Smart Brush
Here's an unusual tool—a special effects brush that works in tandem with a selection brush. Paint into an image and the brush finds contrast edges (around the subject), makes a selection, and fills it with whatever style of Smart Brush is currently set.
![](https://static.packt-cdn.com/products/9781800566996/graphics/image/Smart_Brush_2.png)
In practice this works reasonably well – but, depending on the nature of the image chosen, the initial selection process can be quite flawed to the point where the effect it's filled with appears distinctly out of place.
![](https://static.packt-cdn.com/products/9781800566996/graphics/image/Smart_Brush_3_small.png)
That said, Smart Brush includes the Refine Edge utility—this allows users to soften, blur, widen, shrink, and smooth the brush selection edge to make the result look more realistic. Personally, I find this brush a bit too optimistic in what it tries to produce—everything is reliant on the efficacy of the selection process. But in this example I was pleased with how well it did work.
The tool features more than 90 different effects...