Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [23]
The mixer brush tool has two wells: a reservoir and a pickup. The reservoir well color is defined by the current foreground color swatch in the Tools panel or by -clicking in the image canvas area. This is the color you see displayed in the Load preview swatch. The pickup well is one that has paint flowing into it and continuously mixes the colors of where you paint with the color that's contained in the reservoir well. Clicking on ‘Clean brush’ from the ‘Current brush load’ options immediately cleans the brush and clears the current color, while clicking ‘Load brush’ fills with the current foreground color again. The ‘Load brush after each stroke’ button does what it says, it tells the mixer brush to keep refilling the pickup well with color and therefore the pickup well becomes progressively contaminated with the colors that are sampled as you paint. The ‘Clean brush after each stroke’ button empties the reservoir well after each stroke and effectively allows you to paint from the pickup well only (Figure 1.60 shows an example of how the well colors are displayed in the Options bar).
Figure 1.60 The Load swatch displays the main reservoir well color in the outer area and the pickup well color in the center. Clicking on the mixer brush current brush load swatch launches the Photoshop Color Picker.
Wet/Mix/Flow numeric shortcuts
Typing in a number changes the wetness value. Holding down the keys while entering a number changes the Mix value. Lastly, holding down just the key as you enter a number changes the Flow value. Note, you should type ‘00’ to set any of the above values to zero.
The Paint wetness controls how much paint gets picked up from the image canvas. Basically, when the wetness is set to zero the mixer brush behaves more like a normal brush and deposits opaque color. As the wetness is increased so is the streaking of the brush strokes. The ‘Set load rate’ is a dry-out control. This determines how much paint gets loaded into the main reservoir well. With low load rate settings you'll get shorter brush strokes where the paint dries out quickly and as the load rate setting is increased you get longer brush strokes.
Mixer brush presets
Sampled fill colors are retained whenever you switch brush tips or adjust the brush tip parameters. You can also include saving the main reservoir well and pickup well colors with mixer brush tool presets.
The Mix ratio slider determines how much of the color picked up from the canvas (that goes into the pickup well) is mixed with the color stored in the main reservoir well. A high Mix ratio means more ink flows from the pickup to the reservoir well, while the Flow rate control determines how fast the paint flows as you paint. With a high Flow setting, more paint is applied as you paint. If you combine this with a low Load rate setting you'll notice how at a high Flow setting the paint flows out quickly and results in shorter paint strokes. At a lower Flow rate you'll notice longer (but less opaque) brush strokes.
Bristle shapes
If you select one of the new bristle tip brush shapes you can click on the Brush Tip Shape option in the Brush panel (Figure 1.62) to reveal the Bristle Qualities options. These brush tips can be used in conjunction with any of the Photoshop painting tools. When a bristle tip (as opposed to a traditional ‘static’ Photoshop brush tip) is selected you can also click the Bristle preview button (circled in Figure 1.62) to display the floating Bristle preview panel shown in Figure 1.61. As you adjust the slider controls