By Gyz

All Photoshop Brushes are based on a flexible, sophisticated system which you can use to customize existing Brushes or to create new ones from scratch. When you select a tool, its corresponding options will become accessible in the upper tool bar. Being quite complex entities of Photoshop though, Brushes have a separate palette dedicated to them, as well. You can toggle this palette by relying on the F5 hotkey, or, alternatively, you could invoke it directly using the option bar of the Brush tool.

There are numerous attributes that control and define how a Brush behaves when you create a stroke with it. The level of this control could range from simple to extremely sophisticated, depending on the result you are looking for. The essential attributes of Brushes are the shape, the size and the hardness of the tool. Apart from these properties though, you may also need- or want to control optional values exclusive to the Brush system. As you will see, a wide range and fluent customizability of options are available to form the type of control you need to achieve the results you have in mind.
Accessing Brushes
Photoshop comes with rich libraries of Brushes, inviting you to organize a virtual jar containing the tools that you use most frequently in your current work. While the Brush system is infinitely flexible, the basis of an effective jar consists of the default Brushes Photoshop comes with. Regardless the unique sets and types of tools you will use and create, the most frequently used tool in the software will be the standard Brush with the shape of a circle.

To access a Brush Library, you need to activate the flyout menu of the Brush palette. Flyout menus are easy to spot on all Photoshop palettes. They are located in the upper right hand corner of every palette that has this function associated to it. The flyout menu of the Brush palette is quite rich in its contents. Notice that the menu is divided into numerous parts. The bottommost section lists the available Brush Libraries, while the upper sections give you straightforward controls of Brush management. Once you click on an available library, Photoshop will ask if you want to add these new Brushes to the jar, or, would you prefer to replace the previous Brushes with the contents of the selected library instead. Libraries can be saved out with the .abr – Adobe Brush – file extension to them and this is the file extension you will find downloadable libraries with, as well.
Brush Customization
The Brushes section of the Brush palette hosts all the optional attributes you could utilize to form virtually infinite types of control to define Brush behavior. To see these in effect, pick a Brush Tip of your choosing that has well defined characteristics. Tips resembling grass are good candidates to see the effects of various options on. Brush customization happens via six main categories and all of these have a separate set of controls. To see and understand how custom attributes do work, select the Shape Dynamics category and put a checkmark next to it. You have just activated this optional set of attributes. Now click on the word „Shape Dynamics” to access the attributes themselves.

The values you currently see on the right side of the palette are context sensitive and they are exclusive to the Shape Dynamics category. Try and adjust the different sliders and see how they affect the Stroke preview. This preview is a precise representation of what the stroke will look like if you amend the current settings.

Once you have established values for a category that you are happy with, you have multiple choices. You could lock these values in by clicking on the tiny padlock icon. Locked values will be remembered by the software and the visual results they yield will not be altered by any subsequent changes. There is one exception though, as you could deactivate the effect of the category by removing the checkmark. This will not remove the effect, but will toggle its visibility. These optional attributes are stackable, meaning that they will react to each other non-destructively to create the stroke you are looking for.
Essential Brush Shortcuts
There are multiple methods to access the most essential Brush attributes like the size of the tip and the hardness. A quite effective technique is to press right click with the Brush tool activated. This will grant access to a dialog panel you could define the Master Diameter – size – and the hardness from. You could select a fresh tip from here, as well. Once you are confident with the shape of the Brush though, you may want to gain even more effective control of the size and hardness attributes.

One of the most comfortable pair of hotkeys in Photoshop is activated using the bracket keys. Once you have a Brush in your hand and you press and hold the bracket keys, the diameter will change “on the fly”, giving you direct feedback on the size of the Brush. Keep in mind that the Brush cursor is not necessarily rendered by the software. In case you do not see the Brush cursor, then there is a good chance that you have it deactivated. To display the cursor and the shape again, press the hotkey “Caps Lock”. This is the shortcut to toggle the visibility of the Brush tip.

Being able to alter the size of the Brush intuitively is a valuable ability, but the hardness of the tool remains almost as essential as the previous property. To alter the hardness of the Brush, you could rely on the bracket keys once again, but press and hold the SHIFT modifier key while you set the new value. These four, comfortable hotkey maneuvers will make your work flow much more swift and fluent.
Creating Custom Brush Tips
Create or open up an image and select an area of it which you would like to use as a brand new Brush tip. Keep in mind that your selection will define the Brush tip itself. Once you are happy with the selection, go to Edit - > Define Brush Preset. A dialog will pop up, inviting you to name the new tip. You could do so or you could skip that step, as well. Regardless of your choice, the new tip you have just created is added to the current jar of Brushes. You will find the new tip as the last component of the jar. In case you would like to keep any of your custom Brushes, you could save them out as a variant of an existing Library, or you could create a Library from scratch. To remove and/or rename individual Brush tips from a Library, simply right click on the Brush tip’s thumbnail image in the jar and select the function you need.
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By Gzy

Abobe Illustrator is a sophisticated vector based application, yet there is nothing to prevent the new user from learning her/his way around with one of the most versatile tools the software offers: the Pen tool. Vector based drawing is based on the creation of intricate line segments, these are the underlying elements you either use to create customized Strokes out of them, or to Fill an area that the segments are bordering. This tutorial will show you how to create line art efficiently, using curves and straight lines you have infinite control over. This infinite control of the individual components lets you create what you have in mind with ease, and – if needed – mathematical accuracy.

Start a new document using the File - > New... selection from the upper Main Menu bar. Illustrator offers a wide selection of consensus templates. Select the A4 paper format which will be quite fine for these examples. The easiest way to access the Pen tool is to rely on the default hotkey “p”, but at first it is a good idea to take note of the tool’s location in the toolbox. At default, Illustrator will give you instant interface access to the toolbox, but, in case you can not see it, you can invoke it using the Window - > Tools path.

Illustrator comes with two toolbox layouts. You can change between these configurations by pressing the small arrows at the upper left corner of the toolbox palette. Regardless of which configuration is currently activated, you will find the Pen tool in the second group of tools in the toolbox. It is the first component of both of these subgroups. Before you start the examples with the Pen tool though, let’s see the most essential navigational commands of Illustrator. Panning and zooming the camera.
Basic Navigation
The Hand tool is used to pan the camera around, and it can be accessed by the hotkey “Space”. If you keep the Spacebar pressed, clicking and dragging on the canvas lets you define your focus region on the workspace. You also need to know how to zoom in or out. This command happens the same way as in Adobe Photoshop. There are two main options available when using the Zoom tool. While they are very different, both are very useful.

You could pick up the Zoom tool via clicking on its icon in the toolbox, or, you could rely on the hotkey “z” to get a hold of it. The Zoom tool is area sensitive, meaning you are free to define a region of any size with it on the canvas, simply by making a rectangular selection. The Zoom tool will automatically zoom to that particular region. This is one method. The other one is to rely on the keyboard shortcut CTRL, combined with the “–“, and “+” keys on the Numeric Keyboard. This technique gives you manual zooming, which is especially efficient when used together with the Hand tool.

A final tip for basic navigation yet: no matter how far or how close your zoom is on the canvas, double clicking on the Hand icon in the toolbox will always snap your view back to 100% view, which lets you observe the current state of the document in its original size. Now is the time to grab the Pen tool. Remember the “p” hotkey? Once you have the Pen tool selected, let’s see what can be done with it.
Anchor Points
The Pen tool uses different kinds of Anchor Points to define straight- or curved segments. As user, it is your call to tell Illustrator what kind of Anchor Point you need at a given position, and/or what kind of curvature - if any - is desired at the moment. This sounds more difficult than it actually is. To illustrate this, let’s see what happens if you simply click on the canvas using the Pen tool. A simple click will create your first Anchor Point, which, in this case, will be a Corner Point. Click again in the vicinity two more times, as you would construct a triangle. Notice that Illustrator will automatically draw a straight segment between the first and second Corner Points. Depending on your current Fill and Stroke settings of the tool, Illustrator may or may not start to apply the current Fill value to the ensuing shape, once you placed a third Anchor Point. The same is true concerning the Stroke characteristics. Since these two attributes – Fill and Stroke - are of essential importance, let’s address their fundamentals.

Notice the Control bar immediately below the Main Menu bar. You can activate and deactivate this interface element by the Window - > Control toggle. This interface element is context sensitive to your picks, always informing you of the attributes of the current selection. Once you have the initial, simple shape constructed, go to Select - > Deselect in the main menu bar. This will leave the initial shape inactive for a second. Select it again, using the Selection tool – hotkey “v”. Click on the shape with this tool. Notice that the Control bar will pick up the attributes of the selected shape, including its Fill and Stroke values. Notice the tiny rectangles on the Control bar with the arrows beside them. These are very important. The first, left rectangle informs you of the Fill value, while the right one registers the Stroke value of the selected element. These rectangles represent an efficient method to define the Fill and Stroke values.

Using the small arrows beside the rectangles, assign a custom color as a Fill, then, do the same to the Stroke value. Notice how the Fill and Stroke colors are changing on the shape. Before moving on, set the Fill attribute to “None”, and keep a random color of your choosing as the Stroke value. The third attribute you see on the Control bar is the Stroke weight. This is the width of the Stroke. Now that you know how to control the basic Fill and Stroke characteristics of the simple shape you just created with the Pen tool, let’s focus attention on the types of Anchor Points you could create with it.

As you have seen, a simple click on the canvas with the Pen tool will create a Corner Point. Corner Points always will generate the shortest possible distance between each other. On the main menu bar, choose Select - > Deselect if you have an active selection. Pressing Enter should do the trick, as well. Construct a new path now, by placing another Corner point to start it. Now, as you did earlier, move the pointer to a different location in the vicinity, but, instead of a single click and release, click the mouse and keep it pressed. While still pressing, adjust the mouse left and right, even up and down. Notice the resultant curvature of the segment. You have just created a Curve point. When creating a path or a shape with the Pen tool, your agenda either is to “rough in” the shape you are looking for and refine it until you are happy with it, or, you could always go for rigorous precious right from the very start, as Illustrator knows no upper limit to the complexity of a single segment, let alone a network of intricate curves.

Curve points will have Control Handles to them. These are the tiny rectangles you see on both sides of the selected Curve point. After selecting them using the Direct Selection tool – hotkey ” a” - these Handles can be manipulated separately, and doing so will have a dramatic effect on how the curvature of the segment flows. Now that you are aware of how to define Corner points and Curve points, let’s see how you can refine a segment, or a shape.
Selections and Refinement
Adobe Illustrator knows two types of selection tools. The Selection tool - hotkey “v” – and the Direct Selection tool, which you can invoke by the hotkey “a”. The difference between the two Selection tools is crucial. The first one will pick up an entire object, while the second one is suited for component-based editing. If you have a relatively complex path segment defined by seven Anchor Points, the Selection tool will select the whole segment, so you could transform it around the canvas in its entirety, while the Direct Selection tool will recognize individual components of the segment. It will let you select and manipulate Anchor Points on a point by point basis.

The first habit you want to get used to though is a simple shortcut to deselect the current selection. Whenever you are happy with the momentary state of an edited object, you could always rely on the CTRL + click shortcut, making sure you click on empty canvas space. This technique releases your active selection, letting you make another. The method gives you an efficient way of moving between simple or even more complex selections, saving you the time of doing this essential maneuver via the interface.

To refine an existing segment or shape, you need to be able to incorporate additional Anchor Points into them, and you need to know how to remove existing Anchor Points from them, as well. First of all, you need to tell Illustrator which path or shape you want to edit – your safest bet would be to rely on the Selection Tool. Select the object you want to refine, using the Selection tool. Now that the shape or path is active, Illustrator becomes context sensitive. To take advantage of this, let’s take the Pen tool once again. Position the Pen tool pointer over an existing Anchor Point. Notice the tiny minus sign displayed automatically beside the cursor. This tells you that a click would remove that particular Anchor Point. Now position the Pen tool pointer over any region of the path that has no Anchor Point on it. Notice that the Pen tool automatically displays a persistent plus sign along these regions, ready to implement a new Anchor Point into the path by a single click. Now you can construct a simple path or shape by creating a sequence of Anchor Points, and you also know how to maintain infinite flexibility by removing and adding Anchor Points.
Converting Anchor Points
To ensure this limitless flexibility, you also need to be aware of how to convert Anchor Points. Illustrator won’t carve anything into stone at all. In case you have a Curve point, but decided that you want a Corner point instead, then you could convert that point. To accomplish this, select the Pen tool, position it over the point you want to convert, then use the ALT + click and ALT + click and drag shortcuts to confirm these conversions. ALT + click is sufficient to convert Curve points to Corner points, while you would need an ALT + click and drag maneuver to convert a Control point to a Curve point. You would need to define a curvature value to the new segment – hence the need to drag.
Additional types of Anchor Points
When you will get deeper into Illustrator, you will see that there are times when you create two additional types of Anchor Points: these are the Combination Corner Points and the Curved Corner Points. A Curved Corner Point will form whenever two different – essentially separate - Curve points intersect. To illustrate this, create a curve using two Curve points, then press ALT plus click and drag over the last Curve point you created. The consecutive click with the Pen tool will create a new Anchor Point, but will leave behind a Curved Corner Point to attach the new segment to the existing segment.

A Combination Corner Point, on the other hand, forms when you need to come out from a curvature with a straight line, or vice versa. To create such an intersection, you want to convert Anchor Points according to the specific need, either to a Corner point, or to a Curve point. By doing so, you tell the consecutive Anchor Point you create to behave accordingly. Using this method, you could construct a curvature coming out of a straight line, or, you could come out straight from the steepest curvature. Either way, the resultant Anchor Points of such intersections would be Combination Corner Points.

On a final note: be aware that you can turn the visibility of the Grid on or off using the View - > Show Grid / Hide Grid toggle, and you could activate or deactivate the Snap to Grid functionality from the very same menu group. A nice trait of Illustrator is that it remembers the Snap to Grid settings, regardless if the Grid itself is shown, or not. If you need to customize the layout of the Grid, use the Edit - > Preferences - > Guides & Grid dialog. Happy and efficient drawing!
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By Ron DardenIf you're a beginning graphic designer, or a new desktop publisher looking for clip art to use in a newsletter, it's important to understand the differences between raster images, which are created with painting programs, and vector images, created with drawing programs. Knowing why these two major formats exist and how they are used can mean the difference between a graphic that works the way you want it to and one that doesn't.Raster graphicsAlso frequently referred to as bitmap graphics, raster images are the most common. They are formed by a series of tiny individual squares that together create a larger picture, kind of like a mosaic is made of a series of smaller tiles.If you were to look closely at any number of every day images you would see how these images work. Documents that come from a fax machine or printer are made up of a series of tiny dots. The text and graphics on your computer screen are made up of a number of small image elements called pixels. When you take a photo with a digital camera, the picture is saved in memory as a long series of bits of information representing tiny squares of colors in a grid. These are all raster-based graphics.The main problem with using raster graphics is that they are size-dependent. Normally the dots or pixels involved are so small that they blend together and look like one continuous image. If you try to print them out at a size larger than what the file was intended for, at some point you'll start seeing the individual pieces as blocks.Making the image smaller than it was created for can also have bad consequences. For example, a line that is printed two dots thick can disappear entirely if the graphic is printed at less than half its original size, because the printer can't draw anything smaller than one dot.Raster graphics are typically used for complex images formed from lots of different colors and shapes, most notably photos. These graphics can be saved in a variety of formats with file extensions like .TIF, .JPG, .GIF and .BMP.Vector graphicsVector-based images follow a very different method in generating an image. These kinds of graphics don't break an image down into individual parts of the same shape. Instead, they keep track of the instructions on how to draw that image. An image of a triangle would be formed by drawing three lines of a certain thickness and length that join at their end points and then filling it with a specific color. A vector image doesn't know how many dots a printer will need to print that triangle, it just knows the size, shape, angles, colors and so forth of the parts that make up the image.Vector graphics usually resize much more gracefully than raster-based images, because the file can just tell the computer or printer to draw the image larger or smaller than normal. The lines in such images are always smooth and do not become blocky when magnified. Because it typically has less overall information to keep track of, a vector file usually takes up less memory than a raster one. The more complex an image is, however, the more difficult it is for it to be stored in a vector format; this is why all photos except for the most basic or stylized should be in raster format instead of vector.Diagrams, logos, fonts and other graphics that have basic shapes and curves are the main uses of vector images. The font files that generate type are stored as vector-based information, and many logos are as well. The main file extensions used with vector-based graphics are .EPS and .SVG.Raster versus vectorA desktop publisher choosing clip art to use in a project or ordering a custom image from a graphic designer should pick a format that will best suit the intended use. If it's a photo, or an image for use on a website, you'll definitely want one of the raster-based file formats. If the image will be used in a print-based product like a newsletter or book and it consists of line art, such as in logos or diagrams, you'll probably want a vector image. Raster images can also work just fine in print projects as long as the graphic is the right size, but if you try to cut corners and print one bigger than the file can support you'll end up with a blurry mess.If you are a graphic designer creating work for other people or saving your own projects, you'll want to create each image with its format in mind from the beginning. Paint and photo editing applications, such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Paint, create graphics as raster images even if you incorporate vector-based elements, such as fonts. If you save a graphic from one of these applications in .EPS format it won't be automatically converted to a vector image. There are some software applications that can do that with varying degrees of success, but if you want a vector image you should create it from scratch in a drawing program like Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or Inkscape. Vector images are relatively easy to convert to raster-based ones once you know what size you want them to be; the option to convert it is available in every major graphic design application, whether it's a painting or drawing program.Once you have experience with the two major types of graphics under your belt you'll be able to choose the ones that work best for your purposes without a second thought. More...