About painting tools, options, and panels

Adobe Photoshop CS4 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.

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 panel to set brush tip options. See Brushes panel 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 panel.

You can resize or change the hardness of painting cursors by dragging. Right-click + Alt (Windows) or Control + Option (Mac OS) and drag to the left or right to reduce or enlarge the size of the painting cursor. Shift + right-click + Alt (Windows) or Control + Option + Command (Mac OS) and drag to the left or right to change the hardness.