In Photoshop, brush is a very big concept. It not only includes our commonly used brush tools, but also has more tools that can apply brush operations. In today's course, you will learn how to use alternative tools to recreate the protagonist's natural hair, thereby improving your retouching skills.
When can I use a paintbrush?
Select the Brush option in the Window menu to bring up the Brush panel. When we use some tools that have nothing to do with painting, such as the Lasso tool, the brush panel appears gray, indicating that the current brush panel is unavailable. But when we use drawing tools such as brushes, the brush panel will be activated, indicating that this tool can set brush options.
How to use a paintbrush
We set the foreground color to red, find the maple leaf brush in the brush panel, and use it to paint on the white background. You can see that you can draw a lot of leaves just by painting on the canvas. Compared with the traditional Drawing method, such drawing speed is very fast. From another aspect, it also shows that we define existing images as pen tips for painting, and we can also set the number and color of pen tips, which is very flexible to use.
How to turn a paintbrush into a comb
Let’s take an example of cutout and turn the smudge tool into a digital comb.
The girl's avatar has been cut out and placed on a white background. As you can see, the edges of the image on the right side of the hair are very stiff. If combined with other images, the edges of the hair will look very fake. We can use the applicator tool to add very natural ends to her hair and comb it out beautifully.
Select the smear tool in the toolbox and set the pen size to 1 pixel (this value depends on the size of the image, if the image is very large, you can set it larger). Set the intensity higher in the property bar, my setting is 98%. If it is set to 100%, when you pull the brush, you will draw very stiff lines, with no transition from thick to thin, or from opaque to transparent. You can't achieve the flowing effect of your hair. And if the value set is too small, when the hair is pulled, longer hair strands will not be pulled out, and it is only suitable for repairing shorter hair.
Pull the brush tip out from the inside of the hair, and the hair strands will be pulled out, and the hair strands will be pulled out according to the direction of hair growth. At this time, you can see that after careful repair, the hair has been naturally reconstructed. Because the color of this hair part is not pure black, the color of the hair we pull will be consistent with the color of the starting point. If the starting point is different, the color of the pulled hair will be different, so we can make the hair color layers, and the repaired image can be placed on any background without blurring.
If we use a pixel-sized pencil to point a few points on the blank canvas, select them with the rectangular selection tool, and in the "Edit" menu, select "Define Brush Preset" to set these points as a new With the pen tip, we can draw several hair strands in one stroke, achieving twice the result with half the effort. This is like making a comb with denser teeth, and the efficiency will be much improved.
Compared with a mouse, a hand-drawn tablet will have better results. If your work requires you to frequently process similar images, you can purchase a hand-drawn tablet, and the efficiency and quality will be greatly improved.
This technique is very suitable for picking out hair-like images with similar edge colors or unclear edges. Of course, any technique must be used in combination. When doing this kind of work, we can first borrow the hair next to it, and then perform the drawing operation after the initial repair, which will improve the efficiency.