Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

314 Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

The Specialty Brushes

Deleting brushes is pretty straightforward. You can select the brush in the Brush

palette and then choose Delete Brush from the pop-out menu. Or, you can

Alt+click the brush thumbnail. The cursor will change to a pair of scissors when

you hold down the key. Clicking with the scissors deletes the brush.

You can also make a selection from an image and save it as a brush, if you like (the

next section shows you how). Just remember, though, that brushes by definition

don’t have color, so you save only the shape of your selection, not the full coloring

of it. The color you get is whichever color you choose to apply. If you want to save

a full color sample, try saving your sample as a pattern (page 245) or just use the

clone stamp repeatedly instead.

The Specialty Brushes

So far you’ve been reading about brushes that behave pretty much as brushes do in

the real world—they paint a stripe of something, whether color, light, or even

transparency.

But in the digital world, a brush doesn’t have to be just a brush. With some of the

brushes included in Elements, you can paint stars, flowers, disembodied eyeballs,

gravel, or even rubber ducks with just one swipe of the brush, as shown in

Figure 12-10.

Figure 12-10:

You can digitally doodle

using the Elements

brushes, even if you can’t

draw a straight line.

Everything in this lovely

drawing was done with ...