Writing Assignment 1

Our first writing assignment was to find a tutorial and write about it.  Here is my turned in work.

Writing Assignment 1

Tutorials

Jennifer Brewer

I chose to do a tutorial on the Brush Tool.  I found the tutorial on www.psd.tutsplus.com and it’s titled Photoshop Brush Tool: A Basic Guide.  I chose the brush tool tutorial because I like playing around and just seeing what different things that you can do with a paintbrush.  Things like other shapes, the dynamics of the colors, and combining different brushes to get more of an effect in the design.

In this tutorial I learned about using the brush presets, modifying brush properties, blending modes, pressure controls, and creating a brush from scratch.  The tutorial was very fun and informative for many reasons, though creating a brush from scratch was my favorite.

The brush tool is the basic painting tool in Photoshop and is located in the standard tool bar.  The shortcut for the brush tool is B and the tool works by adding shaped marks on a selected layer.  There are essential options associated with the brush tool.  Things like brush tip shape, blending mode, opacity, and flow.

Brush tip is the basic option, however with many of the presets you can adjust the master diameter and the hardness of the brush allowing for different effects with the tip.  There are several blending modes.  Even a photoshop pro is always learning new things to do with blending modes.  Some of the more frequently used modes are the normal mode, dissolve mode, behind mode, and clear mode.  The opacity value of the brush tool is the percentage of transparency associated with the stroke of the brush.  The flow value is a percentage that sets the rate for the amount of color applied, and cannot exceed the opacity percentage unless it is clicked in the same spot more than once.

I also learned about the brushes panel.  This panel is an easy way of creating, editing, saving, and loading a particular brush behavior or preset.  To access the brush panel go to Window > Brushes, or simply use the shortcut key, which is F5.  From here you can see many of the different options for brushes.

I then learned about creating a brush from my own image.  With this I learned how to change the RGB visibility on and off in the channels, how to invert the colors in an image, copy and pasting an image, and how to select an entire image.

Not only did I learn about the brush tool, scattering, and the axis of your brush in doing this tutorial, but how to invert images, using the channels, creating a layer mask, and creating my own brush tool.