- [Narrator] Hi folks, Glyn here,
back with really quick video for you,
and this one is in direct response to a question
that I got asked at a seminar I was presenting
at recently regarding the brush tool.
The question was, is there a keyboard shortcut
we can use for rotating the brush that we're
currently using in Photoshop?
Well, at the time of recording this video,
unfortunately the answer is to that is, no.
However, there is an alternative
that you might wanna have a look at.
Now if you're just using a round brush
like the one you can see I'm using
on screen now, it's very unlikely
you're ever gonna wanna change the angle of it,
'cause you're not really gonna notice it.
However, if you start using brushes in Photoshop
that have actually got some shape to them,
like for example this one here,
brush number 112, which is designed
to look like a blade of grass,
you may find that you do actually
want to change the angle of it,
because no matter which way I paint,
that brush, if I zoom in, is always going to be
starting at the bottom and it goes up
and angles off to the right hand side at the top
as you can see here.
It's never gonna go any other kind of angle.
The only way I can change it at the moment
is clicking on the brush panel
and coming in to where is says brush tip shape,
and here we have this little disc that we can rotate
and you can see in the preview at the bottom
how that changes the angle of brush,
and that is the only way be can
physically do it at the moment.
And that's a way that I tend to use quite a lot.
However, there is a workaround,
and that workaround is using what
they call the rotate view tool.
Any of you that are seasoned users of Photoshop
you'll be well aware of this,
so this is more for those of you
who may be new to Photoshop,
or you just didn't know about it.
But the rotate view tool, situated over in the toolbar,
just underneath the hand tool,
and you got a keyboard shortcut
of R, for rotate view.
So you can actually do with this is,
you can actually, once you're using it,
you can click and drag right or left
to change the angle you want the canvas to be at.
This is kind of like a cheap,
I should zoom out just a touch.
This is kind of like, I guess,
a cheap way of having Wacom Cintiq,
which those quite expense, but brilliant,
screens that you actually draw directly on,
and you can actually physically rotate
those screens to change the angle that you're working at.
Here, what we're doing is rotating the canvas like so.
Incidentally, when you're using this
if you find that you're getting lost
and you wanted to go back to being normal and straight,
just double-click on the icon over in the toolbar.
So that's one thing you can do
and it's really, really handy.
I tend to use this a lot on pictures like this one here,
where I've made a selection of this deer,
I've cut it out from it's original background,
which we can see just here,
but when I've used things like select and mask
and refine edge, it's not done
a brilliant job of picking up the hair.
it wasn't an easy picture to use.
Now stick around til the end of the video,
there's a little thumbnail for you to click on
and it'll show you the whole technique,
though I'm just gonna quickly brush on now,
to show you why I think it's really
useful to be able to rotate the canvas.
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try and make it
look as if we've actually managed to
pick up all those fine hairs,
and we can use brushes in Photoshop to do that.
The first thing I'll do is just
choose a normal round brush, with 100 per cent hardness,
and have a black foreground colour,
and I'm actually gonna paint away
part of the deer, stag's, kind of hair
around his neck, 'round about there.
Then I'm gonna go back to brushes,
my brush presets, and I'll choose a brush
built into Photoshop, we'll use
that same one I've just talked
about a few minutes ago, brush 112,
which is designed to look like a blade of grass,
but if I click on the brush panel
we can then use the settings in here as well as
rotating the angle of it, we can use
the settings in here to make it behave
and look more like hair or fur.
So I'm just gonna bring the size jitter down,
we'll be the angle down as well.
So, leave it something like that.
So now what I'm going to do, I painted away
part of the deer in black, I'm gonna paint
it back in white, but in the shape of this brush.
But now rather than me having to physically
come in and keep constantly changing
the angle of the brush that I'm using
by coming into the brush panel,
what I'm gonna do is just use the rotate view tool.
So let's just decrease the size of the brush a little bit,
I'm gonna press R on my keyboard
to go to the rotate view tool,
and I'm gonna drag left or right to rotate the deer 'round,
somewhere like that'll be good,
get the brush and I'm gonna start painting it back in.
Now you'll notice, that it's actually
starting to make it looks as if
the hair is actually been selected originally,
but it hasn't, I've just done that using this technique,
which is on that video at the very end.
So let's just zoom in a little bit for you.
You'll see at the moment, that hair's all going
in the same direction, so if I wanted to change
the angle of it, rather than click on the brush panel,
I press R on the keyboard to go to the rotate view tool,
and I can rotate it that way,
let's have a look how that looks,
just to change it a little bit,
just to vary the angle a touch,
something like that, let's go to R again
and go the other way, get the brush tool,
and we can go painting the hair in like this.
So this is kind of like an alternative way,
there is no keyboard shortcut you can use
for rotating the brush, but I think
the rotate view tool does a pretty good job,
and once the hang of it, it's actually really,
really good tool to use for rotating
the canvas 'round like so.
Now like I said, if you wanna go back to normal view,
just double-click on the icon in the toolbar,
sets it back to the straight view like that,
and you can see, just very quickly,
shown you how you can fake the look
of the hair coming in, but stick around
to the very, very end where you've got
that video to check out this whole technique,
which will save you a tonne of time,
when it comes to doing tricky cutouts.
So, that's the rotate view tool.
Let's just go back to this first screen here,
couple of other little things that
you can do with your brushes,
let's just get rid of that, put another blank screen,
and we'll just a normal round brush.
While we're on the subject of brushes,
just a couple of things otherwise to show you.
Increasing or decreasing the size of the brush
you can use your right bracket key to increase it,
left bracket to decrease it.
If you're wanting to increase the hardness,
hold down the shift key and use the right bracket key,
or go left bracket key to decrease the hardness of it,
but that can be quite hard to see,
so another way you can do that
is hold down the control key,
or the control and the alt key,
or control and option key, then click
and drag right or left, and you can actually
see now using this red overlay
the brush increasing or decreasing in size,
you can also go up or down to increase
or decrease the hardness of the brush as well.
So that's one way there.
We know that B on the keyboard gets us the brush tool,
but you can also go into the edit menu,
choose keyboard shortcuts, and from in here
where it says the shortcuts for menu,
if you choose tools, and scroll down,
you can find the brush tool, just here,
and see that it says B for brush,
but further on down we can see all
the shortcuts that are built into Photoshop
by default for using with brushes.
And here are the ones that we can actually set
for doing the brush size, the hardness, and what have you.
And you will see again, just to confirm,
there is no option there for putting in
a keyboard shortcut for rotating the brushes
that we're currently using.
So that's just a little bit of a run through on brushes.
Very, very quick video mainly to show you
that rotate view tool over the toolbar,
keyboard shortcut of R, where you can drag right or left
to rotate the canvas as opposed to the brush,
reset it back to normal by double-clicking the icon.
Check out the video at the end, and I'll see you next time.