Photoshop® CS4 Bible

Chapter 19. Painting

IN THIS CHAPTER

Brushes and tools that work like brushes

Brushes panel

Brushes used with blending modes

Painting techniques

Creating special effects with painting

There are numerous options as far as painting software goes on both the Mac and Windows, but because of its robust features, Photoshop remains one of the premier choices. At its core, Photoshop is engineered as image-editing software, but skilled artists can create beautiful, painterly images from scratch by using only Photoshop's brush tools. These same tools are also part of the core toolset of digital photographers, retouchers, graphic artists, and many other creative professionals.

Part of what makes Photoshop's painting toolset so versatile is its capability to heavily customize almost every aspect of the brush tools. There is also the huge number of brush presets that ship with Photoshop — which, with the custom brushes that you can create or download from the Internet, make for almost limitless possibilities.

Photoshop and its brushes have features that are designed to work especially well with drawing tablets such as those created by Wacom (www.wacom.com), and can respond to the pressure, angle, and rotation of the pens used with these devices.

Many of Photoshop's tools, including the Clone Stamp, the Healing Brush, and the History Brush, are brush-based, but in this chapter you'll learn about those tools that more closely resemble traditional painting implements.

To fully dive into using the ...