SFredrickPhoto.com Blog

The purpose of this post is to let you know about a couple of problems that you can run into using Photoshop’s brush tool and the simple solutions for those problems. What prompted this is I hit the first one of these the other day but forgot about it because I hadn’t ran into for a while. But as Photoshop was  coming back up, after bouncing it, I remembered the issue.  If you know about these (and remember them) you can save a lot of time chasing you tail. But before I get into the problems some background info.

In the Cursor preferences (Edit > Preferences > Cursors) there are options for how the user wants their cursor for painting tools to be displayed. A few examples of painting tools are the brush tools, the erase tool, and the clone/healing tools. IMHO the first two option are worthless. Standard shows a brush icon and Precise shows only a crosshair for the center of the brush. Most folks have this option set to either Normal or Full Size. The difference is how brushes with soft edges (low hardness) are displayed. When the brush is set to a soft edge, the center of the brush has 100% coverage and outer edge “feathers” from 100% out to 0% coverage. Full Size show the size of the brush size all the way out to the 0% coverage point. Normal only shows the size of the brush from 100% out to where there is 50% coverage.

In the last couple of version of Photoshop they added the option to show a crosshair where the center of the brush is located. In some instances this can be helpful in deciding where to start painting. So handy in fact, that; in the early versions of Photoshop there was a keyboard short cut, Caps Lock, to switch between Normal/Full and Precise so the user could see where the center of the brush was located. (Sorry I don’t have any screen shots to show this. My capture program doesn’t show the cursor, no matter what it looks like.)

And this is the source of the first problem. The outer edge of your brush can suddenly disappear and all you will see is the Crosshair in the center (but no outer edge).  The most likely reason for this behavior is that you inadvertently have the Caps Lock key active. To get the outer edge of the brush back all you have to do is toggle the Caps Lock key. Easy enough…if you know this (and remember) it.

The next gotcha has to do with the keyboard shortcut for changing a brush’s opacity. Normally, when a brush tool is active, if you press a number key the opacity will change to 10x that number. For example, pressing 5 will change the brush opacity to 50%, as shown in the blue eclipse.  However; if you have inadvertently activated the air brush option, circled in orange above, when you hit a number key the Flow will change to 10x the number. So if you are using the brush tool and hitting a number results in Flow changing rather than Opacity check the Air Brush option. (It took me at least 6 months to figure this one out. And I’ve never seen it documented anywhere.)

Another tip to keep in mind related to all the tools. If any tool starts acting “funny” and it’s not obvious why, one the first things to do is to either Reset Tool or Reset All Tools. (Click the down facing arrow on the tool icon in the Options Bar (yellow circle above) to bring up the tool’s Presets. Then click the right facing arrow (disclosure triangle) and then choose either Rest or Rest All in the drop down menu. This will get rid of the second problem (which is probably one of the reasons it took so long to figure out why/how it was getting set that way in the first place).

Hope these tips save you some time figuring out why your brushes are acting differently than expected.