Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

305

Chapter 12

chapter

12

Drawing with Brushes,

Shapes, and Other

Tools

If you’re not of the artistic persuasion, you may feel tempted to skip this chapter.

After all, you probably just want to fix and enhance your photos. What do you care

about brush technique? Surprisingly enough, you should care quite a lot. In Ele-

ments, brushes aren’t just for painting a moustache and horns on a picture of

someone you don’t like, or for blackening your sister’s teeth in that old school

photo.

Many tools in Elements use brushes to apply their effects. So far, you’ve already

run into the Selection brush, the Clone Stamp, and the Color Replacement brush,

to name just a few. And even with the Brush tool, you can paint with lots of things

besides color—like lights or shadows, for example. In Elements, when you want to

apply an effect in a precise manner, you’re often going to use some sort of brush to

do it.

If you’re used to working with real brushes, their digital cousins can take some get-

ting used to, but there are many serious artists now who paint primarily in Photo-

shop. With Elements, you now have access to most of the same tools as in

Photoshop, if not quite all the settings available for each tool. Figure 12-1 shows an

example of the detailed work you can do with Elements and some artistic ability.

This chapter explains how to use the Brush tool, some of the other brush-like tools

(like the Erasers), and ...