menu apply to some (but not all) of the Wacom brushes - the scroll wheel, for example, is only present on the airbrush pen. with 256 variants in total). Another common, working theme lies in the 'Control' drop-down. Here the options are: Off, Fade, Pen Pressure; Pen Tilt, and Stylus Wheel. This menu item is marked with a shriek in a triangle unless a graphics tablet is connected to the computer. Although there are a number of graphic tablets on the market, the undoubted leader is Wacom which leads nicely to the rview of their latest offering at the end of this feature. It is sufficient to say at the moment that the features of the drop-down menu apply to some (but not all) of the Wacom brushes - the scroll wheel, for example, is only present on the airbrush pen.

FLOW & OPACITY

These are the confusing terrible twins of the brush engine. In just the same way that an artist will 'load' their brush with more media or less media (paint) and also control the amount of water on their brush, Photoshop provides similar controls. However, they are not quite the same, the electronic process has to be more defined than this and it is achieved with the Flow and Opacity settings which are headline adjustments in the context-sensitive tool bar. If your Opacity and Flow are 100% you will paint a fully dense colour onto the image, marred only by slight waviness to the edges if a hard brush is used. Setting the Flow to 50% but retaining an Opacity of 100% produces an even more pronounced waviness which extends into the body of the brush stroke. Setting the Flow to 100% and the Opacity to 50% creates a smoother body to the stroke although the edges remain wavy and the density of the stroke on the page remains at exactly 50% unless you release the mouse and go over the line again.

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last update 09/12/2022 14:57:48

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