Although Elements does not have a Brush panel, if you click the Brush icon grouped with the tool options, to the right of the Airbrush Button, Elements will open the Options panel seen i
Trang 1the tablet icon is for graphics-tablet users only Clicking it overrides any other settings for the pen and causes pen pressure to alter brush size We do not find this helpful for most photographic work
You’re just about ready to take the Brush tool for a test-drive, but you still need
to adjust the size of the brush Place the cursor on the new document you created, and evaluate the size of the brush then, press the left and right square bracket keys ([
and ]) to reduce or enlarge the size of the brush, respectively You can hold down the shift key while pressing the right and left bracket keys to adjust the hardness/softness, respectively, of the brush, but this isn’t quite as visual as the size adjustment For that reason we usually set the hardness/softness directly in the Brush panel
Cs5 also gives you the option to drag and modify the brush tip to resize the brush tip in Windows, press alt and right-click while dragging the cursor on a Mac, press option+Ctrl and drag to modify the softness/hardness of the brush in Win-dows, press alt+Ctrl and right-click while dragging unfortunately there does not seem to be a comparable Mac shortcut
Note: To draw a horizontal or perpendicular straight line, hold down the Shift key and then click and drag the cursor
Note: The Caps Lock key toggles the mouse-pointer display between Precise and the brush size settings If you’re not able to see the circle that defines the shape of your brush, check the status of Caps Lock This is one of the most common problems we encounter in workshops!
Brush Panel
the Brush panel is located on the tool options bar when you select a Brush tool, and
is accessible as a panel as well Clicking the icon opens the Brush panel in a float-ing dialog box You can select preset brushes and set the same parameters you set in the Brush Preset Picker on the options bar, but in addition you can modify brush tip options Most of these options are more useful to graphic artists than to nature pho-tographers, but if you use a graphics tablet such as a Wacom, you’ll need to use this dialog box to set the brush so that the opacity of your stroke varies with pen pressure
this will be useful when you’re painting on layer masks (We’ll be doing that exten-sively in later chapters.)
to vary the opacity of your brush stroke according to the pressure applied with your stylus, follow these steps:
Trang 2Opacity Jitter slider control, as shown in Figure 4.42
Figure 4.42 Setting Pen Pressure to control
opacity is extremely useful when painting on
a layer mask using a graphics tablet
For Photoshop Elements Users: Setting Brush Options
The Elements Brush drop-down list is simpler than the one in CS5, having no options for Master Diameter or Hardness To see a stroke preview, like in the Photoshop Brush drop-down, click on the More Options button and select Stroke Thumbnail
Although Elements does not have a Brush panel, if you click the Brush icon grouped with the tool options, to the right of the Airbrush Button, Elements will open the Options panel seen in the following image Here, in addition to Hardness and Spacing, there are controls for the following:
phys-ical canvas while drawing a stroke) Lower values mean the color fades away faster, although a value of 0 means to turn fade off
very useful for photographers)
Continues
Trang 3For Photoshop Elements Users: Setting Brush Options (Continued)
indi-vidual “dots” of paint
If you are using a tablet, clicking the small triangle grouped with the other tool options, between the Airbrush and Brush Options buttons, will bring up a panel that allows you to choose which brush options are affected by pen pressure We recommend leaving this at the default, Size
Tr y It! Now comes the fun part You have an empty canvas before you, and you know how to adjust the behavior of the Brush tool So, start painting away! Get comfortable working with the Brush tool, using the mouse (or a stylus) to paint strokes on the canvas Be sure to adjust all the various set-tings for the Brush tool, including the Color, Hardness, Opacity, and the size of the brush so you get comfortable adjusting the various parameters You can then use the Brush tool with confidence in the wide variety of situations we’ll describe in later chapters
The Color Replacement Tool
the Color Replacement tool (Figure 4.43) is a specialized Brush tool with properties that allow you to alter the color of specific areas within your image it produces simi-lar behavior in most cases to what you could achieve with the Brush tool in conjunc-tion with specific settings, but it provides extended capability above and beyond the Brush the Color Replacement tool is useful for fixing small areas of color problems within an image, where you need to change the color without changing the tonality or texture of the area
Figure 4.43 The Color Replacement
tool lives under the Brush tool
For this type of use, we typically work with the Color Replacement tool with the following options set:
Mode set to Color, so we’re changing the color in the image.
tool to change color anywhere we paint, not just based on an initial sampling point, for example occasionally we use the second button, sampling once , to replace just a certain color
Limits set to Contiguous, to adjust only those colors that are contiguous to those we
paint over
Trang 4Tolerance at 100%, so all areas we paint on are adjusted.
Anti-Alias checked.
When you paint with the Color Replacement tool with the settings recom-mended here, it changes the color of the pixels under the brush, preserving tonality
and texture For example, if you have some color contamination on a flower because
a flower of a different color was very close to the lens and resulted in a wash of color
that is completely out of focus, you could use this tool to paint an appropriate color to
fix the flower
Painting with a neutral color (such as black) changes the color to a shade of gray
if you want to paint a color correction, you naturally need to find an appropri-ate color to paint with using the Color Replacement tool to do so, simply hold the
alt/option key, and click an appropriate color within the image to make that color the
foreground color You can then paint with that color in appropriate areas of the image
using the Color Replacement tool to change the color as needed
Tr y It! To practice using the Color Replacement tool, open the image ColorReplacement on www.
sybex.com/go/photoshopnature, select the Color Replacement tool, set the foreground color to
a muted orange, and paint on the red flower on the left to change its color Be careful to paint only the red flower, zooming in and using a small brush as needed when painting near the foreground flower
The History Brush
the History Brush tool is unique—it allows you to selectively paint certain areas of
your image to take them “back in time,” reflecting what they looked like before
cer-tain tasks were performed this allows you to perform actions on the entire image and
then undo those actions in specific areas as desired Let’s look at an example to help
you understand this concept
Note: Neither of us uses the History Brush often, preferring to use various layers and masks to produce the same results However, it can come in handy, so we present it here as an option
start by opening an image and applying an artistic filter to that image For example, you might select Filter > artistic > Colored Pencil, adjust the settings for this
also access it by pressing Y on your keyboard.)
By default, when you paint with the History Brush, it changes the areas you paint on to what they looked like when you first opened the image However, you can
change the source for the History Brush to any history state on the History panel
to do so, click the box to the left of the name of the history state (which defines the
action performed at that step) on the History panel this places a small History Brush
icon in that box, as shown in Figure 4.44, so you know it is the source for this tool
Trang 5Figure 4.44 On the History panel, click the box
to the left of the state you want to paint back to, defining the source for the History Brush tool
For example, in your new, blank practice document, you’ve only opened an image and applied the Colored Pencil filter to it, so you don’t have many options
However, in Figure 4.45 we changed the image from a 16-bit image to an 8-bit image
in order to use the artistic filters, so we set the History Brush to use the 8-bit his-tory state You can set the source to any step in the hishis-tory using the same bit depth and crop to specifically select that history state as the definition of how you want to change the pixels
Figure 4.45 With the History Brush, you can
selectively paint areas back to the way they looked before you made a particular adjustment
With the source set, you’re ready to paint note that you have the same options
on the options bar for the History Brush as you do for the regular Brush tool in most cases, you want to use a soft-edged brush of an appropriate size, the normal blend-ing mode, and a 100% opacity Wherever you paint, the effect of the Colored Pencil filter in this example is removed, returning those areas of the image to their original appearance, as shown in Figure 4.45 However, at times you might want to paint at a reduced opacity setting—for example, when you want to “tone down” an adjustment
in certain areas of the image rather than eliminate the effect altogether
Trang 6think of the History Brush as a “selective undo” tool anytime you’ve changed pixel values in an image and want to reduce or eliminate the effect in certain areas,
this tool allows you to do exactly that with very good control However, if you have
made certain types of changes to your image, such as cropping it or changing the bit
depth, you’ll need to change the source to a state that reflects the same conditions,
rather than setting it to the initial image otherwise, the tool refuses to work
Trang 7P hoto by E llEn A non