Photoshop 7: Understanding the Brushes Palette

Pete Bauer

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Photoshop 7’s new Brushes palette is far more than simply a place to pick a brush. You have incredible control over the size, shape, and behavior of the brush. The Brush Tip Shape pane of the Brushes palette is one of the keys.

The Brush Tip Shape pane includes thumbnails of the brushes currently loaded in the palette. Click on a thumbnail to select the brush. You can then modify the diameter, angle, roundness, hardness, and spacing values using sliders.

You can also modify the roundness (top) and angle (middle) by dragging in the preview. The Hardness slider determines feathering for the brush tip. It is only available for round brushes. When a custom or square brush is selected, the Use Sample Size button is visible. When not grayed out, you can click it to reset the brush to the size at which it was designed.

When experimenting with the various brush capabilities, it’s easiest to see what each does when you disable all others. For example, when determining optimal spacing for a brush tip, uncheck the dynamics options in the Brushes palette.

The Spacing variable determines the distance between instances of the brush tip. Rather than a continuous flow of ink from a pen, think of Photoshop’s brushes as a series of imprints of the brush tip. When the brush tip instances are very closely spaced, they overlap and you see what appears to be a continuous line of color. When spacing is increased, then you see the individual instances. (From the top, three identical paths are stroked with a 55-pixel hard round brush with spacing of 1%, 40%, and 83%.)

When the Spacing option is turned off in the Brush Tip Shape pane of the Brushes palette, the spacing is governed by the speed of your drag. the faster you drag, the greater the spacing. (As indicated, the mouse was dragged at increasing speed through the curves.)

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