The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

This week, let's talk about Photoshop's brushes:

Choose File>Preferences>Displays and Cursors and set the Painting Tools setting to Brush Size (that's the default setting in Photoshop 5.5 and 6.0). This will allow your cursor to reflect the size of the current brush.

If you're using Photoshop 5.5 or earlier, you can switch between brushes by using the bracket keys. The left bracket ([) will give you the brush to the left of the currently active one. Adding Shift to that will give you the first brush in the palette. They changed this in Photoshop 6.0, so that using the brackets no longer switches between brushes. Instead, it changes the size of the active brush. Also, in 6.0, you can add the brackets along with the Shift key to change the hardness setting of the currently active brush.

At any time, you can press the Capslock key to turn your cursor into a crosshair. So, if you've ever been stuck with a crosshair cursor all day, now you know why :-)

You can delete any brush from the Brushes palette by Command-clicking (Ctrl-clicking in Windows) on it. You can load some interesting custom brushes into the Brushes palette by choosing Replace brushes from the side menu and then opening the files in the Photoshop>Goodies>Brushes folder.

To create you own custom brush, make a selection and then choose Define Brush from the side menu of the Brushes palette. I use the feature all the time to create textured brushes (just click once with a normal brush, apply a filter and then turn it back into a brush again). You can also use it to store your company logo in the Brushes palette!

Most of the time large hard-edged brushes produce jaggy edges. To prevent this, double-click on a brush and lower its Spacing setting to 1% (but don't do that to your soft-edged brushes).

When retouching an area that contains grain, the grain often disappears leaving an area appearing blurry. To prevent this, double-click on a brush in the Brushes palette and use a much higher hardness setting (around 70%).

If you want to mess with a co-worker (make sure they have a sense of humor first), double click on a brush and turn off the Spacing checkbox. Do this to random brushes in the Brushes palette and then watch in amazement when they attempt to work in Photoshop... some brushes will work fine and others will be rather unpredictable. To get them back to normal, choose Reset Brushes from the side menu of the Brushes palette.

Have a great week. I'm heading off to Santa Fe to present a week long hands-on workshop... talk to you next week.

-Ben Willmore
Founder, Digital Mastery