The default brushes that appear in the pop-up palette include a row of hard edged brushes at the top, followed by two rows of soft edged brushes. A variety of different brush shapes and sizes fill the rest of the palette. All brushes show the pixel width of the brush at the bottom of the thumbnail. You can create your own brushes from existing brush tips by editing the More Options settings for an existing brush. Then choose New Brush from the pop-up palette menu (menu shown near the bottom of this page). Below you see the stroke thumbnail of one of the default round brushes with edited Spacing, Scatter, Angle and Roundness settings. New brush tips can be created by selecting whatever it is that you would like to make into a brush. The brush tip is what you see in the thumbnail for that brush in the brushes palette. A brush applies color according to the brush tip’s luminosity. Therefore, any part of your brush tip that is black will apply color at 100 % opacity. Any gray areas in your brush tip will apply color in proportion to the brightness of the gray tone; dark gray applies more color while light gray applies less. White areas within a defined brush tip are considered transparent and apply no color at all. In Elements 2, the selection boundary used to define a new brush can be in any shape. Once you’ve made your selection, choose Edit > Define Brush. You will then get a dialog box asking you to name your new brush. Once named, the new brush will appear in the current brushes palette. However, it is best to save your custom brushes in their own set. If you don’t save to a custom set, your custom brushes will be lost if you load another brushes palette or delete your preferences. To save a custom set, choose Edit > Preset Manager. Choose Brushes from the Preset Type menu, and then click and Shift-click to select all the brushes you want to include in your set. Click the Save Set button and name your custom set. After closing and reopening Elements, your set will appear in the brushes pop-up palette menu. Keyboard shortcuts for brushes include the bracket keys for cycling through all available brushes. The left bracket [ will move you to the next smaller size, and the right bracket ] will move you up one size. In Elements 2, these keyboard shortcuts for increasing and decreasing size work on all brushes, not just the default round ones. Holding down the Shift key while pressing the left bracket will decrease brush (edge) softness. Shift plus the right bracket increases softness. This shortcut does not work on most of the non-round brush; hardness cannot be altered even via More Options for most of the more complicated brushes. When editing an image with any tool that uses brushes, you can right-click on the image and the brushes pop-up palette will appear next to your cursor. You can then use the arrow keys to navigate to the brush that you want, or click on a brush to select it (as usual). To close the brushes pop-up palette, press Enter, or click on your document’s blue title bar, or just start painting. Be sure and set your brush cursor preference in Display & Cursors preferences. Find them at Edit > Preferences > Display & Cursors. If you have chosen “brush size”, you can toggle to “precise” by pressing Caps Lock. If you have your preference set to “precise”, Caps Lock will toggle to “brush size”. A preference of “standard” will go to “precise” when Caps Lock is pressed. If you look for the old Brush Dynamics button at the far right end of the options bar, it’s gone. Those options have been moved into the More Options pop-up palette. There is now only one Fade setting instead of three. If you’re looking for the airbrush tool, it’s also gone. It has been relegated to a button on the brush tool’s options bar. Use the airbrush option to allow continued application and build-up of color (color pooling) even when you are not moving the cursor.

The illustration in the white on the left below in the white section is the brushes pop-up palette menu found if you click the arrow in the upper right corner of the brushes pop-up palette. The pop-up palette is found by clicking the brush stroke thumbnail or the little down arrow next to it on the options bar.Use this menu to save a brush with More Options settings (use New Brush), or to change your brush list view, for example, from thumbnails to Small List, which looks like this:

New in Elements 2 is the Stroke Thumbnail option. I still prefer Small List view though the single stroke thumbnail on the options bar is very handy when tinkering with More Options settings. Stroke thumbnails are more useful in Photoshop 7 where you have many more settings that will alter the stroke’s appearance.

On the right below is the dialog box you find if you click the More Options button on the options bar. Please note that More Options only appears on the brush tool’s options bar. Therefore, you can only use More Options settings when using the brush tool—unless you save a brush with More Options settings by using New Brush from the pop-up palette menu. If you frequently need to use brushes with other tools using altered More Options settings, I strongly recommend that you build a custom brush set with the brushes and settings that you need. That custom set will be available in the brushes pop-up palette drop-down menu for all of the painting tools.

In the More Options pop-up palette, Spacing determines how often your brush tip makes a ‘footprint’. Watch the stroke thumbnail at the left end of the options bar for a live preview of what it does. Fade allows you to cause a brush stroke to fade in the distance that you set. The amount is set in brush tip widths thus fade distance is proportional to the current brush size. Color Jitter causes the color that the brush is applying to vary between the current foreground and background colors. Hardness determined the fuzziness of the brush edges. This setting is not available for most of the irregular (non-round) brushes. Scatter will cause the brush tip ‘footprints’ to be placed at random distances around the point where you click or stroke. Watch your stroke thumbnail preview to get an idea of what it does. Please note that Scatter will cause your brush to lay down multiple imprints, even if you only click once on your document.

 

Elements 2 comes with a ton of new brushes. See samples from four of the palettes, below. Notice the scroll bars—those palettes contain a lot of brushes not shown. In addition, the new brush engine (same as in Photoshop 7 though with many fewer options) allows for scattering, and resizing of all brush tip shapes. There are leaf and grass scatter brushes that allow you to foliate an entire tree or lawn in minutes.