Brushes and Digital Stamps

This month and next, we continue our look at presets within Photoshop and concentrate on brushes. Brushes are one of the most important and versatile tools in your Photoshop arsenal! To demonstrate a little on how to locate, utilise and manage your brushes and show how you can use them to create some wonderful backgrounds, textures, layouts, decorations and titles/momgrams etc. I am going to create a simple 4x6 card using some brushes I have in my stash and show you a few tricks along the way.

As with the other standard presets supplied with Photoshop, you will find the brushes in the Presets Sub-Folder of your Adobe Program Folder. Adobe provides you with a range of brushes (.ABR format) to get you started, but there are many brushes available for free or to purchase on the Internet.

Within Photoshop Elements you will find your brushes on the Tool Menu, typically to the left of your screen. By clicking on the drop down arrow, you can see the type of brush tools available, as in the screenprint below.

For now we are just going to use the brush tool, so click on that to bring up your brush options, which you will find at the top of the screen.

The first option shows you the current or last brush you selected, along with the size of the brush. If you click the drop down arrow on this, it will bring up all the brushes contained in that brush set. By clicking the drop down arrow alongside the name of the brush you can see all the brush sets in the Preset Folder. You can replace your brushes by selecting a different set.