Chapter 12. Drawing with Brushes, Shapes, and Other Tools
If you’re not of the artistic persuasion, you may feel tempted to skip this chapter. After all, you probably just want to fix and enhance your photos. What do you care about brush technique? Surprisingly enough, you should care quite a lot. In Elements, brushes aren’t just for painting a moustache and horns on a picture of someone you don’t like, or for blackening your sister’s teeth in that old school photo.
Many tools in Elements use brushes to apply their effects. So far, you’ve already run into the Selection brush, the Clone Stamp, and the Color Replacement brush, to name just a few. And even with the Brush tool, you can paint with lots of things besides color—like light or shadow, for example. In Elements, when you want to apply an effect in a precise manner, you’re often going to use some sort of brush to do it.
If you’re used to working with real brushes, their digital cousins can take some getting used to, but there are many serious artists now who paint primarily in Photoshop. With Elements, you now have access to most of the same tools as in the full Photoshop, if not quite all the settings available for each tool. Figure 12-1 shows an example of the detailed work you can do with Elements and some artistic ability.
This chapter explains how to use the Brush tool, some of the other brush-like tools (like the Erasers), and how to draw shapes even if you can’t hold a pencil steady. You also get some practical applications for your new skills, like dodging and burning your photos to enhance them, and a super-easy way to create sophisticated artistic crops for your photos—a favorite feature for scrapbooking.
Picking and Using a Basic Brush
If you look at the Toolbox, you’ll see the Brush tool icon, which is below the Eraser in a single-column Toolbox, or below the Clone Stamp if you have two columns of tools. (Don’t confuse it with the Selection brushes, which are up above the Crop or Type tool, or the new Smart Brush [Correcting color with a brush], which is below the regular Brush tool or to the right of it, depending on whether you have one or two columns of tools.) Click the Brush tool’s icon or press B to activate it.
The Brush is one of the tools that include a hidden pop-out drawer—you can choose between the Brush, the Impressionist brush, the Pencil tool, and the Color Replacement brush. You can read about the Impressionist brush and the Pencil tool later in this chapter, and about the Color Replacement brush on The Color Replacement Tool—Using a Brush to Replace Colors. This section is about the regular Brush tool.
If you look at the Options bar (Figure 12-2), you can see that the Brush offers lots of ways to customize the tool.
Here’s a quick rundown (from left to right) of the available Brush options:
Brushstroke thumbnail. The Options bar displays a thumbnail of the stroke you’d get with the current brush. Click the thumbnail to view the complete Brush palette. Elements gives you a bunch of basic brush collections, which you can view and select here. You can also download many more from various Web sites (see Free Stuff from the Internet).
If you click the pull-down menu, you’ll see that you get more than just hard or soft brushes of various sizes (see Figure 12-3). You also get special brushes for drop shadows, brushes that are sensitive to pen pressure if you’re using a graphics tablet (you can also use them with a mouse, but you don’t have as many options), and brushes that paint shapes and designs.
Size. This slider lets you adjust the size of your brush—anywhere from 1 pixel up to sizes that may be too big to fit on your monitor. Or you can just type in a size. Figure 12-4 shows you an easy way to adjust brush size using your mouse. As you’re working you can press the close bracket key (]) to quickly increase brush size, or the open bracket key ([) to decrease it.
Mode. Choices in this pull-down menu determine your blend mode. The mode you choose determines how the brush color interacts with what’s in your image.
For example, Normal simply paints the current foreground color (more about all the Mode choices later).
Figure 12-3. Elements gives you a pretty good list of different brushes to choose from, or you can add your own. Here you see just one of the many brush libraries included with Elements, the Default Brushes. You can make brushes, too, as explained on Making a Custom Brush.Figure 12-4. You don’t need to open pull-down menus like the one shown here that says “13 px”. Just move your cursor onto the word “size”, and your cursor changes into a hand-with-double-headed-arrow. Now you can “scrub” back and forth right on the Options bar to make the changes—left for smaller, right for larger. This trick also works anywhere you see a numerical pop-out slider (as in the Layers palette’s Opacity menu, for example).Opacity. Here’s the way to control how thoroughly your brushing covers what’s beneath it. You can use the pull-down menu’s slider or type in any percentage you like, from 1 to 100. The maximum—100 percent—gets you total coverage (at least in Normal mode). Or you can scrub, as shown in Figure 12-4.
Airbrush. Clicking the little pen-like brush just to the right of the Opacity control lets you use the brush as an airbrush. Figure 12-5 shows you how this works.
Tablet Options. Click the tiny arrow to the right of the airbrush. If you use a graphics tablet, you can use these settings to tell Elements which brush characteristics should respond to the pressure of your stroke. There’s more about graphics tablets on Graphics Tablets.
Brush Dynamics. Clicking this icon gets you the Brush Dynamics palette, which gives you oodles of ways to customize your brush, all covered in the next section. If you’re using your brush for artistic purposes, it pays to familiarize yourself with these settings, since this is where you can set a chiseled stroke or a fade, for example.
Tip
If you ever want to return a brush to its original settings, click the Reset button (the tiny black arrow) on the far left side of the Options bar and then click Reset Tool from the pop-up menu.
To actually use the Brush, you enter your settings—make sure you’ve selected the color you want in the Foreground color square (Choosing the Color You Want)—and then just drag across your image wherever you want to paint.
Tip
If you’re used to painting with long, sweeping strokes, keep in mind that in Elements, that technique can be frustrating. That’s because when you undo a mistake (by pressing Ctrl+Z), Elements undoes everything you’ve done while you’ve been holding down the mouse button.
In tricky spots, you can save yourself some aggravation by using shorter strokes so you don’t have to lose that whole long curve you painstakingly worked on just because you wobbled a bit at the end. (The Eraser tool [Using the Eraser] is handy in these situations, too, for tidying up.)
One of the biggest differences between drawing with a mouse and drawing with a real brush is that, on a computer, it doesn’t matter how hard you press the mouse. But if you’ve got a graphics tablet, an electronic pad that causes your pen movements to appear instantly onscreen, you can replicate real-world brushing, including pressure effects. Graphics Tablets tells you all about using a tablet.
Tip
To draw or paint a straight line, hold down the Shift key while moving your mouse. If you click where you want the line to start, and press and hold Shift, and then click at the end point, Elements draws a straight line between those two points. It’s important to click first and then press Shift, or you may draw lines where you don’t want them.
Modifying Your Brush
When you click the Brush Dynamics button in the Options bar, you’ll see a palette that lets you customize the brush in a number of ways. Its official name is the Brush Dynamics palette(it’s also called Additional Brush Options). You’ll also run into a version of this palette for some of the other brush-like tools, like the Healing brush. The Brush Dynamics palette lets you change the way your brush behaves in a number of sophisticated and fun ways. Mastering these settings goes a long way toward getting artistic results in Elements.
Fade controls how fast the brush stroke fades out—just the way a real brush does when you run out of paint. Think of the numbers as sort of “how many steps” it would take to run out of paint. A lower number means it fades out very fast (very few steps) while a higher one means the fade happens later (more steps).
You can pick a number up to 9999, so with a little fiddling, you should be able to get just what you want. Zero is no fading at all—the stroke is the same at the end as it is at the beginning.
If the brush isn’t fading fast enough, decrease the number. If it fades too fast, increase it. A smaller brush usually needs a higher number than a larger brush does. You may find that you need to set the brush spacing (see below) up into the 20s or higher to make fading show any visible effect.
Hue Jitter controls how fast the brush switches between the background and foreground colors. Some brushes, especially the ones that you’d use to paint objects like leaves, automatically vary the color for a more interesting or realistic effect. The higher the number (percentage) here, the faster the color moves from foreground to background. A lower number means the brush takes a longer distance to get from one color to the other. Brushes that acknowledge hue jitter don’t put down only the two colors, but a range of hues in between. Not all brushes respond to this setting, but for the ones that do, it’s a pretty cool feature. Figure 12-7 shows how it works.
Figure 12-7. Top: A brushstroke with no hue jitter. Middle: The same brushstroke with a medium hue jitter value. Bottom: The same brushstroke with a high hue jitter value. The foreground/background colors here are red and blue. Notice how the brush automatically does a little shading, even without allowing for jitter. It takes a fairly high number to get all the way to blue in a stroke of this length.Scatter means just what it says—how far the marks get distributed in your brushstroke. (When you paint with an Elements brush, you’re actually putting down many repetitions of the brush shape rather than an actual line.) If scatter is given a very low number (percentage), you get a dense, line-like stroke, whereas a higher value gives an effect more like random spots.
Spacing controls how far apart the brush marks get laid down when you apply the brush. A lower number makes them close together, a higher number farther apart, as shown in Figure 12-8.
Figure 12-8. The same brushstroke with the spacing set at 5 percent, 75 percent, and 150 percent (respectively, from top to bottom). You may have been wondering why some of the brush thumbnails look like long caterpillars, when the brush should paint an object, like a star or leaf. The reason? Cramped spacing: The thumbnail shows the spacing as Elements originally sets it. Widen the spacing to see separate objects instead of a clump.Hardness controls whether the brush edge is sharp or fuzzy. This setting isn’t available with all brush types, but when it is, you can choose any value between zero and 100 percent. 100 percent is the most defined edge, zero the fuzziest.
Angle and Roundness. If you’ve ever painted with a real brush, you should understand Angle and Roundness right away. They let you create a more chiseled edge to your brush and then rotate it so that it’s not always painting with the edge facing the same direction. Painters don’t use only round brushes, and you don’t have to in Elements, either.
There are some brushes in the libraries that aren’t round, like the calligraphy and chalk brushes. But you can adjust the roundness of any brush to make it more suitable for chiseled strokes, as shown in Figure 12-9.
There’s also a checkbox (called “Keep These Settings for All Brushes”) you can turn on if you want to make all brushes behave exactly the same way. The checkbox only keeps the settings that appear above it in the palette, though, not the ones below it (spacing, hardness, angle, and roundness).
Saving Modified Brush Settings
If you modify a brush and like the result, you can save it as a custom brush. You can alter any of the existing brushes and save the result—a great feature if you’re working on a project that’s going to last awhile and don’t want to have to keep modifying the settings again and again. (Don’t worry: When you modify an existing brush, Elements preserves a copy of the original.) To create your own brush, just:
Choose a brush to modify.
Select a brush in the Brush palette. You can customize any of the brushes.
Make the changes you want.
Change the brush settings until you get what you’re after. Watch the brush thumbnail in the Options bar as you go. It changes to reflect your new settings.
Tell Elements you want to keep the new brush.
Click the arrow in the upper-right corner of the brush thumbnails palette and choose Save Brush. Elements asks you to name it. You don’t absolutely have to, but naming brushes makes them easier to keep track of. (Your new name will appear as pop-up text when you hover over the brush icon, rather than in the actual thumbnail in the palette.)
Click OK.
The brush shows up in the bottom of your current list of brushes. If you make lots of custom brushes you may want to create a special set for them. The Preset Manager (When You Really Need Photoshop) is helpful for this.
Deleting brushes is pretty straightforward. You can select the brush in the Brush palette and then choose Delete Brush from the pop-out menu. Or you can Alt+click the brush thumbnail. The cursor will change to a pair of scissors when you hold down the key. Clicking with the scissors deletes the brush.
You can also make a selection from an image and save it as a brush, if you like (the next section shows how). Just remember, though, that brushes by definition don’t have color, so you save only the shape of the selection, not the full coloring of it. The color you get is whichever color you choose to apply. If you want to save a full color sample, try saving your selection as a pattern (The Pattern Stamp) or just use the clone stamp repeatedly instead.
The Specialty Brushes
So far you’ve been reading about brushes that behave pretty much as brushes do in the real world—they paint a stripe of something, whether color, light, or even transparency.
But in the digital world, a brush doesn’t have to be just a brush. With some of the brushes included in Elements, you can paint stars, flowers, disembodied eyeballs, gravel, or even rubber ducks with just one swipe of the brush, as shown in Figure 12-10.
If you click the arrow next to the brush thumbnail in the Options bar, you’ll see the list of brushes in the current category and a pull-down menu that lets you investigate the other brush sets available in Elements. The brushes used in Figure 12-10, for example, came from several different categories. Most brushes are sensitive to your pen pressure if you’re using a graphics tablet (Graphics Tablets).
The Specialty brushes respond very readily to changes in the Advanced Brush Options settings (covered earlier in this chapter). Your choices there can make a huge difference in the effect you get—whether you’re painting swaths of smooth grass, like a lawn, or scattered sprigs of dune grass, for instance. You get the exact same list of choices described in the previous section on the Advanced Brush Options palette: fade, hue jitter, scatter, and so on.
Tip
If you’ve tried some of the special effects brushes and found the results rather anemic, you can always go back once you’ve painted and punch up the color with a Multiply layer, just as you would do for an overexposed photo (see Fixing Major Exposure Problems).
Making a Custom Brush
You can turn any picture, or selection within a picture, into a brush that paints the shape you’ve selected. Figure 12-11 shows what a wreath looks—and behaves like—when it’s been turned into a brush.
It’s surprisingly easy to create a custom brush from any object you have a picture of.
Open a photo or drawing that includes what you want to use as a brush.
You can choose an area as large as 2500 pixels square. (Remember, you can resize your selection once it’s a brush, just the way you can resize any other brush, so don’t worry if it’s a big area. That said, of course, if you choose a tiny size for a super-detailed brush, you may lose some definition when you’re actually using it.)
Select the object or region you want.
Use any of the Selection tools. It’s a good idea to inspect your selection with the Selection brush in Mask mode as a last step (The Selection Brush). That’s because any stray areas you included by mistake get painted with each stroke—just as if you wanted them to be there.
Create your brush.
Go to Edit → “Define Brush from Selection”. You see a dialog box showing the shape and asking you to name the new brush. Check the thumbnail to be sure it’s exactly what you had in mind. If not, click Cancel and try again. If you like it, click OK.
The new brush shows up at the bottom of your currently active list of brushes. If you want to get rid of it, highlight the thumbnail in the brush thumbnails, click the arrow on the right side of the palette, and go to Delete Brush, or Alt+click the brush thumbnail.
The Impressionist Brush
When you paint with the Impressionist brush, you blur and blend the edges of the objects in your photo, just like an Impressionist painting. At least that’s what’s supposed to happen. This brush is very tricky to control, but you can get some very interesting effects, especially if you paint with it on a duplicate layer and play with the Opacity control (Managing Layers). Usually you want a very low opacity with this brush, or some of the curlier styles will make your image look like it’s made from poodle hair.
The Impressionist brush has most of the same options as the regular Brush, but if you click the More Options button (the icon to the right of the Opacity setting), you’ll see three new choices:
Style determines what kind of brushstroke effect you want to create.
Area tells Elements the size and number of brushstrokes.
Tolerance is how similar in color pixels have to be before they’re affected by the brush.
If you really want to create a hand-painted look, you may prefer the brushstroke filters (Filter → Brush Strokes). Using Filters explains how to use them. The Impressionist brush is really not the best tool for true Impressionist effects, although its blurring qualities can sometimes be useful because it covers large areas faster than the Blur tool. The Smudge tool (The Smudge Tool) is another excellent, though time-consuming, way to create a painted effect.
The Pencil Tool
Basically just another brush, the Pencil tool shares the Brush tool’s slot in the Toolbox. Choose the Pencil from the pop-out menu or press N to activate it.
The Pencil has many of the same setting options as the Brush—like size, mode, and opacity—but it offers only hard-edged brushes. In other words, you can’t draw fuzzy lines with the pencil, not even the kind of lines you’d sketch with a soft pencil. The Pencil’s lines are always very well defined. It’s especially useful when you want to work on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
You use the Pencil tool the same way you use any other brush. The big difference is the Auto Erase option (the checkbox is located in the Options bar). Auto Erase makes the Pencil paint with the background color over areas that contain the foreground color. But if you start dragging in an area that doesn’t contain the foreground color, it paints with the foreground color instead. This is really confusing until you try it, but then it’s pretty easy to understand. Take a look at Figure 12-12 for some help in understanding what’s going on, or better yet, create a blank file (Capturing Video Frames) and try it yourself.
The Paint Bucket
When you want to fill a large area with color in a hurry, the Paint Bucket’s the tool for you. It’s right next to the Brush in the Toolbox. If you click it (keyboard shortcut: K) and then click in your image, the entire available area (either your whole image or the current selection) gets flooded with color. It works something like the Magic Wand: Just as the Magic Wand selects the color you click, the Paint Bucket fills only the color you click.
Most of the Options bar settings for the Paint Bucket are probably familiar:
Pattern. Normally the Paint Bucket fills the area with the foreground color (Choosing the Color You Want). Turn this on and it uses a pattern (Applying Patterns) instead. Choose from any of the existing patterns (listed in the Pattern drop-down menu on the Options bar). Or create your own, just as you would with the Pattern Stamp (see The Pattern Stamp).
Mode. Use the Paint Bucket in any blend mode, as explained later in this chapter on Blending and Smudging.
Opacity. 100-percent opacity gives you total coverage; nothing shows through the paint you put down. Lower the percentage for a more transparent effect.
Tolerance. This setting works the same way it does for the Magic Wand (The Magic Wand). The higher the number, the more shades the paint fills.
Anti-alias. This setting smoothes the edges of the fill. Leave it turned on unless you have a specific reason not to.
Contiguous. This is another old familiar option from the Magic Wand (The Lasso Tools). If you leave Contiguous on, you change only areas of the chosen color that touch each other. Turn it off, and all areas of the color you click get changed, whether they’re contiguous or not.
All Layers. Fills any pixels that meet your criteria, no matter what layer they’re on. (The Paint Bucket actually paints on the active layer, but it looks for pixels to change based on all the layers in your image.) To keep out just one layer, click the eye icon on the Layers palette to hide the layer you want to exclude. Don’t forget that you can lock the transparent and translucent parts of layers in the Layers palette (see Blend Mode).
You can undo a Paint Bucket fill with the usual Ctrl+Z.
Dodging and Burning
Like Unsharp Mask, dodging and burning are old darkroom techniques to enhance photos and emphasize particular areas. Dodging lightens and brings out the hidden details in the range you specify (midtones, shadows, or highlights), and burning darkens and brings out details (you have the same range choices as for dodging). Both tools live with the Sponge tool in the Toolbox, so you may have run into them while using the Sponge.
You may think that, given the Shadows/Highlights command, you don’t have any need for these tools. But they still serve a useful purpose because they let you make selective changes, rather than affecting the entire image or requiring tedious selections, the way Shadows/Highlights does. When you dodge or burn, you just paint your changes. Figure 12-13 gives an example of when you might need to work on a particular area. Of course, you can also make a selection and then use Shadows/Highlights just on that area, which is another technique that you may want to try as well as dodging and burning.
Skillful use of dodging and burning can greatly improve your photo, although it helps to have an artistic eye to spot what to emphasize and what to downplay. When using the black-and-white conversion feature (Method One: Making Color Photos Black and White), use the Dodge and Burn tools to emphasize certain areas of your photos. The real masters of black-and-white photography, like Ansel Adams, relied heavily on dodging and burning (in the darkroom, in those days) to create their greatest images.
Both the Dodge and Burn tools are really just variants of the Brush tool, except they don’t apply color directly—they just affect the colors and tones already present in your photo. Adobe refers to these two as the “toning tools.”
One caution about these tools, though—unless you use them on a duplicate layer, you can’t undo the effect once you close your photo. So be careful how you use them. Actually, many people prefer to dodge and burn using the method described in the box on The Smudge Tool, rather than with the actual Dodge and Burn tools, unless they’re working on a black-and-white photo.
Tip
In Elements 7, you may also want to try some of the Smart Brush (Correcting color with a brush) lighting settings for making selective adjustments to just part of your photo. A little experimenting will give you a sense for which tools you prefer to use in different situations.
Dodging
Use the Dodge tool to lighten areas of your image and to bring out details hidden in shadows. It’s a good idea to create a separate layer (Layer → Duplicate Layer or Ctrl+J) when using this tool, to preserve your image if you go overboard. Be sure you’re applying the Dodge tool to a layer that has something in it, or nothing happens.
Activate the Dodge tool.
Click the Sponge tool in the Toolbox or press O, and choose the Dodge tool (the lollipop-like paddle) from the pop-out menu. You’ll see the usual brush options, but with two differences: a choice of whether the tool should work on highlights, midtones, or shadows, and a setting called Exposure, which determines the strength of the effect.
Drag over the area you want to change.
Choose a very low Exposure setting for the Dodge tool (and the Burn tool as well) and drag more than once to get a more realistic result (see Figure 12-14). After you’re done, if you think the Dodge tool’s effect is still too strong, you can always reduce the opacity of the layer in the Layers palette (as long as you’re working on a duplicate layer).
Burning
The Burn tool does exactly the opposite of what the Dodge tool does: It darkens. Use the Burn tool to uncover more detail in your highlights. Of course, there have to be some details there for the tool to work. If your photo’s highlights are blown out (see The Shadows/Highlights Command), you won’t get any results, no matter how much you apply the tool. The Burn tool is grouped with the Sponge and Dodge tools. Its icon is a hand striking a match, logically enough.
Apply the Burn tool the same way as the Dodge tool; most of the time, you’ll probably want to use these tools in combination. They can help draw attention to specific parts of your photo, but they work best for subtle changes. Applying them too vigorously—especially on color photos—gives an obviously faked look to photos. Black-and-white pictures (or color images converted to black and white) can generally stand much stronger contrasts.
Blending and Smudging
In Elements, you can control how the color you add to an image blends with the colors that are already there. This section takes a look at blending in two different ways—using the Smudge tool to literally mix elements of your image together, and using blend modes to determine how the colors you paint change what’s already in your image. Blend modes are almost limitless in the ways they can manipulate images.
Blend Modes
Blend modes control how the color you add when you paint reacts with the existing pixels in an image—whether you just add color (Normal mode), make the existing color darker (Multiply mode), or change the saturation (Saturation mode).
Image editing experts have found plenty of clever ways to use blend modes for some really sophisticated techniques. Thorough coverage of these maneuvers would turn this into a book the size of the Yellow Pages, but Figure 12-15 shows a few examples of how simply changing the brush blend mode can radically change your result.
There are so many ways to combine blend modes that even Elements pros can’t always predict the results, so experimenting is the best way to learn about them.
Elements groups Blend modes according to the effects they have. The top group in the menu includes what you might call painting modes, followed by modes for darkening, lightening, adjusting light, special effects modes, and adjusting color.
It’s also important to be aware that the modes work quite differently with layers than with tools. In other words, painting with a brush in Dissolve mode is going to produce an effect quite different than creating a layer in Dissolve mode and painting on it, as shown in Figure 12-16.
Modes are really cool and very useful once you get used to using them, but if you’re just starting out in Elements, there’s no need to worry about them right away.
Tip
If you’d like to learn more about how each mode works, there are a lot of useful tutorials on the Web. A good place to start is www.photoshopgurus.com/tutorials/t010.html. (Ignore the section “Additional blend mode information”—that’s only for Photoshop.)
The Smudge Tool
The Smudge tool does just what its name says. You can use it to smear the colors in your image, just as if you had rubbed them with your finger. You can even “finger paint” with the Smudge tool, if you feel the call of your inner fifth grader. Adobe describes the effect of the Smudge tool as being “like a finger dragged through wet paint.” It’s sort of like a cousin to the Liquify filter (Applying the Liquify Filter to Type), but without so many options.
If you’re interested in turning your photos into paintings (Figure 12-18), the humble Smudge tool is your most valuable resource. For artistic smudging, you need a graphics tablet so you can vary the stroke pressure. You can use the Smudge tool without a tablet, but you won’t get nearly as good an effect. If you’d like to learn more about this kind of smudging, some excellent tutorials can be found at the Retouching forum at Digital Photography Review (www.dpreview.com; search for smudging). The forums at www.retouchpro.com are also a favorite hangout for expert smudgers.
Note
If you’re serious about smudging, check out Scott Deardorff’s online classes at www.digitalartacademy.com. (Most of the classes there are for a different program, Corel Painter, but his smudging classes cover Photoshop and Elements.) Scott is one of the most talented smudgers you can find.
A warning—if you have a slow computer, there’s quite a bit of lag time between when you apply the Smudge tool and when the effect actually shows up. This delay makes the tool tricky to control, because you need to resist the temptation to keep going over the area until you see results.
You’ll find the Smudge tool hidden under the Blur tool in the Toolbox. Click the Blur tool or press R and, from the pop-out menu, choose the Smudge tool (its icon is a finger that looks like it’s painting).
The Smudge tool offers mostly the same settings as a regular brush, but it also includes the All Layers option (The Healing Brush: Fixing Larger Areas), like you have for the Healing brush or the Clone Stamp. It also has two additional settings: Strength and Finger Painting.
Strength. This setting means just what it says—it controls how hard the tool smudges the colors together. A higher number results in more blending.
Finger Painting. Turning on this checkbox makes the Smudge tool smear the foreground color at the start of each stroke. When the box is turned off, the tool uses the color that’s under the cursor at the start of each stroke. Figure 12-19 demonstrates the difference. This option is very useful for creating artistic smudges. If you want a bit of a contrasting color to help your strokes stand out more, choose a foreground color (Choosing the Color You Want) and turn this checkbox on.
Tip
Use the Eyedropper (The Eyedropper Tool) to sample other areas of your image to add Finger Painting colors that harmonize well with the area you’re smudging.
Once you’ve chosen your settings, smudge away.
Note
When using the Smudge tool, you only see results where two colors come together. It blends together the pixel colors where edges meet. If you use Smudge in the middle of an area of solid color, nothing happens unless you’ve turned on Finger Painting.
The Eraser Tool
Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Adobe has thoughtfully included three different mistake-fixers. If you click and hold the Eraser icon in the Toolbox, you’ll see the Eraser, the Magic Eraser, and the Background Eraser. You’ll probably use all three Erasers at one time or another. You can also activate the Eraser by pressing E.
Using the Eraser
The Eraser is basically just another kind of brush tool, only instead of adding color to your image, it removes color from the pixels. How it works varies a little, depending on where you use it.
If you use the Eraser on a regular layer, it replaces the color with transparency. On a Background layer, or one in which transparency is locked, it replaces whatever color is there with the background color (see Chapter 6 for more about how layers work).
The settings for the Eraser are pretty much the same as for any other brush—including brush style, size, and opacity—but with the Eraser a couple of them work differently:
Mode. For the Eraser, Mode doesn’t have anything to do with blend modes (Blending and Smudging), but rather tells Elements the shape of the eraser you want to work with. Your choices are Brush, Pencil, and Block.
You can see the difference in how the Eraser is going to work by watching the brush style preview in the Options bar as you change Modes. Picking the Brush or Pencil lets you use the Eraser as you would those tools—in other words, by choosing a brush, you can choose any brush you like. The Brush option lets you make soft-edged erasures, while Pencil mode makes only hard-edged erasures. Choosing Block changes the cursor to a square, so that you can use it just the way you would a regular artist’s erasing block—sort of.
Opacity determines how much of the color is removed—at 100 percent, it’s all gone (or all replaced with the background).
To use the Eraser:
Activate the Eraser.
Click the Eraser tool in the Toolbox (keyboard shortcut: E). The tool looks like an eraser, so it’s easy to find.
Choose the eraser’s size, mode, and opacity. As noted earlier, the mode and opacity settings work differently here than they do for regular brushes.
Drag anywhere in your image to remove what you don’t want.
You may need to change the size of the Eraser a few times. It’s usually easiest to use a small eraser (or the Background Eraser, which is explained later) to accurately clear around the edges of the object you want to keep, as shown in Figure 12-20. Then you can use a larger eraser brush size to get rid of the remaining chunks, once you don’t have to worry about accidentally going into the area you want to keep.
Tip
You can use a selection (see Chapter 5) to limit where the Eraser operates.
It’s tedious to erase around a long outline or to remove entire backgrounds, so Elements has two other kinds of Erasers for those situations.
The Magic Eraser
Once you try it, you’re likely to wonder why the heck Adobe gave this pedestrian tool such an intriguing name. What’s so magic about the Magic Eraser?
Well, not much, really. It’s called “magic” because it works very much like the Magic Wand tool (The Magic Wand). Use it to select pixels of a single color or range (depending on the tolerance settings). It even has the same little sparklies as the Magic Wand does in its icon to remind you of the relationship.
The problem, as Figure 12-21 shows you, is that the Magic Eraser isn’t as clean in its work as the other erasers. Still, it can be a big help in eliminating large chunks of solid color. Moreover, if you’re lucky, you may be able to clean the edges right up with Refine Edge (you’ll need to make a selection to use it) or the Defringe command (Enhance → Adjust Color → Defringe Layer). To use Refine edge, you’ll need to select the layer contents, or click in the empty background area with the Magic Wand (The Magic Wand) and then choose Select → Invert. There’s more about Refine Edge on Refine Edge and about Defringing on Removing Objects from an Image’s Background.
It’s usually best to use the Magic Eraser in combination with at least one of the other erasers if you’re looking to achieve really clean results. One sometimes useful side effect of the Magic Eraser is that if you click your photo with the Magic Eraser, it automatically transforms your Background layer into a regular layer, just the way the Background Eraser does. That means if you want to do something to the remaining object that requires a regular layer—applying a Layer Style, for instance—you save yourself a step.
The Background Eraser
Lots of people think this eraser deserves the name “Magic” much more than the Magic Eraser does. The Background Eraser is a tremendous help when you want to remove all the background around an object. For example, say you’ve got a photo of a football and want to quickly remove the ball from the background.
The Background Eraser erases all the pixels under the brush (but outside the edges of the object) and renders the area it’s used on transparent, even if it’s a Background layer. (If you click with it on a Background layer, your computer may hesitate initially because it’s busy transforming your Background to a regular layer.)
Here’s how to use it:
Select the Background Eraser.
Press E or, in the Toolbox, click the Eraser icon. Then choose the Background Eraser from the pop-out menu. It’s the eraser with a pair of scissors next to it.
In the Options bar, choose a brush size.
The cursor turns to a circle with crosshairs in it. These crosshairs are important: They’re the Background Eraser’s “hot spot.” Any color that you drag them over is turned to transparency. The circle size changes depending on how large a brush you’ve chosen, but the crosshairs stay the same size. As you can see in Figure 12-22, with a large brush, there may be a lot of space around the crosshairs. That makes it easy to remove big chunks of the background at once, since everything in the circle is going to get eliminated.
If you start seeing all your brushes (not just the Background Eraser) as crosshairs, take a look at the box on Modifying Your Brush to see how to get back to your regular cursor.
Drag in your photo.
Move around the edge of the object you want to keep, being very careful not to let the crosshairs move into the object, or else you’ll start erasing that, too. If you make a mistake, just use Ctrl+Z to undo your actions.
The Background Eraser has three Options bar settings to help refine how it works:
Brush. If you want a different brush style, choose it from the pull-down menu.
Limits. Do you want the Background Eraser to remove only contiguous color, or all patches of a certain color? This works exactly like the Contiguous setting for the Magic Wand (The Lasso Tools).
Figure 12-22. The Background Eraser does a very careful job of separating the flowers from their background. Just be sure to keep the little crosshairs outside the color you want to keep. Here, because the crosshairs are outside the petals, only the background is getting removed. But if you moved the crosshairs into the flower, you’d be biting chunks out of it with the tool.Tolerance. This tells the Background Eraser how similar colors must be for it to remove them, again like the Magic Wand setting (The Magic Wand).
However, you may never need to change any of these settings to get the results you want.
If you want to remove the background from around an object, you may find it most effective to start with the Background Eraser around the edge of your object. Then, use the other Erasers to clean up afterward. The advantage of working this way is that you don’t have to clean up junk left over from the Magic Eraser. It’s also easier to maneuver the Background Eraser than the regular Eraser, especially if you don’t have a graphics tablet.
Drawing with Shapes
Wow, so many brush options and Adobe still isn’t done—there’s yet another way to draw things in Elements. The program includes a Shape tool (actually a group of tools that share one slot in the Toolbox), which lets you draw geometrically perfect shapes, regardless of your artistic ability. And not just simple shapes like circles and rectangles. You can draw animals, plants, starbursts, picture frames—all sorts of things, as shown in Figure 12-23. This tool should appeal to anyone whose grade school masterpieces always seemed to get put up on the wall behind the piano somewhere.
Turning yourself into an artist by using Elements’ Shape tool is easy. Just follow these steps:
Open an image or create a new one.
You can add shapes to any file you can open in Elements.
Figure 12-23. Here are just a few of the shapes that you can draw with Elements, even if you flunked art class in elementary school. These objects look much more impressive once you gussy them up with Layer styles (Adding Layer Styles).Click the Shape tool in the Toolbox, or press U. The Shape tool is sometimes a little confusing to newcomers to Elements, because the icon reflects the shape that’s currently active—so you may see a rectangle, a polygon, or a line, for instance. (You see a blue heart shape—the Custom Shape tool’s icon—before you’ve used this tool for the first time.)
Select the kind of shape you want to draw.
Use the Toolbox menu to choose a rectangle, a rounded rectangle, an ellipse, a polygon, a line, or a custom shape. (If you choose the custom shape, you have many different shapes to choose from. Click the Shape pull-down menu in the Options bar to choose the one you want.) All the shapes, and their accompanying options, are described in the following sections.
Adjust your settings in the Options bar.
Choose a color by clicking the color square in the Options bar or use the foreground color (Choosing the Color You Want). If you click the Options bar color square, you see the Color Picker (The Color Picker). If you click the arrow to the right of the square, you get the Color Swatches palette instead (The Color Swatches Palette).
If you have special requirements, like a rectangle that’s exactly 1” x 2”, click the downward-facing arrow just to the right of the shape thumbnails for the Shape Options palette and enter the size of your shape.
There’s also an Options bar setting that lets you apply a layer style (see Adding Layer Styles) as you draw your shape. Just click the downward-facing arrow on the right side of the Style box and choose the style you want from the pop-out palette. To go back to drawing without a style, choose the rectangle with the diagonal red line through it.
Drag in your image to draw the shape.
Notice that how you drag the cursor affects the final appearance of the shape. For example, the way you drag determines the proportions of your figure. If you’re drawing a fish, you can drag so that it’s long and skinny or short and fat. Even with practice, it may take a couple of tries to get exactly the proportions you want.
Note
If you’re trying to create exact copies of a particular shape, use the Shape Selection tool, described later, to create duplicates of the first shape.
The Shape tool automatically puts each shape on its own layer. If you don’t want to do that, or need to control how shapes interact, use the squares in the middle of the Options bar. With one exception (“Exclude Overlapping Shape Areas”), they’re the same as the ones for managing selections (Controlling the Selection Tools). Use them to add more than one shape to a layer, subtract a shape from a shape, keep only the area where shapes intersect, or exclude the areas where they intersect.
Tip
If you want to draw multiple shapes on one layer, click the “Add to Shape” rectangle in the Options bar. Then, everything you do is on the same layer. Shapes don’t have to touch or overlap to use this option.
You can also turn any shape from a vector image (infinitely resizable) into a raster image (drawn pixel by pixel) by clicking the Simplify button in the Options bar. The box on Ellipse tells you everything you need to know about the difference between vector and raster images.
You can also add custom shapes by choosing them in the Content palette. Just double-click the one you want, or click its palette thumbnail and then click Apply.
The following sections describe all of the main shape categories and their special settings.
Rectangle and Rounded Rectangle
The Rectangle and Rounded Rectangle tools work pretty much the same way and are very popular for creating Web page buttons. They both have Shape Options settings in the Options bar pull-down menu for:
Unconstrained. Choose Unconstrained to draw a rectangle of whatever dimensions you want. How you drag determines the proportions of your shape.
Square. To draw a square instead of a rectangle, click this radio button before you start, or just hold down the Shift key as you drag.
Fixed Size. This setting makes Elements draw your shape the size you specify. Just enter the dimensions you want in inches, pixels, or centimeters.
Proportional. Use this setting if you know the proportions you want your rectangle to have, but not the exact size. Just type in the proportions. So if you enter a width of 2 and a height of 1, no matter where you drag, the shape is always twice as long as it is high.
From Center. This setting lets you draw your shape from its center instead of from a corner. It’s useful when you know exactly where you want the shape but aren’t sure exactly how big it needs to be.
Snap to Pixels. This setting makes sure that the edge of your rectangle falls exactly on the edge of a pixel. You’ll get crisper-looking edges with “Snap to Pixels” turned on. It’s available only for the Rectangle and Rounded Rectangle tools.
Most of the Shape tools have similar options. The Rounded Rectangle has one Options bar setting of its own, though: Radius, which is the amount (in pixels) that the corners are rounded off. A higher number means more rounding.
Tip
Looking to add a simple, empty rectangle, square, circle, or ellipse? See the box on The Cookie Cutter.
Ellipse
The Ellipse tool has the same Shape Options as the Rectangle tool. The only difference is that you can opt for a circle instead of a square. The Shift key constrains the Ellipse to a circle.
Polygon
You can draw many kinds of regular polygons using this tool. Use the Options bar to set the number of sides. The shape options in the Options bar pull-down menu are a bit different for this tool:
Radius. This setting sets the distance from the center to the outermost points.
Smooth Corners. If you don’t want sharp edges at the corners, choose Smooth Corners.
Star. This setting inverts the angles to create a star-like shape, as shown in Figure 12-24.
Indent Sides by. If you’re drawing a star, this sets how much (in a percentage) you want the sides to indent.
Smooth Indents. Use Smooth Indents if you don’t want sharp interior angles on your star.
Line Tool
Use this tool for drawing straight lines and arrows. Specify the weight (width) of the line in pixels in the Options bar. If you want an arrowhead on your line, the Shape options give you some settings for adding one to your line as you draw:
Start/End. Do you want the arrowhead at the start or the end of the line you draw? Tell Elements your preference with this setting.
Width and Length. This setting determines how wide and how long you want the arrowhead to be. The measurement unit is the percentage of the line width, so if you enter a number lower than 100, your arrowhead is narrower than the line it’s attached to. You can pick values between 10 and 5,000 percent. If your length setting is too low, you get a shape that looks more like a T than an arrow.
Concavity. Use this setting if you want the sides of the arrowhead indented. The number determines the amount of curvature on the widest part of the arrowhead. See Figure 12-25. Pick a setting between –50 percent and +50 percent.
The Custom Shape Tool
The Custom Shape lets you draw a huge variety of different objects, as you can see in Figure 12-26. Its icon is the little blue heart in the Toolbox. Click it or press U and then choose the Custom Shape tool you want from the pull-down menu.
Once the Custom Shape tool is active, if you look in the Options bar, you see a little window labeled Shape with the arrow for a pull-down menu next to it. Click this arrow to bring up the Elements Shape Picker. Various shapes automatically come up, but if you click the More button (the double arrows) at the upper-right corner of the window, you get a menu giving you lots more choices. To scroll through all of them, just choose All Elements Shapes.
Tip
There’s a copyright symbol available in the custom shapes if you want something official looking.
The Custom shape also has a few optional settings:
Unconstrained. Control the proportions of your shape by the way you drag.
Defined Proportions. The shape always has the proportions that the designer who created the shape gave it.
Defined Size. The shape is always the size it was originally created to be—dragging won’t make it bigger or smaller. It just plinks out at a fixed size that you can’t control, except by resizing after the fact.
Fixed Size. Enter the dimensions you want in inches, pixels, or centimeters.
The Shape Selection Tool
The arrow in the Options bar just to the left of the any Shape tool’s icon is the Shape Selection tool. This is a special kind of Move tool (The Move tool) that works only on shapes that haven’t been simplified yet, as explained in Figure 12-27. (You can also activate the Shape Selection tool from the Toolbox pop-out menu.)
It may seem unnecessary, but if you’re working with shapes, it saves a lot of time not to have to keep switching tools when you want to move one shape.
Click the Shape Selection tool and then move your shape. Your shape doesn’t have to be on the active layer. You can also use the Shape Selection tool to combine multiple shapes into one by clicking the Combine button. You also have the other options that you have when using any of the shape tools: add, subtract, intersect, and exclude.
The Shape Selection tool works just like the Move tool. You can drag to move, hold down Alt to copy (instead of moving) the original shape, drag the handles to resize the shape, and so on. Unfortunately, you can’t align and distribute shapes with this tool the way you can with the Move tool. If you need to line things up, use the regular Move tool instead.
The Cookie Cutter
At first glance, you may think the Cookie Cutter is a pretty silly tool. Actually, it’s a very handy tool that you may use all the time, once you understand it. The Cookie Cutter creates the same shapes as the Custom Shape tool, but you use it on a photo to crop it to the shape you chose. Want a heart-shaped portrait of your sweetie? The Cookie Cutter is your tool. If you’re a scrapbooker, with a couple of clicks you can get results that would have taken ages and a bunch of special scissors to create with paper.
If you’re not into that sort of thing, don’t go away, because hidden away in the shapes library are some of the most sophisticated artistic crop shapes you can find. You can use them to get the kinds of effects that people pay commercial artists big bucks to create—like creating abstract crops that give a jagged or worn edge to your photo (an effect that’s great for contemporary effects).
You can also combine the result with a stroked edge, as explained in the preceding box (”Drawing Outlines and Borders”), and maybe even a Layer style (Adding Layer Styles). Even without any additional frills, your photo’s shape will appear more interesting, as shown in Figure 12-28.
Tip
Elements gives you a couple of other ways to create cutouts and fancy edge effects, which you might want to check out. If you plan to print out your cropped photo, for use in a scrapbooking project, for example, check out the Picture Package (Picture Package ). The frames there include some shape crops, and you can do everything right in the Organizer Print dialog box, if those shapes work for you. (Despite the name, you can make a Picture Package with only one print of one photo.)
The Frames section of the Content palette also includes a bunch of crops, ranging from simple shapes like stars to elaborate edges that make your photo look like a half-completed jigsaw puzzle.
Use the Cookie Cutter just like the Custom Shape tool, but you cut a shape from a photo, instead of drawing a shape:
Activate the Cookie Cutter tool.
Click the Cookie Cutter in the Toolbox (the icon looks like a star), or press Q.
Select the shape you want your photo to be.
Choose a shape from the Shapes palette by clicking the down arrow next to the shape display in the Options bar. You have access to all the Custom Shapes, but pay special attention to the Crop Shapes category. Click the More button (the arrows) on the Shape Picker to see all the shape categories it contains, or choose All Elements Shapes.
Adjust your settings, if necessary.
You have the same Shape Options described earlier for the Custom Shapes (The Custom Shape Tool), so you can set a fixed size or constrain proportions if you want. Click the Shape Options button to see your choices.
You can choose to feather the edge of your shape, too. Just enter the amount in pixels. (See The Lasso Tools for more about feathering.) The other option, Crop, crops the edges of your photo so they’re just large enough to contain the shape.
Drag in your photo.
A mask appears over your photo and you see only the area that will still be there once you crop, surrounded by transparency.
Adjust your crop if necessary.
You can reposition the shape mask or drag the corners to resize it. Although the cropped areas disappear, they’ll reappear as you reposition the mask if you move it so that they’re included again.
Once you’ve created the shape, you’ll see the Transform options (Transforming Images) in the Options bar (which means that you can skew or distort it if you want) until you commit your shape, as explained in the next step. You can drag the mask around to reposition it if you’d like, or Shift+drag a corner to resize it without altering the proportions. It may take a little maneuvering to get exactly the parts of your photo that you want inside the crop.
When you’ve gotten everything lined up the way you want, click the Commit button in the image window or just press Enter.
If you don’t like the results, click the Cancel button in the window, or press Escape (Esc). Once you’ve made your crop, you can use Ctrl+Z if you want to undo it to try something else.
Tip
The Cookie Cutter replaces the areas it removes with transparency. If the transparency checkerboard makes it too hard for you to get a clear look at what you’ve done, temporarily create a new white or colored Fill layer (Adding Fill and Adjustment Layers) beneath the cropped layer. You can delete it once you’re sure you’re happy with your crop.