Photoshop® CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 14. Painting in Photoshop

In This Chapter

• Adding color manually for complete control

• Discovering tools with and without brushes

• Traversing that amazing Brushes panel

• Creating do-it-yourself brushes

Painting. The word evokes images of brushes and palettes and color being precisely applied to canvas. Or, perhaps, images of drop cloths, ladders, rollers, and buckets — color being slopped on a wall and spread around. It doesn't generally bring to mind digital image editing. But painting certainly has a place in your arsenal of Photoshop skills, even if you never create an image from scratch.

In addition to painting landscapes and portraits (which you certainly can do in Photoshop, if you have the talent and training), you can use Photoshop's painting tools for a variety of other tasks. For example, you can paint to create masks and layer masks, adjust tonality or sharpness in specific areas, repair blemishes and other damage in an image — even to create graphic elements and special effects.

In this chapter, I concentrate on those editing-related painting skills rather than fine art painting. I introduce you to the basic concepts of painting in Photoshop and also walk you through the basic brush-related tools and the Brushes panel, concentrating on those features that you most likely need (as well as a few of the other, more artistic features). To wrap up the chapter, I show you how to create custom brush tips and how to save them for future use.

Discovering Photoshop's Painting Tools ...