About painting tools, options, and palettes
Adobe Photoshop CS3 provides several tools for painting and editing image color. The Brush tool and the Pencil tool work like traditional drawing tools by applying color with brush strokes. The Gradient tool, Fill command, and Paint Bucket tool apply color to large areas. Tools like the Eraser tool, Blur tool, and Smudge tool modify the existing colors in the image. See Painting tools gallery.
In the options bar for each tool, you can set how color is applied to an image and choose from preset brush tips.
Brush and tool presets
You can save a set of brush options as a preset so you can quickly access brush characteristics you use frequently. Photoshop includes several sample brush presets. You can start with these presets and modify them to produce new effects. Many original brush presets are available for download on the web.
You choose presets from the Brush Preset picker, which stores preset brushes and allows you to temporarily modify the diameter and hardness of a brush preset.
Learn the
shortcuts for changing paint tool size and hardness. See Keys for painting objects.You use tool presets when you want to save brush tip characteristics along with settings from the options bar, such as opacity, flow, and color. To learn more about tool presets, see Create and use tool presets.
Brush tip options
Along with settings in the options bar, brush tip options control how color is applied. You can apply color gradually, with soft edges, with large brush strokes, with various brush dynamics, with different blending properties, and with brushes of different shapes. You can apply a texture with your brush strokes to simulate painting on canvas or art papers. You can also simulate spraying paint with an airbrush. You use the Brushes palette to set brush tip options. See Brushes palette overview.
If you work with a drawing tablet, you can control how color is applied using pen pressure, angle, rotation, or a stylus wheel. You set options for drawing tablets in the Brushes palette.