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Spotting the painting and drawing tools in any image editing package isn't difficult — their icons look like paintbrushes and pencils. You also often get airbrush and spray-can alternatives, as well. When you use a painting tool, you can customize several options in just about any application. Although some applications definitely do offer more options than others, any program worth its salt lets you set the following paintbrush options:
- The shape of the brush bristles
- The strength of the flow of paint coming out of the brush
- The opacity of the paint applied by the brush
Pencil tools offer many of the same options that you can find for a Paint Brush tool — size, shape, intensity, and color. You usually establish the color setting in a color selector tool unrelated to the Paint Brush or Pencil, but the foreground color that you choose is the color that the painting or drawing tool applies.
To customize your Brush or Pencil tool, you can use the options presented when you activate the tool. The options for painting and drawing are quite similar in Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro, respectively.
 | To apply customizations to a tool, click the tool to activate it and then use the available drop lists, radio buttons, check boxes, sliders, and menus. Sometimes the options appear on a toolbar; other times, they appear in a palette. It all depends on the software that you use. |
You can often save your settings for a particular tool. You can set up groups of options for each tool and have more than one setting for a tool, which lets you have different paintbrushes for different tasks.
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