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Changing the brush cursor

The painting tools have three possible cursors: the standard cursor (the icon from the toolbox), a cross hair , and a cursor that matches the size and shape of the currently selected brush tip. You change the brush tip cursor in the Cursors preferences dialog box.

  1. Choose Edit > Preferences > Cursors (Windows) or Photoshop > Preferences > Cursors (Mac OS).
  2. Select the desired cursors in both the Painting Cursors area and the Other Cursors area. The sample cursors change to reflect your choices. For a Brush Tip cursor, choose a size and whether to include a cross hair in the cursor.

    • Normal Brush Tip restricts the cursor size to areas of the brush stroke that have 50% or more opacity.

    • Full Size Brush Tip sizes the cursor to the entire area affected by the brush stroke. For soft brushes, this produces a larger cursor size than the Normal setting, to include the areas of the brush stroke with lighter opacity.

  3. Click OK.
    For the Pen and Brush tools, the Caps Lock key or the Shift+Caps Lock keys act like a toggle for changing between the standard cursor and the cross hair.