Controlling Brush behaviour
Though Elements is mostly a photo editing program, many of its tools rely on the use of a brush – Dodge, Burn, Healing, Clone, and Smart are all examples of brush-based tools.
But retouching brush tools are not the only brushes available. Elements contains a wide range of "real" (digital) brushes used to paint, sketch, draw, and illustrate, either by brushing over an existing picture or by starting from scratch with a blank canvas.
And if that's not enough, Elements allows the user to change the characteristics of each brush – the shape, orientation, opacity, color, pressure, and appearance, all of which we'll look at here.
![](https://static.packt-cdn.com/products/9781800566996/graphics/image/sketch_brush_settings.png)
![](https://static.packt-cdn.com/products/9781800566996/graphics/image/Parblo_graphics_copy.png)
Which brush? On top of the expected hard and soft brush tips (the top two lines in the screenshot here), Elements provides a number of other brush characteristics, which include Spacing – if you are drawing and the line looks a bit lumpy, this is possibly because...