One of the most fundamental tools in Photoshop is the Brush tool. It is used by photographers, graphic designers, and a host of other professionals and hobbyists alike to "brush" on and off effects. It can be used to affect large portions of an image very quickly, or it can be fine-tuned to change individual pixels in more time-consuming work.

In this tutorial, we will focus on using the basics of the Brush tool, how to navigate the menu, and how it works with layers in the Photoshop infrastructure. This is geared for beginners who want to get started immediately using the Brush tool, using just the standard mouse.

Getting Started Using the Brush Tool

First thing’s first. Load any image into Photoshop and press the B key to access the Brush tool menu in Photoshop. The menu will appear at the top-left of the toolbar panel.

Brush Toolbar

Next, let's choose what kind of Brush that you'll be using on your image. We will focus on the two most important brushes in Photoshop that have a wide range of uses: the Soft Round and Hard Round brushes. You can access this menu by clicking on the dropdown menu on the Brush icon.

Soft and Hard Brushes

These brushes will be found in the General Brushes folder, as shown above.

About the Soft Round Brush and Hard Round Brush

Each of these brushes serves different purposes. The Soft Round Brush will apply the brush effect, leaving a soft or faded look along the edges. The Hard Round Brush fully applies the brush effect all the way out to the edges.

In the image below, we created a new blank layer by pressing Shift + Ctrl + N on Windows (the corresponding keys on Mac). Then, we changed the blend mode to Overlay.

Overlay Blend Mode Painting

This will serve as our layer to use our brushes non-destructively. We discuss how to easily create lighting effects using the Overlay blend mode in another tutorial.

Examples of the Soft and Hard Round Brushes

Let's compare the two brushes, starting with the Soft Round Brush.

To demonstrate, we will apply a couple of clicks of the mouse in the grass area to see how the Soft Round Brush looks. For now, don't worry about changing the brush settings to increase or decrease the brush size, we'll cover this and more later.

Soft Round Brush in Grass

Notice how the Soft Round Brush effect actually looks soft around the edges? Compare this to the Hard Round Brush:

Hard Round Brush in Grass

The difference between these two brushes (using their default settings) is easy to see. It's also easy to choose which brush is the right one for this particular image if we were intending to brighten up the grass region. Typically, the Hard Round Brush works better in images that have hard lines and geometric shapes.

Related: Underappreciated Photoshop Tools You Should Be Using

Changing the Brush Size and Screen Navigation

One of the first things Brush users will want to do is increase or decrease the size of the Brush. There are ways to do this. The easiest is to use the bracket keys [ and ] to decrease and increase the size, respectively.

This can also be accomplished in the main Brush menu at the top, which may be the place to go if there are other settings that need adjusting too.

Change Brush Size in Menu

Additionally, it's very helpful to zoom in and out of the image while using the Brush tool. These keyboard shortcuts will be indispensable for this. Hold down the Ctrl and + keys to zoom in. Hold down the Ctrl and - keys to zoom out. Then, to return your screen back to the normal full-screen view, press the Ctrl and 0 keys.

One more very "handy" tool for screen navigation is the Hand tool. Press and hold the Spacebar to navigate your screen when you're zoomed in.

Memorize these keyboard shortcuts because they complement the Brush tool more often than not.

Changing the Foreground and Background Color in Photoshop

What does this have to do with the Brush tool? The short answer is everything. If the Brush tool is to be used at all, it's important to know what your foreground and background colors are set to in Photoshop. The default settings are Black (foreground) and White (background).

The keyboard shortcut D key automatically resets the colors to black and white. The X key toggles between the foreground and background.

Changes can be made at the bottom left of the Photoshop screen as shown here.

Foreground Background Defaults

To change the color of the background and foreground, simply double-click on the Foreground icon. A popup menu will appear where colors can be selected via mouse or by numeric value entry.

Color Picker

Additionally, while the Brush tool is active, the Alt key serves as a color sampler in order to choose colors directly from the image. In the below example, we used the mouse to hover over the building, and then pressed the Alt key to choose the color. It then becomes the new foreground color, as shown below.

new foreground color

At any time while using the Brush tool, or just about any other feature in Photoshop, the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Z can be pressed to undo changes in Photoshop.

Using the Brush Tool with Layer Masks

Lastly, we will cover using the Brush tool along with layer masks. Apart from directly brushing color or brush effects onto a layer, Photoshop brushes can be used on layer masks to change the amount of color or an effect in select regions of the image. We can also control how much or little the Brush tool applies, which we'll discuss below.

Used in this way, the default foreground-background colors of black and white would determine if the effects were hidden using black, or applied using white. Simply put, white reveals and black conceals.

For example, let's say that we wanted to brighten this image, but we only wanted to brighten it in the middle and leave the edges as they were in order to create a vignette effect. One way to achieve this would be to create a Curves adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves) and then brush off the effect on the mask itself.

Curves to Brighten Image

Now that the image is brighter, press B for the Brush tool and press D to make the foreground color black. With the Curves layer mask selected, simply paint around the edges of the image to create the vignette.

Fill 100 percent Brush

You'll notice now that the black around the edges shows on the white layer mask in addition to the image we painted over. Unfortunately, the vignette looks absolutely terrible! But we can fix it easily by adjusting the Opacity and Flow settings in the Brush menu and then re-doing the vignette with a lighter touch.

Flow 5 Percent

Starting from scratch, we adjusted the Flow to 5 percent (as shown above) and then painted gradually around the image. The results are much more natural.

Natural Vignette

If you'd like to learn more about vignettes, we also discuss how to make custom vignettes in Photoshop using a variety of other methods.

There's More to Photoshop Brushes Than Meets the Eye

a painter with a paintbrush

We have only scratched the surface of what the Brush tool is capable of in Photoshop. The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce the basics of the Brush tool so that any newcomer to photo editing could start right in without being overwhelmed by more advanced techniques and settings.

Once you become familiar with the Brush tool and these basics, you can try out more advanced techniques. This means experimenting with the use of digital pens, custom brushes, and the introduction of blend modes.