207 Chapter 5 ✦ Painting and Editing ✦ Delete a brush: To delete a brush from the current brush set, Ctrl-click its icon in the Brush drop-down palette. When you press Ctrl, your cursor changes to a little scissors icon, indicating that you’re about to snip away a brush. You also can delete a brush by clicking its icon in the palette and choosing Delete Brush from the palette menu. Want to give a bunch of brushes the boot? Do the job in the Preset Manager dialog box. Shift-click the brushes you no longer want and then click the Delete button. ✦ Restore default brushes: To return to the default Photoshop brush set, choose Reset Brushes from the menu in the palette or the dialog box. You then have the option of either replacing the existing brushes with the default brushes or simply adding the default brushes to the end of the palette. ✦ Rename a brush: If you ever want to rename a brush, select it in the Preset Manager dialog box and click Rename. Or, even easier, click the brush icon on the Options bar (as shown earlier, in Figure 5-22) or double-click the icon in the Brush drop-down palette. Then enter the new brush moniker in the Name option box and press Enter. If you want your new brush names to live in perpetuity, resave the brush set. Otherwise, the names revert to their original labels if you replace the brush set, as is the case with all changes you make to brush characteristics. Opacity, pressure, and exposure Another way to change the performance of a paint or an edit tool is to adjust the Pressure, Opacity, or Exposure value, depending on what tool you’re using. In Version 6, the controls appear on the Options bar, which replaces the former Options palette. Regardless of which setting you want to change, you click the triangle to display a slider bar, drag the slider to raise or lower the value, and then press Enter. Alterna- tively, you can double-click the option box, type a value, and press Enter. Here’s a look at how these options work: ✦ Opacity: The Opacity value determines the translucency of colors applied with the paint bucket, gradient, line, pencil, paintbrush, eraser, or rubber stamp tools. At 100 percent, the applied colors appear opaque, completely covering the image behind them. (The one exception is the paintbrush with Wet Edges active, which is always translucent.) At lower settings, the applied colors mix with the existing colors in the image. You can change the opacity of pixels that you just altered by choosing Edit ➪ Fade (Ctrl+Shift+F) and dragging the Opacity slider in the Fade dialog box. While you’re in the dialog box, you can apply one of Photoshop’s brush modes to further change how the edited pixels blend with the originals. Chapter 10 discusses the Fade command in detail; you can get an introduction to brush modes at the end of this chapter in the “Brush Modes” section. Tip Caution 208 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching ✦ Pressure: The Pressure value affects different tools in different ways. When you use the airbrush tool, the Pressure value controls the opacity of each spot of color the tool delivers. The effect appears unique because the airbrush lays each spot of color onto the previous spot, mixing them together. This results in a progressive effect. Meanwhile, the paintbrush and pencil tools are not pro- gressive, so their spots blend to form smooth lines. When you use the smudge tool, the Pressure value controls the distance the tool drags colors in the image. And in the case of the blur, sharpen, or sponge tool, the value determines the degree to which the tool changes the focus or saturation of the image, 1 percent being the minimum and 100 percent being the maximum. ✦ Exposure: Available when you select the dodge or burn tool, Exposure con- trols how much the tools lighten or darken the image, respectively. A setting of 100 percent applies the maximum amount of lightening or darkening, which is still far short of either absolute white or black. The factory default setting for all Exposure and Pressure values is 50 percent; the default setting for all Opacity values is 100 percent. As long as one of the tools listed in this section is selected, you can change the Opacity, Pressure, or Exposure setting in 10-percent increments by pressing a num- ber key on the keyboard or keypad. Press 1 to change the setting to 10 percent, press 2 for 20 percent, and so on, all the way up to 0 for 100 percent. Want to change the Opacity, Pressure, or Exposure setting in 1-percent increments? No problem—just press two keys in a row. Press 4 twice for 44 percent, 0 and 7 for 7 percent, and so on. This tip and the preceding one work whether or not the Options bar is visible. Get in the habit of using the number keys and you’ll thank yourself later. Brush Dynamics In previous versions of Photoshop, you’ve been able to apply paint and edit effects in strokes that varied in size, opacity, pressure, or color along the length of your drag. But to take advantage of some of these options, you needed a pressure-sensi- tive drawing tablet. Photoshop 6 enables mouse users to enjoy the same flexibility as their stylus-wielding colleagues. Whether you use the mouse, a stylus, or even a finger on a laptop trackpad, these options introduce an element of spontaneity into what seems at times like an absolute world of computer graphics. 6 Photoshop 6 Tip 209 Chapter 5 ✦ Painting and Editing Exploring the Brush Dynamics palette The Brush Dynamics drop-down palette, shown in Figure 5-26, holds the secret to plying the paint and edit tools in strokes that vary from one end to the other. Click the brush icon at the right end of the Options bar to display the palette. Figure 5-26: Click the brush icon to display the Brush Dynamics palette, the key to creating fading and tapered lines. You get different options depending on the active tool; you can read about the options for the paint and edit tools in the next few sections. (Also see Chapter 7, which covers certain other tools affected by these settings.) But all the options have the same purpose: to enable you alter the effect of a tool as you drag. And in all cases, you can select one of three settings: ✦ Off: If you choose this option, the tools apply paint or edit effects consistently throughout the entire length of your drag. ✦ Fade: Select Fade to change the effect of a paint or edit tool gradually over the course of the drag. Enter a value in the option box to specify the distance over which the fading should occur. (More about that topic in the next section.) The tool attributes that you can fade depend on the tool. For the paintbrush and pencil, you can vary brush size, opacity, and color. When working with the airbrush, you can adjust pressure and opacity. For the edit tools discussed in this chapter (dodge, burn, sponge, sharpen, blur, and smudge), you can alter pressure and brush size. And for the eraser, rubber stamp, history brush, art history brush, and pattern stamp, all covered in Chapter 7, you can adjust size and opacity. No matter what tool you’re using, Photoshop applies it initially at the setting you established elsewhere on the Options bar and then gradually reduces the value to the lowest possible value as you drag. For example, if you set the Opacity slider on the Options bar to 70 and select Fade from the Opacity pop- up menu in the Brush Dynamics palette, dragging with the paintbrush gives you a stroke that fades from 70 percent opacity to full transparency. And if you select a 100-pixel brush and drag with the Size option set to Fade, your paint stroke tapers from 100 pixels wide at the start to 1 pixel at the end. 6 Photoshop 6 210 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching ✦ Stylus: If you use a pressure-sensitive tablet with Photoshop, the paint and edit tool effects vary according to the amount of pressure you apply as you draw on the tablet. The upcoming section “Setting up pressure-sensitive tablets” provides some additional information on working with a tablet. The next sections explain how the Brush Dynamics settings affect the paint and edit tools, and these sections also give you a real-life example to inspire your own inves- tigation of these options. Fading the paint (and other effects) In earlier versions of Photoshop, you could create a fading paint stroke by selecting the Fade check box in the Options palette and then specifying whether you wanted the stroke to fade from the foreground color to the background color or to trans- parency. In Version 6, you have the same choices, but they’re handled a little differently. When you work with the paintbrush or pencil, setting the Color option in the Brush Dynamics palette to Fade enables you to paint a line that fades from the foreground color to the background color. Choosing Fade from the Opacity pop-up menu, on the other hand, paints lines that fade to transparency. This option also enables you to create gradually disappearing strokes with the rubber stamp, pattern stamp, eraser, art history brush, and history brush. If you’re using the airbrush, you fade paint to transparency by setting the Pressure option in the Brush Dynamics palette to Fade. Similarly, you set the Pressure option to Fade to apply less and less pressure as you drag with the burn, dodge, sponge, blur, sharpen, and smudge tools. To try your hand at fading lines, select the paintbrush or pencil and select Fade from the Opacity pop-up menu in the Brush Dynamics palette. Then enter a value in the corresponding option box to specify the distance over which you want the fading to occur. The fading begins at the start of your drag and is measured in brush shapes. For example, assume that the foreground color is black. If you enter 40 into the Fade option box — as in Figure 5-27 — Photoshop paints 40 brush shapes, the first in black and the remaining 39 in increasingly lighter shades of gray. The physical length of a fading line is dependent both on the Fade value you enter in the Brush Dynamics palette and on the Spacing value entered in the Brush Options dialog box, discussed in “Editing a brush shape,” earlier in this chapter. To recap, the Spacing value determines the frequency with which Photoshop lays down brush shapes, and the Fade value determines the number of brush shapes laid down. Therefore, as demonstrated in Figure 5-28, a high Fade value combined with a high Spacing value creates the longest line. Note 6 Photoshop 6 211 Chapter 5 ✦ Painting and Editing Figure 5-27: The top and middle strokes show examples of fading strokes that you can create by selecting Fade from the Opacity pop-up menu in the Brush Dynamics palette. For the other two strokes, I set the Opacity option to Off and set the Color option to Fade. Figure 5-28: Here are five fading lines drawn with the paintbrush tool. In each case, I set the Opacity option in the Brush Dynamics palette to Fade and entered 36 as the Fade value. I changed the Spacing value incrementally from 1 to 50 percent, as labeled. Creating sparkles and comets Fading lines may strike you as pretty ho-hum, but they enable you to create some no-brainer, cool-mandoo effects, especially when combined with the Shift key techniques discussed earlier, in the “Painting a straight line” section. 1% 12% 25% 37% 50% 212 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching Figures 5-29 and 5-30 demonstrate two of the most obvious uses for fading straight lines: creating sparkles and comets. The top image in Figure 5-29 features two sets of sparkles, each made up of 16 straight lines emanating from the sparkle’s center. I cre- ated these lines by setting the Opacity slider on the Options bar to 100 percent and then selecting Fade from the Opacity pop-up menu in the Brush Dynamics palette. For the smaller sparkle on the right, I set the Fade value to 60 and drew each of the four perpendicular lines with the paintbrush tool. I changed the value to 36 before drawing the four 45-degree diagonal lines. The eight very short lines that occur between the perpendicular and diagonal lines were drawn with a Fade value of 20, and I created the larger sparkle on the left by periodically adjusting the Fade value, this time from 90 to 60 to 42. Figure 5-29: I drew the sparkles in the top image using the paintbrush tool. The second image features a reflection applied with the Lens Flare filter (upper-left corner) and two dabs of a custom brush shape (right edge of the bumper). 213 Chapter 5 ✦ Painting and Editing For comparison’s sake, I used different techniques to add a few more sparkles to the bottom image in Figure 5-29. To achieve the reflection in the upper-left corner of the image, I chose Filter ➪ Render ➪ Lens Flare and selected 50–300mm Zoom from the Lens Type options. (Lens Flare works exclusively in the RGB mode, so I had to switch to RGB to apply the filter, even though Figure 5-29 is a grayscale image.) I created the two tiny sparkles on the right edge of the bumper using a custom brush shape. I merely selected the custom brush, set the foreground color to white, and clicked once with the paintbrush tool in each location. So many sparkles make for a tremendously shiny image. In Figure 5-30—a nostalgic tribute to the days when gas was cheap and the whole family would pile in the Plymouth for a Sunday drive through space— I copied the car and pasted it on top of a NASA photograph of Jupiter. I then went nuts clicking and Shift-clicking with the paintbrush tool to create the comets— well, if you must know, they’re actually cosmic rays—you see shooting through and around the car. It’s so real, you can practically hear the in-dash servo unit warning, “Duck and cover!” Figure 5-30: To create the threatening cosmic rays, I set the Fade value to 110 and then clicked and Shift-clicked on opposite sides of the image with the paintbrush tool. After masking portions of the image (a process described at length in Chapter 9), I drew rays behind the car and even one ray that shoots up through the car and out the spare tire. The three bright lights in the image — above the left fin, above the roof, and next to the right-turn signal—are more products of the Lens Flare filter in the RGB mode. 214 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching I drew all the fading lines in Figures 5-29 and 5-30 with the paintbrush tool, using a variety of default brush shapes. Because I didn’t edit any brush shape, the Spacing value for all lines was a constant 25 percent. Creating tapered strokes Available for any tool that uses a brush, the Size option in the Brush Dynamics palette tapers your paint or edit strokes when set to Fade. As with the other palette options, the Fade value that you enter determines how quickly the stroke tapers to nothingness. Figure 5-31 shows examples of four tapering strokes created by setting the Size option to Fade and using different Fade values. In all cases, I used a 19-pixel hard brush and left the brush Spacing value at its default, 25 percent. (See the previous section for details about how the Spacing value comes into play when you create fading or tapering strokes.) Figure 5-31: Here you see four tapering lines created by setting the Size option to Fade and using different Fade values. I used a 19-pixel hard brush and the default Spacing value for all four lines. Setting up pressure-sensitive tablets In Photoshop 6, you can use a mouse to create fading and tapering lines, but you can go in only one direction. You can make a line fade or taper into nothingness, but you can’t make a thin, faint line get fatter and more opaque as you drag. Nor can you fade or taper a single stroke by varying amounts along the course of your drag. But with a pressure-sensitive tablet, you can dynamically adjust the thickness of lines and the opacity of colors by changing the amount of pressure you apply to the stylus, the pen-like input device that takes the place of the mouse when you work with a graphics tablet. 6 Photoshop 6 25 steps 50 steps 75 steps 100 steps Note 215 Chapter 5 ✦ Painting and Editing If you’re an artist and you’ve never experimented with a pressure-sensitive tablet, I recommend that you do so soon. You’ll be amazed at how much it increases your range of artistic options, not only because you have access to options like the ones I just mentioned, but also because drawing and editing with a stylus is much easier than working with a clunky old mouse. Thirty minutes after I installed my first tablet back in 1990, I had executed the cartoon you see in Figure 5-32. Whether you like the image or not — I’ll admit there’s a certain troglodyte quality to the slope of his fore- head, and that jaw could bust a coconut — it shows off the tablet’s capability to paint tapering lines and accommodate artistic expression. Figure 5-32: Although I painted this caricature years ago, it still demonstrates the range of artistic freedom provided by a pressure-sensitive tablet. Pressure-sensitive options As I mentioned a few pages ago, you control Photoshop’s reaction to stylus pres- sure using the options in the Brush Dynamics drop-down palette. When you select Stylus from any of the palette pop-up menus, the program responds to changes in stylus pressure by varying your paint or edit strokes as follows: ✦ Size: Select Stylus from the Size pop-up menu, as shown in Figure 5-33, if you want Photoshop to change the thickness of the line according to stylus pres- sure. The more pressure you apply, the thicker the line. Figure 5-34 shows three paintbrush lines drawn using this feature. I drew the first line using a hard brush, the second with a soft brush, and the third with a hard brush and with the Wet Edges check box selected. 216 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching Figure 5-33: When you work with a pressure-sensitive tablet, select Stylus from any pop-up menu in the Brush Dynamics palette to vary your paint and edit strokes according to stylus pressure. Figure 5-34: The effects of the Size, Color, and Opacity options on lines drawn with the paintbrush tool and a pressure-sensitive tablet ✦ Color: With Stylus selected for the Color option, the paintbrush, pencil, and airbrush lay down the foreground color at full pressure, the background color at slight pressure, and a mix of the two at medium pressure. ✦ Opacity: When you work with the pencil or the paintbrush, this option paints an opaque coat of foreground color at full pressure that dwindles to transparency at slight pressure. Similarly, varying stylus pressure adjusts the opacity of strokes that you paint with the rubber stamp, pattern stamp, eraser, history brush, and art history brush. ✦ Pressure: Here’s one that I think you could probably figure out for yourself, but just in case: If you set the Pressure option to Stylus, changes in stylus pressure alter the pressure setting of the airbrush, dodge, burn, sponge, smudge, sharpen, and blur tools. Heavier stylus pressure increases the tool pressure. Hard brush Soft brush Wet edges Color Size Opacity [...]... Remember how the HSL color model calls for three color channels? One is for hue, the value that explains the colors in an image; the second is for saturation, which represents the intensity of the colors; and the third is for luminosity, which explains the lightness and darkness of colors If you choose the Hue brush mode, therefore, Photoshop applies the hue from the foreground color without changing any... tools Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking Paint bucket cursor Figure 6- 2: The results of applying the paint bucket tool to the exact pixel after setting the Tolerance value to 16 (top), 32 (middle), and 64 (bottom) In each case, the foreground color is light gray 227 228 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching Figure 6- 3: The results of turning on (left) and off (right) the Anti-aliased check box before using... paint bucket tool — and then some Click for menu Photoshop Figure 6- 5: The Fill dialog box combines the opacity and brush mode options available for the paint bucket with an expanded collection of fill content options 6 If you display the Use pop-up menu, you see a collection of fills that you can apply Foreground Color and Pattern behave the same as they do for the paint bucket tool When you select... Ctrl+Backspace To fill the selection with the foreground color, press Alt+Backspace Photoshop 6 You now choose a gradient style by clicking an icon on the Options bar The old shortcut for cycling through the styles, Shift+G, now toggles the gradient and paint bucket tools, which occupy the same flyout menu in the Version 6 toolbox If you turn off the Use Shift Key for Tool Switch check box in the Preferences... turning off this last option.) 6 Click inside the feathered selection to fill it with black The result is an image fading into white and then into black, like the edges of a worn slide or photograph, as shown in Figure 6- 6 233 234 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching Figure 6- 6: I created this antique frame effect by filling a feathered selection with the paint bucket tool Figure 6- 7 shows a variation on this... example of Figure 6- 8 Gradient options 6 As with other tools in Photoshop 6, the Options bar contains the gradient tool controls, which you can examine in Figure 6- 9 If you don’t see the Options bar, press Enter when a gradient tool is active or double-click the tool icon in the toolbox The following list explains how Options bar controls work In all cases, you must adjust the options before using the... labeled in Figure 6- 1 Photoshop 6 enables you to create multiple patterns; you’re no longer limited to one custom pattern The Chapter 5 discussion of custom brushes details presets fully, so I won’t waste space repeating everything here Be sure to also check out Chapter 7, which explains ways of creating custom patterns Click to display palette menu Figure 6- 1: These options govern the performance of the... Bitmap mode Photoshop You can fill an area of an image in the following ways: 6 ✦ The Fill command: Choose Edit ➪ Fill to fill a selection with the foreground color or a repeating pattern In Photoshop 6, you don’t need to select a portion of the image to access the Fill command If you choose the command while no selection is active, Photoshop fills the entire layer Tip To choose the Fill command without... range of Photoshop s selection tools For example, instead of putting your faith in the paint bucket tool’s Anti-aliased option, you can draw a selection outline that features hard edges in one area, antialiased edges elsewhere, and downright blurry edges in between 6 If you want to fill an entire layer, you don’t need to create a selection outline before choosing Fill as you did in past versions of Photoshop. .. let up on the stylus (See Chapter 7 for more information on Photoshop s multiple undos.) Note that the shortcuts I mention here assume that you set the Redo Key option on the General panel of the Preferences dialog box to its default setting, Ctrl+Z Check out Chapter 2 for more information on your other Redo Key options Tip Better yet, create a new layer before you paint with or without a stylus Then . color, the Photoshop paint bucket tool offers several useful adjustment options. 6 Photoshop 6 6 Photoshop 6 Tip 6 Photoshop 6 6 Photoshop 6 225 Chapter 6 ✦ Filling and Stroking In Version 6, you. creating custom patterns. Figure 6- 1: These options govern the performance of the paint bucket tool. Click to display palette menu 6 Photoshop 6 6 Photoshop 6 2 26 Part II ✦ Painting and Retouching ✦. Dynamics palette. For the smaller sparkle on the right, I set the Fade value to 60 and drew each of the four perpendicular lines with the paintbrush tool. I changed the value to 36 before drawing