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The Brush Panel Part 2

Lesson 17 from: Adobe Photoshop: Creative Explorations, Lighting Effects & More

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

17. The Brush Panel Part 2

Next Lesson: Wacom Tablet Setup

Lesson Info

The Brush Panel Part 2

And I'm going to go back to just a normal soft edge brush make sure it's normal you never know what weird settings again all right I'm gonna then go back to our brush settings and we've talked about shape dynamics that's where rotates and squishes and all that we talked about scattering uh we talked about color dynamics that's where various the color uh all that kind of stuff we haven't talked about a few of these other things so there is something in here called texture in when I turn on texture remember that this is one of those categories that's divided up with those horizontal lines which means it's not just a simple check box it's a hole category settings so click on the name when you turn on now with that turned on at the top I can choose my texture and if you just click here you'll have a list of textures you won't have a cz many is what I have because I've messed with this a little bit if I go to the side menu in here I can choose reset patterns and that should clear these out ...

you don't need to reset yours, but now I'm just down to the defaults meaning this is what I look like when you get there uh so you only have a few patterns in there but when you go to the side menu photoshopped comes with some patterns already made and I think it comes with just about all these except for the very bottom when I don't think it comes with that's one that I've loaded myself but we have artistic their artists surfaces, artists, brushes, canvas that kind of stuff so why don't we load some of these in if I choose one of these it's gonna ask me if I want to replace the textures I already have sitting in there or if I'd liketo append them meaning just add to the bottom of them? So when I go here to artist surfaces, it'll ask this question if I click on ok, it means replaced if I click on a pen, it just means add to the list and so I can come in here and get a few of these appended just so we have a nice list of stuff tio toe work with feel free to load as many as you want, then I could click through these and I get a little sample of my texture up top and I'm just gonna go through and see what we find when I like don't mind that one yeah it's kind of nice um that one is called burlap if you want to go see the names over because sometimes these previews are a bit small let me see if I could change it but going to the side yeah text only to annoy your coworkers uh or large thumb there some now small thumb now the list, though I find to be nice because then you actually get the names, and so I'm using the one called burlap, but you're welcome to experiment with any of the others. You can also create your own remember we talked about making textures the other day where we use something like the clouds filter in boston did all that kind of stuff? You would just have to make sure that your texture is seamless and we talked a little bit about that we used to filter called offset to push it over and see the scene, you have to retouch them out and somebody's already done that with these so nice, we can use him then below that once we've chosen a texture, we have scale, which just means you wanted to be big or do you want to scale down that texture from its original size because it could be that you define that texture and a really high resolution file and there's lots of fine detail in and it's huge, and then you're applying it to a low resolution file and the texture just feels massively huge because if you have a canvass up, you know an inch away from your eye instead of normal viewing distance, we'll scale is where you can change that just scale up or down the texture, what is being applied then? The thing that's going to affect the way this gets into your brush the most is a setting down here called mode, and that just means how is it going to take that texture and use it to change the way your brush looks? And if you click on here, just watch the preview at the bottom and you will find different looks in my brush as I change between the various bloody modes they're here, and I'm just gonna remember that it didn't mind the one called abstract try the others and see color burns not bad, so so part subtract color burn in linear burn looked pretty good if I wanted to just on the edge than this one called hard micks wouldn't be bad choice, but now when you find one of these that you like trying to remember which one of these linear burn seems kind of nice, if you want to find tim, look, just how this ends up applying if a couple choices, and in general you want to mess with brightness and contrast it's just going to take this picture here in brighton or darken it when it applies it, and so you'll find that if you go some ways, it'll just start burning through your brush like you find it's just not getting in your brush it might be that your pattern that you're applying is too bright so bring her down you see what's going on be most effective to get in there contrast is well just trying to get it so my brush has some nice uhm texture to it uh this thing called texture each tip if that's turned off if you have a repeating pattern where the seams are relatively obvious, some patterns are that way where if you applied over a large area you'd be able to easily see where one application ends and the next begins if you have this turned off then you might notice those seems more and if you have this turned on it means every little tip that it puts down member how it's just a repeating tip gets textured separately so it's not one continuous texture it's individual little pieces of it so sometimes that makes it so you don't see this seems so much and then this choice called depth here is going to affect my brush a lot more once we get into a bristle brush and we get into something known as the mixer brush but you're welcome mess with it here uh and wash the preview to see what you're getting so now what I'm painting you see that not only do I have a soft edge brush which is just what we started with but that brush has texture to it and so I could come in here and choose any color I'd like to paint with, uh, I don't have my thing in here and go grab any color I want and now when I paint, we have some texture to the brush it's kind of nice. Now when you're working with these settings, you'll notice next to the word texture in here there's a lock symbol if you change between various brush presets, the brush presets contain all of these settings within them, like, if we go back and choose my grass brush preset, he contains all those little angle jitters and color jitters and all that junk messed with, and it did not include a texture, and so if I were to switch to that preset for my grass, it would wipe out this texture on wouldn't be used once I switched, but if you click that lock symbol, it means when I switched between various brush presets, don't pick up these settings from the preset instead use the sightings have right now, okay, I could just as easily go to my grass preset in lock in the color dynamics and lock in the scattering and lock in some other things and then switch over to my stitching one you know that since she won and it would suddenly have the those same color dynamics and other qualities from the grass brush, you know, that kind of stuff so just means locking in, so if I switch between various presets, don't let this thing switch and that's important when it comes to textures, because if you're going to be painted across the entirety of your image, eventually to make a painting, you want the texture to be consistent. If one brush has a burlap texture in it, and a different one has a water color texture in it used them in the same document, they might not look like they belong together, but lock in your texture, and then you can switch between any brushes you want in the textural main, consistent same thing for anything else. If there's some setting that annoys you, that it changes whenever you switch between brushes, just lock it in the little lock symbol. All right, let's, talk about a few other things that are in here. We haven't really talked about thes check boxes that are, um, all by themselves, where they don't have settings associated with him, and this one's kind of weird, I guess I'd have to talk to the programmers to really know, um, why this is here, because to me, protect texture is really the same is locked texture, and I don't know the exact difference between locking the texture and turning that on down here, I'm sure there's got to be some sort of technical difference, otherwise they wouldn't have both, but I'm not aware of what it is, but this is similar to it says, if you look at it by mousing over protect texture pattern when implying brush presets, maybe what it would do is on ly protect this part in not protect the depth and other things that I'm not certain, but the other ones let's take a look buildup, all buildup does is it turns on that little icon up here that looks like an airbrush. I don't know if you remember that little icon looks like an airbrush, but all it did is if I completely stopped moving, he would build up the paint. It doesn't do it! If you slow down, you have to stop and to me that's not all that useful of the setting, but that little thing all it does is turn on and off the buildup checkbox. Why they didn't call it the airbrushed check box because that's the icon I don't know smoothing smoothing is where if your computer can't keep up up with your painting sometimes it's going to end up drawing straight lines that are connected if I turned smoothing off, I might see this. I'll get a small brush not sure if I'll be able to do it all depends on the speed of my computer but I'm gonna try to paint as fast as I can and we're going to see if it's going to be able to maintain a smooth appearance to my paint strokes do you see how they start looking like straight lines? Okay, this is another test for how fast is your computer? Just paint as fast as you can with smoothing turned off and you notice that this starts looking like straight lines? I don't think I was painting like that because those look like just straight lines right it's just the computer trying to record less information so it doesn't get bogged down so instead of recording exactly where your paint stroke went, it went okay you went from here to here in a straight line if I turn on smoothing now even though the computer might be recording it as straight lines between areas photo shops going to smooth it out so now going to try to fat paint as fast as I can you see how smooth want to annoy a coworker don't do that maybe you want a lock smoothing on so if you could ever get a preset where it doesn't have smoothing turned on and you find it's looking kind of jumble e it would stay on that kind of thing even when you switch presets so build up was like the airbrush smoothing makes for a smoother brush lets the protect texture is similar to locking the texture up here there must be some slight technical difference between them but their same concept uh, wet edges if you ever want to simulate watercolor uh, if you have a soft edge brush when you turn on wet edges and I'm not sure if we'll see it so much in this textured version, but you're going to get more of a see through look in the center of your brush and more of a build up out on the edge so let's work with a simple doc give it here, I'll just go to a white background and I'll see if we can see it on this one he tell the middle looks a little more gray than the outer edges and if I'm painting with some sort of a color I would get a little less of the color in the middle and we buildup on the edges it's any time you want the look of a true kind of watercolor brush because water cover when you paint around that the pigment kind of seems toe pull out on the edges like I guess uh that's what is going to do? You're going to mainly notice it with more soft edge brushes uh and it's you could call it pulling on the edge of your brush and the noise is going to add a little bit of noise to your your brush if you work with just soft edge brushes on a plane white background kind of thing where there have just blatant soft strokes that could make them look a little smoother when you print them because it's just going to have a little bit of variation in them so I think that's the check boxes that air down here just so you know what they do it's not that they're critical smoothing though if it gets turned off now you know why your brush might not look nice uh and if you ever want the look of watercolor try what edges so we played with texture that was a thing we got into before that and just remember what texture that you want to choose your texture from the top and if you only have a few textures go to the side menu and you can load in some pre sets that come with photoshopped uh or if you want to you could possibly do searches on the internet for photoshopped texture files and there's lots of websites that have them either for sale or for free and then scale is how much we're going to change from the original scale of the texture I want a bigger smaller brightness and contrast there really goingto control how it's applied that in concert with this little menu notice the blending mode uh all right. We could also get out here for control and either have it that fade out or make it to the pen pressure controls it, that kind of stuff turn texture off, all right. So let's see, what else could we do? Well, let's go back to our little blade of grass and we have another setting that is called dual brush dual brush. That means we're gonna have to brush tips at the same time. And when we paint both brush tips, get painted in the to interact based on the sightings that you use in here, which is pretty weird. Eso it would be like I could get, um, what could do? I could take that cloud brush and I could make it so we don't get blatant clouds. Instead we get it was a little more painterly edge because I did grab a different brush that's got a little painterly edge so let's see and here I'm going to choose is my second brush, one of these kind of stippled ones or one of these others bring my spacing up a bit in my size. So now what I've done is my brush. The actual brush tip I have is that plate of grass, but instead of just putting down that blade of grass, I've also fed it. This brush tipped you see what it looks like. So now instead of just getting blatant blades of grass do you see how they have a little bit of texture in them in that they're being broken up by the second were dual brush and in here we have some basic settings. We have the size of our brush in the spacing, just like we do with our normal brushes we have scattering, which is if you want it to brandon lee, move them just like the scattering. We could apply to a normal brush in the count if we want to add more or not. But the thing that's really gonna control the look is the menu at the very top, just like when we had a texture and we had a menu very similar to this one controlled how the texture ended up controlling our brush. Switching between these is going to have a radical difference in what that preview looks like and so it's a matter of experimenting with that to see if you can find one that's interesting. But the main thing is if you have a brush and you wanted to have a little bit more of a random quality and not quite as blatant ly shaped, we could end up using a dual brush to have it kind of you could say crop the first brush using the second brush so in this particular case I think something like leonard your burn uh and I could get a more random look so if I want a little grungy brush that kind of thing I could try that out so let's look a this what we got here what if we covered what haven't we covered brush tip take shape we talked about in general we just tough shapes we can choose general settings for it shape dynamics we talked about those and we had a blade of grass and when we had it changed angle roundness size uh we had scattering which is just having it moving around texture which would just cover dual brush which is having one brush paint interact with another brush and kind of modified its look for instance I could grab a round brush that spaced out so just creates a bunch of circles and have that off the dual brush of a soft brush that just creates a normal line and suddenly I get little spaced out uh circles with soft edges on him you know, like they're being cropped kind of a weird interesting feature we had color dynamics which is where we could have it vary the color in many different ways we did that with a blade of grass we have transfer which we have haven't talked about but this relates to some of the tools that were going to be using and we haven't discussed what thes particular terms mean yet and so we're not going quite get into that yet, but when we do just know that you're going to see things called opacity flow wetness in mix you're going to find those terms related to a tool that we use and this will simply let you vary them brush pose is something that I think is new and it means if I don't have a graphics tablet but I want to simulate one with my mouse then what should I act like? The tilt is on that uh pen I want to act as if the pen is tilted at this particular angle even though I don't have a pen I want to rotate because you can rotate the pen not this particular pen you have to have a special one called the, um the art pen or the pressure I want to act as if I'm pushing down a certain amount and that's all the, uh, brush poses doing so you could be a poser and act like you have a tablet when you don't and then below that we just had a bunch of check boxes. So in general we've covered a good amount of what's in here the only thing we haven't gotten into his transfer which relates to a tool we haven't talked about and then brush prose makes it could be a poser and act like you have a tablet when you don't

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Ratings and Reviews

Kathleen
 

This is the second class on PS filters that I've taken with Ben Willmore. He is handsdown a fabulous teacher and one I highly recommend. I purchased both classes and I feel that for the price, they are worth their weight in gold. I applied his PS filter techniques to some of my surface pattern designs that were created using my original artwork and I've received great comments. So I owe a great deal of gratitude to CL and to Ben Wilmore for giving me the opportunity to grow my PS knowledge and to apply it with confidence to my artwork. Thank you!

a Creativelive Student
 

well I would recommend it sort of. I think much of the chapters show you how to use things without giving good examples or reasons such as with the brushes part. The photo on the cover is never worked on or really any of the topics didn't talk about how to achieve that look. I did learn some things as I have a lot to learn. I have been using the textures with great success. He does a nice job of explaining...I just don;t think we saw enough start to finish work.

a Creativelive Student
 

Fantastic tutor and course content! Ben Willmore truly is a master of Photoshop and has the ability to teach all aspects of Photoshop in such and easy-to-understand manner. Thanks so much for making Photoshop so much more understandable. Highly recommended.

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