Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [22]
Figure 1.55 In this example, I selected the Aurora brush preset and adjusted Size Jitter and Angle Jitter in the Shape Dynamics settings, linking both to the angle of the pen. I then set turquoise as the foreground color, purple for the background color and used a pen pressure setting to vary the paint color from the foreground to the background. I created the doodle shown here by twisting the pen angle as I applied the brush strokes.
Pressure sensitive control
If you are using a pressure sensitive pen stylus, you will see additional options in the Brush panel that enable you to link the pen pressure of the stylus to how the effects are applied. You can therefore use these options to determine things like how the paint opacity and flow are controlled by the pen pressure or by the angle of tilt or rotation of the pen stylus. But note also here that the tablet pressure controls can now also be controlled via the buttons in the Options bar for the various painting tools (I've highlighted these new tablet button controls in Figure 1.50).
Figure 1.50 This screen shot shows you the Options bar for the brush tool. To display the brush preset list shown here, mouse down on the arrow next to the brush shape icon. You can then use the Size and Hardness sliders to modify one of the round brush settings and save as a new setting by clicking on the Create New Tool Preset button. Most of the painting tools offer a fairly similar range of settings and here you can see the newly added pen tablet options which allow you to set the pen pressure to control the opacity and/or the size of the selected painting tool.
Brush tool presets
When you have finished adjusting the Brushes panel dynamics and other settings, you can save combinations of the brush preset shape/size, Brushes panel attribute settings, plus the brush blending mode (and brush color even) as a new Brush tool preset. To do this, go to the Tool Presets panel and click on the New Preset button at the bottom (circled in Figure 1.58). Or, you can mouse down on the Tool Preset Picker in the Options bar and click on the New Brush setting button. Give the brush tool preset a name and click OK to append this to the current list. Once you have saved a brush tool preset, you can access it at any time via the Tool Presets panel or via the Tool Preset menu in the Options bar.
Figure 1.58 The Tool Presets panel. When you click on the New Preset button (circled) this opens the New Tool Preset dialog, where you can save and name the current tool settings as a new tool preset.
Mixer brush
The mixer brush is a new brush tool that allows you to paint more realistically in Photoshop. With the mixer brush you can mix colors together as you paint, picking up color samples from the image you are painting on, and set the rate at which the brush picks up paint from the canvas and the rate at which the paint dries out. The mixer brush can be used with the new bristle tips or with the traditional Photoshop brush tips (now referred to as ‘static tips’) to produce natural-looking paint strokes. The combination of the mixer brush and bristle tip brushes provide a whole new level of sophistication to the Photoshop paint engine. The only downside is that the user interface has had to become even more complicated. The brush controls are split between the Brush panel, the Brush Presets panel, the Options bar and the new Bristle preview. It's not particularly easy to pick up a brush and play with it unless you have studied all these brush options in detail and can understand how the user interface is meant to work. Fortunately, the Tool Presets panel can help here and the easiest way to get started is to select one or two of the new brush presets and experiment painting with these brush settings to gain a better understanding of what the new brush settings can do. In the meantime, let's take a look at the Options bar settings for the mixer brush that's shown in Figure 1.59.
Figure 1.59 The new mixer brush options.
Wacom™ tablets
Photoshop is able