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MARCH 07, 2002 A Closer Look: Photoshop's New Paint Engine
First we'll get to the basic Brush preset palette, which you see below. 
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This palette is where it all happens. Well, most of it, anyway. Some parameters, such as opacity and blending mode, are still located in the top tool bar, as before. But this Brush preset palette is where you go to control the look and feel of the brush itself.
At the most basic level, you have the presets that ship with Photoshop 7. These can be used as brushes themselves or modified to create custom brushes. Photoshop 7, in its current state, includes seven libraries full of brush presets, ranging from basic brushes to brushes that emulate natural media to special effects brushes. All of them can be loaded into the preset palette and selected from a visual listing (as seen above), which can also include text describing the name of the brush and its diameter. Once you've selected a preset, you can move on to customization, which begins with the brush tip shape. These are the same brush tip options found in Photoshop 6, so they don't bear much discussion. But note that at the bottom of the palette, you get to see a sample stroke, which is updated as you change the shape of the tip. 
Dynamics But now we get to the much more exciting features found in Photoshop's new paint engine--dynamics. I'm going to cover three of them today, and we'll follow up with the rest in a future installment. Shape Dynamics provide you with options for controlling how your brush tip shapes are interpreted. This is to say, you select the tip shape, and then you set how this tip shape will be applied as you make your stroke with your mouse or pen. 
One of the more exciting features in Photoshop's new paint engine is improved support for Wacom tablet tools. In Photoshop 6, you could control the size and opacity of a brush stroke using the pressure from one of Wacom's pressure-sensitive tablets. Now, however, you can control almost all of the dynamics not just with pressure, but also with tilt (with a Wacom Intuos tablet) and even the airbrush wheel of a wheel-equipped Wacom pen. (Wacom airbrush pens are purchased separately. The pens that are included with Wacom tablets do not have airbrush wheels.) Prev 1 2 3 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • Digital Webcast • DV Format • Film and Video Magazine • Film Imaging • Hollywood Industry • Presentation Master • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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