Sams Teach Yourself Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 2 in 24 Hours

Chapter 23. Building Your Own Brushes and Patterns

One of the truly cool things about Elements is that, even though it’s considered a beginner-level graphics program, it has all the flexibility of Photoshop, if you choose to use it. Take brushes, for instance. Elements comes with 321 different brush shapes, divided into 13 different categories including Wet Media, Dry Media, Calligraphic, Drop Shadow, Faux Finish, and more. You’d think this would be enough. But no. There’s also a brush editor so you can design and save your own custom brush sets.

Elements also lets you create and save fill patterns, swatches, and gradients and keep track of them all with the Preset Manager. When you have photographed or designed a bunch of background textures, ...