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 The Brush Tool's versatility is controlled by the settings on the Control Palette. The arrangement of the control items varies only slightly with PSP6. The box in the upper left corner of the brush tip controls gives a visual indication of the current size and shape of the brush, the brush shape being chosen in the dropdown box to the right and size by the slide bar to the right, adjustable from 1 to 200. Numerals may also be typed in the adjacent box instead of using the slide control.
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Hardness refers to the sharpness of the edge or paint strokes. The lower the percentage, the more the brush strokes soften. Step is the spacing of the drops of paint. The illustration to the left shows various setting of Opacity, Density and Hardness with a size 12 brush. Step controls the spacing of the brush strokes, hard to describe, just try playing with it <grin>.
The only way to get accustomed to all these choices and options is to play with them, making images similar to some of these adjusting the settings one at a time. The clone brush, color replacer, retouch tool, eraser and airbrush use the same brush tip settings as the standard brush. There are some other differences between these tools and the standard brush but the basics of the brush settings and effects are the same. To paint with a brush, postion the cursor where you wnat to start the stroke. Hold down the left mouse button for the foreground active color or the right mouse button for the background active color [remember those color boxes below the Rainbow Box on the color palette? If not, go back to Lesson 1 for a quick look.] Drag the mouse for each stroke, ending it by releasing the mouse button. Straight strokes can be achieved by clicking and holding the left or right mouse button where you want to start and pressing and holding the shift key before releasing the mouse button. Click where you want the stroke to end.
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The Clone Brush is used to copy one part of an image to another location, either within that image or to another. It can be used only on 24-bt color or gray scale images so you may need to increase the colors of the image you wish to work with. The source area is where you are copying from, the target is where you are copying to. | |
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Using NON-ALIGNED copies the one particular source spot to as wide a target area as you wish. If NON-ALIGNED was in use with the positioning shown in the example, one could get a large bright green area <grin> |
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The Color Replacer tool is quite interesting. Select a color for the Background Active Color Box that is in the image. Then, choose a color for the Foreground Active Color Box, one which you wish to replace the Background choice with. Now, choose the Replacer Tool, make any Brush Tip choices you wish to make. On the Tool Control, choose a tolerance level and a texture if you want one. The tolerance level refers to how close a match to your specified color the replaced color must be. Then *paint* the image areas where you wnat to make the changes.
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You can confine the replacement of all instances of a color in a selected area by making a selection with one of the selection tools or you can change every instance of the color in an image by double clicking the image after choosing the replacer tool. You can paint/replace colors in a straight line using the same shift key method as for the standard brush. |
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DRAW |
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DRAW |
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Opacity relates to how thickly the paint covers the surface. Reducing the percentage is like diluting the paint with 100% covering everything and 1% covering practically nothing. Density is how much paint is applied with each brush stroke. At 100% coverage is complete, at 1% it leaves only a few specks. These settings are visible in the upper left hand brush box although with small size brushes it can be hard to tell
The illustration to the right shows some of the various textures that can be chosen on the Tool Controls Tab of the Control Palette for the brush tool. They were done at 81% opacity, 81% density, and 50% hardness and a size 50 brush (the size is the number of pixels across).
Click this little button on the upper right of the Brush Controls Panel and you get a dropdown menu of brush types. The complete dropdown list of brush textures is to the left.
Go to Preferences on the File menu and choose General program preferences, the UNDO tab. Her you can set your UNDO history to keep track of each and every brush stroke. This can take up memory and hard drive space so if you are short on either you might wish to set it only when doing tricky work. You can also achieve a similar result by saving very frequently.
As with the standard paint brush, you make your brush tip and pattern selection from the Control Palette. The Clone Brush Tool Control tab has an additional selection: ALIGNED or NON-ALIGNED which refers to the alignment of the source and target. There is also a Sample Merged checkbox which clones all visible data if checked rather than just the one layer. If your image isn't layered, you don't need to worry about that though. The trickiest part of using the Clone Brush is the alignment of source and target. The figure to the left uses ALIGNED to copy a variable image from one spot to another.
