The Brush Tool

Step 1: Select The Brush Tool

To access any of the brush dynamics, we'll need to open Photoshop's Brushes panel. First, make sure you have the Brush Tool selected from the Tools panel, or press the letter B to quickly grab it with the keyboard shortcut:

Step 2: Open The Brushes Panel

With the Brush Tool selected, the easiest way to open the Brushes panel is to either press the F5 key on your keyboard (press it again to close the Brushes panel) or click on the Brushes panel toggle icon in the Options Bar at the top of the screen (click it again to close the panel): 

 

By default, the Brushes panel opens to the Brush Presets options (you'll see the words Brush Presets highlighted in blue in the top left corner of the panel). In this mode, all we can do is choose from a list of ready-made brushes on the right side of the panel. To choose any of the brushes, simply click on its thumbnail in the list. If you have Tool Tips enabled in Photoshop's Preferences, the name of each brush will appear as you hover your mouse cursor over the thumbnails. A helpful preview area along the bottom of the panel shows us what a brush stroke would look like with the currently selected brush. We can use the Master Diameter slider below the list of brushes to change the size of the brush. If all you want to do is choose a brush and paint with it, this is the place to be:

Each of the brush presets in the list on the right side of the panel comes with both a brush tip (the actual shape of the brush that we see in the brush's thumbnail) and a pre-selected collection of brush dynamics that control the behavior of the brush as we paint with it. The six categories of brush dynamics (Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Texture, etc.) are found along the left side of the Brushes panel, and if you keep an eye on them as you click on different brush thumbnails, you'll see that different categories turn on and off depending on which brush you select. For example, if I click on the Scattered Maple Leaves brush, we can see that Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Color Dynamics, and Other Dynamics are all enabled with the brush tip

However, if I choose a more basic brush, like one of Photoshop's standard round brushes from the top of the list, only the Shape Dynamics category is selected. In fact, depending on whether or not you have a pen tablet installed on your computer, you may not see any brush dynamics categories selected at all: 

Let's take a look at how we can change the options in each category and how they affect the behavior of our brush, starting with the first one in the list - Shape Dynamics.

Or, jump to any of the other Brush Dynamics categories using the links below:

• Scattering
• Texture
• Dual Brush
• Color Dynamics
• Other Dynamics