Video:Using Bristle Tip Brushes in Photoshop CS5

Transcript:Using Bristle Tip Brushes in Photoshop CS5

What Is the Bristle Tip Brush?

Creating realistic painting artwork inside of Photoshop has been made even easier in CS5 with some fantastic upgrades to the painting tools including the new Bristle Tip Brushes. The purpose of the Bristle Tip brushes is to recreate the realism of actual painter's brush strokes, giving you highly realistic and precise painting effects inside of Photoshop. Any of the Painting Set of tools can utilize the new Bristle Tips, and when combined with the customization options in the Brush Panel, even the most basic Photoshop user can create great looking painted artwork.

Where to Find the Bristle Tip Brush

The Bristle Tip Brushes can be identified in the brush preset picker, or in the Brushes Panel by their icon identifiers, as compared to the traditional brushes that show you the pattern they create when painted with. Selecting any one of these brushes will bring up a heads up display showing you a visual representation of the brush that will be emulated, as well as a representation of the painted stroke itself.

Bristle Options

Next to the Brush Preset Picker is the icon for launching the Brushes Panel. Here you will find lots of options for adjusting the brush behavior as you paint. The most basic control options are located in the Brush Tip Shape sub-layer. This set of options displays first the preset brush tip selections that are available, the same as in the Preset Picker. Below that is a size slider that determines the overall size of your brush.

The Shape dropdown is the dictating setting for the overall arrangement of bristles in each brush. These are all modeled after traditional painting brushes and range from Pointed or Blunt in brushes, to wide fan brushes.

The Bristles slider dictates the density of bristles in the brush, in other words this is the number of lines that will be left behind with each brush stroke.

The Length and Thickness sliders are fairly self explanatory. The effect of increasing these settings is to darken the stoke path of each bristle, as it is simulating the laying down of more virtual paint.

The Strength slider determines how much deformation will occur in the brush stroke as you paint. By varying the stiffness setting, an artist using the mouse to paint can simulate pressure being applied to the brush, something that is common to traditional painting, and in Photoshop, can really only be utilized by using a stylus pen.

Also when using a mouse, you are limited to only one angle of the brush tip, this is determined by the Angle slider. And lastly there are controls for Spacing, which adds separation between brush marks, which can be useful if you want to paint with a more stippled effect.