Set Brush tip

This part of the course is not about the “brush” tool and how to use it, but about the brush tip. Or in other words, “the tip of the brush”.
The brush tip is not only an option for the “brush” tool, but for some other too. For example, for the “Healing Brush”, the “Pencil”, “Eraser”, each tool you select, the “Brush” is in the options bar.

What you should know when working with a tool, that has the “Brush”, is how the diameter and hardness can be changed in a fast manner.
One way is the downward pointing arrow button, next to this option in the “Options Bar”. This will open Brushes palette where you can change these options by clicking and dragging the sliders.

The higher the percentage of the hardness, the harder the edge. The lower the percentage of the hardness, the softer or the transparent the edge.

A second, and slightly faster way is to right click on the image. This opens the same brushes palette.

However, the problem in both ways is that you have no idea how big your brush tip is. You do not see this.

A third way is through the shortcut.  This is not only much faster, but you see “Live” size of the tip.   Here is a difference between the QWERTY and AZERTY keyboard users.
A QWERTY user clicks the “bracket” on the keyboard to adjust the diameter. The right bracket ] to increase the diameter, the left bracket [ to decrease the diameter. Hold this while the Shift key on his keyboard is pressed, the hardness of the brush is also changed.

Photoshop has not taken AZERTY users into account.

We need to manually make these setting for these options.

Just click “Edit” in the menu bar and choose “Shortcuts” in the drop-down menu.

In the dialog that appears, choose “Tools” in the “shortcuts” (1).

You scroll all the way down the list and provide a shortcut for the “Decrease Brush Size” and the “Increase Brush Size” (2).

Click on a hotkey, the bracket and give the shortcut that you want to use. Make sure that it is not in use.

I use the keys “open parentheses” and “close the parentheses.”

If you still want to use the keys to make the brush softer and harder, you can set them here and change the settings for the brush tip (3) in a fairly smooth and especially quick way.

New in Photoshop CS4 is the keyboard shortcut Alt right click and drag.

Your click the Alt key on your keyboard while you click and drag with the right mouse button.

This gives an example of the live-size and the hardness of the brush tip again.

When you release the mouse on your image, you get nothing, but you know, when you click somewhere, you can see the size and hardness of the brush tip that you just set.

By default, the standard “Live Preview” of the brush tip is in the red. This has nothing to do with the setting of the foreground or the background color.

If you prefer a different color, then you can adjust the color in the “Preferences” dialog under “Cursor” tab.
Click in the menu bar “Edit”, choose “Preferences” and click “Cursors …”.

In the dialog box, click the “Color” (1) button and in the second dialog box, choose the color you want (2).

Click the OK button to close the second dialog box and then click the OK button to close the first dialog.

For you to use this option, your computer must also have the OpenGL technology.

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