Paintings

Painting Tools

Each of the expanded options (shown on the right) for Photoshop's painting tools can be accessed by holding down the mouse on a tool.

Using the Painting Tools

Brushes When working with all of the drawing tools (except the Gradient tool), the Brushes option is available in the toolbar to allow you to use different brushes and textures. You can also load one (or several) of Photoshop's included brush sets by clicking on the black triangle at the top right hand corner of the Brushes menu.
Airbrush Tool The Airbrush tool acts similar to an airbrush or a spray can. The longer you activate it in one place, the more color is applied.	Paintbrush Tool The Paintbrush tool behaves the same as the Airbrush tool except that pressure is kept constant.
Pencil Tool The Pencil tool is similar to the two tools mentioned above, except that the edges of the applied color are not fuzzy—using the Pencil tool produces hard edges.	Clone Tool The Clone tool allows you to copy a part of an image to another area of the image by pressing and holding the key while clicking on an image and then using the tool in another area. The Pattern Stamp tool is slightly different in that you may paste the copied image more than once (the Clone tool allots only one copy).
History Tool The History tool allows you to combine previous versions of your image with the current version. When working with an image, you may decide that you like some of the current changes as well as some of the past changes. You can combine the two by selecting the history state (from the History palette) that includes the old changes that you liked and using the History tool to paint the past image onto the current state.	Eraser Tool The default Eraser tool replaces the erased portion of the image with the current background color. When using the Background Eraser tool, however, the erased portion simply disappears. The Magic Eraser tool behaves similar to the Magic Wand tool in that it will select similar shades of a certain color and erase portions of the image with those colors and erase them.

Brush Dynamics The Brush Dynamics options may be accessed in the brush pallete, which is located on the right-hand side of the toolbars for all the painting tools (except for the Eraser and Gradient tools). Lots of cool effects can be created if you play around with these settings.
Gradient Tool The Gradient tool is a very simple way to paint a gradient between colors into your image. The default settings produce a linear gradient between the current foreground and background colors. Radial, angle, reflected, and diamond gradients are also available. Adding more colors and settings can be done in the Gradient tool's toolbar.