When most people think of brushes in Photoshop they think of a tool that allows you to paint new pixels onto a layer. And I use the Brush Tool a lot to paint on a layer mask to hide/black (or reveal/white) part of that layer. But the Brusch Tool is not the only tool to use brushes. They are common among many of Photoshop’s tools; for example, the heal/clone tools, the quick selection tool, and the dodge/burn tools. Since they are used a lot, it’s good to have a number of ways to modify their attributes.
The most straight forward way is to click on the down arrow next to the Brush selector in the Brush Tool Option menu (a tool’s option menu is the bar across the top of the standard workspace and changes whenever a new tool is selected). In the drop down window you can select a new brush or change the size and hardness (or feather, 0% hardness is 100% feather). (As a side note this is one of the few dialogs where scrubby sliders, that I talked about in a previous post, do not work.)
But if you are changing brush attributes often this is a pretty slow way to work. And like many things in Photoshop there are some short cut keys assigned to these functions. The ones I use most often are the square bracket keys: left to make the brush smaller and right to make it larger. Throw in the Alt key (Atl + square bracket) modifier and you change the brush hardness in 25% increments. E.g., Shift + Rt Bracket increases the brush hardness by 25% (if it was at 50% it will change to 75%). Here’s a tip, at first you don’t need to remember if its the left or right bracket key to increase the brush size. Just remember it’s the bracket keys and just tap one, you’ll be able to see the brush size change. If it’s not changing the way you want it to, just tap the other one until you get to the size you need. Also the little brush preview in the option bar will change. When changing the brush size you will see the numbers below the preview change and when changing hardness you can see the feather change on the brush preview.
In CS4 Adobe better integrated Photoshop with newer high powered video cards that support Open GL. If your video card supports Open GL there is a new way to change the brush size. Hold down the Alt key and right click. At the cursors current location you will get a preview of both the brush’s size and hardness. Now just drag (while keeping the Alt key and Rt mouse button depressed) to change the brush size. And like above, throw in the Shift key as a modifier to change the hardness.
I guess it’s a case of not being able to teach old dogs new tricks but I still use the square bracket key most of the time but I’m going to make a point of trying to change that habit and take advantage of the new way of doing this. Give both of these a try and see which way works best for you. When you get into the habit of using either method you will find your work with brushes will be much faster.