Photoshop Brushes

What are Photoshop brushes, how to use and configure them.

Photoshop brushes are a very useful tool for digital graphic design. We can get the idea that they are like the brushes we use in artistic drawing, but with the exception that they are digital and thanks to this they allow us to create a much more varied range of finishes.

In conventional artistic drawing, brushes are the ones we use to draw freehand, providing the drawing with different textures and different line thicknesses, depending on the type of brush, which can be combined with different shades of ink. Photoshop already has several built-in brushes for drawing with the computer mouse, which offer a good range of possibilities.

The Brush Tool (called Brushes in English versions of Photoshop) can be selected from the Photoshop Tools menu and is grouped together with the Pencil or Color Replacement Tool. To select one of these tools it can be done with a long press on the mouse button on the brush tool or the one in that space.

Once the brush tool is selected, we can configure it to provide different types of thicknesses, textures and blurring of the edges.

With the brushes that come by default in Photoshop we can choose various thicknesses and fades and also change values ​​such as the diameter of the brush and the hardness. The greater the thickness, the area that we will paint with the brush will also be greater. The hardness serves to define how specific or defined the brush stroke will be, with less hardness the more blurred the stroke will be, especially at the edges. We can alter these values ​​ourselves to obtain different finishes, as well as change the color of the brush through the Photoshop color picker.

The brush tool options also include opacity and flow. The opacity is used to draw with more or less transparency of the stroke and the flow is something similar, so that the stroke is more or less marked. I must admit that I don’t see much difference between these two configuration options.

Drawing “freehand” with Photoshop, or to put it another way, using a brush to paint on the canvas with the movement of the mouse is easy. The complicated thing is to obtain an attractive result from a blank canvas, although for photo retouching sometimes it can be very useful to apply various brush strokes or color alterations.

I leave here a link with an article from our briefs section, where we present a video of a drawing in Photoshop from a blank canvas, painting in an artistic way and with results very similar to those that a good painter could obtain on paper:

For digital graphic design, and as far as we are concerned: web design, brushes may not be very useful at first, but a good use of them can add touches of quality and originality to creations. Even more so when we know how to install and configure brushes created by other designers in our Photoshop, which are often offered for free on their web pages.

In the next article we will see how.