Painting tools

The next set of tools we’ll focus on are the painting tools, which include: the brush, pencil, mixer brush, blur, sharpen, smudge, burn, dodge and sponge tools. These can be used to paint, or used to edit the existing pixel information in an image. If you want to keep your options open you will usually find it is preferable to carry out your paint work on a separate new layer. This allows you to preserve all of the original image on a base layer and you can easily undo all your paint work by turning off the visibility of the paint layer. When you select any of the painting tools, the first thing you will want to do is to choose a brush, which you can do by going to the Brush Preset Picker (the second item from the left in the Options bar) and select a brush from the drop-down list shown in Figure 1.52. Here, you can choose from the many different types of brushes, including the bristle shape brushes. The Size slider can be used to adjust the brush size from a single pixel to a 5000 pixel-wide brush. If a standard round brush is selected you can also use the Hardness slider to set varying degrees of hardness for the brush shape.