Painting and Drawing > Using the painting tools
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Using the painting tools


You can use the paintbrush, pencil, or airbrush to paint color on an image. The three tools create different effects:
  • The paintbrush tool creates soft strokes of color.
  • The pencil tool creates hard-edged freehand lines.
  • The airbrush tool applies gradual tones (including sprays of color) to an image, simulating traditional airbrush techniques. The edges of the stroke are more diffused than those created with the paintbrush tool. The pressure setting for the airbrush tool controls how quickly the spray of paint is applied. If you hold down the mouse button without dragging, you can build up color.

    • To use a painting tool:

    1 Specify a foreground color. (See Choosing foreground and background colors.)

    2 Select the paintbrush tool (), pencil tool (), or airbrush tool ().

    3 Click the inverted arrow () next to the brush sample and choose a size for the brush from the pop-up palette menu in the options bar. To learn more about using pop-up palettes, see Using pop-up palettes.

    If a brush is too large to fit in the palette, it appears as a smaller brush with a number indicating the actual diameter in pixels.

    4 Specify a blending mode to control how painting affects existing pixels in the image. (See  Selecting a blending mode.)

    5 Specify opacity for the paintbrush or pencil tool, or pressure for the airbrush tool. (See Specifying opacity, pressure, or exposure.)

    6 Set additional options:
  • For the paintbrush tool, select Wet Edges to paint with a watercolor effect. The paint builds up along the edges of the brush stroke.
  • For the pencil tool, select Auto Erase to paint the background color over areas containing the foreground color.

    • 7 Specify the rate at which a brush stroke fades dynamically. (See Specifying a paint fade-out rate.)

    8 Drag in the image to paint.

    To draw a straight line with one of the painting tools, click a starting point in the image. Then hold down Shift, and click an ending point.

    Painting and Drawing > Using the painting tools