Up Close: Photoshop CS5 Advanced Painting Mixer Brush

#1


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Today is the Day! Adobe has officially announced Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended software (as part of Creative Suite 5). Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended will be available as stand-alone applications or key components of the Adobe Creative Suite® 5 family.

Of principal interest to digital painters are the new Mixer Brush, which offers on-canvas color blending, and Bristle Tips, which let you create lifelike, textured brush strokes. The Mixer Brush lets you define multiple colors on a single tip, and then mix and blend them with the underlying hues on your canvas. When starting with a photo original, you can use a dry, empty brush to blend the existing colors while at the same time adding a painterly effect to the image.

Mixer Brush settings provide extensive control over the wetness of the brush, the load rate to add paint to the brush, the mixing rate between brush and canvas colors, and whether the brush is refilled, cleaned, or both after each painting stroke. The 3D Bristle Brush Preview provides a realtime visualization of the current Bristle Brush’s Tilt, Bearing, and Rotation. This visualization aids the artist’s control of the brush.

In conjunction with these new mixing features, Photoshop CS5 incorporates precise control over stroke characteristics of its painting tools with Bristle Tips. Bristle Tip shapes include Point, Blunt, Curve, Angle, and Fan in both Round and Flat varieties. Bristle Qualities define key bristle properties such as shape, length, stiffness, thickness, angle, and spacing, which affect how the color is laid on the image as you paint.

Another highly useful feature is the new HUD (Heads-Up Display) Color Picker, which provides instant access to in-image color selection via keyboard shortcut. This color picker can be configured to different sizes, as well as either a Color Wheel (shown) or Color Strip.

In upcoming posts, I’ll be detailing additional features of Photoshop’s new superior painting features. Check in often!

#2

I’m very much looking forward to your subsequent posts about this, John.

Random side note, I’ve been working through your great Painter tutorials on Lynda, and it is impossible to read this and not hear it in your voice. Neat trick! :slight_smile:

#3

Watch Out! I can hypnotize through text, as well!

-john

#4

Watch Out! I can hypnotize through text, as well!

I have no idea what you mean, but I do know that these are not the droids I’m looking for.

#5

The real question is: can we now FINALLY use any COLOURED selection and define that as a brush? And not losing the actual colours in that brush? (you know, cs4 and before only allowed for greyscale brushes)

#6

The big question I have is, how does the brush performance compare to Painter? Any lag or slowdown when adding in the new features and additional parameters? Overall, the new features in CS5 look great and I’m hoping the Mixer Brush is as good as it looks in the pre-release marketing info.

#7

Besides being 64-bit, PS CS5 is also multi-core aware and subdivides processing tasks based on the number of cores a system has. The system GPU is additionally being put to use for specific tasks to intelligently offload bandwidth from the CPU.

The Mixer Brush bristle tip processing has three threads - physics (doing the simulation of the motion of the bristles), rasterizing (taking the bristle geometry and making a 2D stamp), and compositing (blending that stamp into the canvas pixels). The mixer brush processing takes place in the compositing stage, and it can be further parallelized - for big stamps that need to be blended, the rows of the stamp get distributed across cores.

So, the bottom line is Photoshop continues to love memory and—in this day and age—more CPU cores. The performance you will realize on your system depends on how much memory and how many cores it has available.

-john

#8

Thanks, John. I’ve got 8 cores and 16 GB ram, so I should be good to go :slight_smile:

For Mac users, is OS X 10.6 the recommended OS for CS5? I’m still at 10.5.8, since I haven’t had any issues with CS4 and my other graphics programs.

#9

Well, CS5 is 64-bit aware, so the only way to take advantage of it is to run it on Snow Leopard.

-john

#10

Looks very promising!

How does the Mixer brush compare in speed to the Smudge brush? If it’s just as slow or slower then those of us with slower computers will probably have to upgrade our hardware to take advantage of it.

#11

How does the Mixer brush compare in speed to the Smudge brush? If it’s just as slow or slower then those of us with slower computers will probably have to upgrade our hardware to take advantage of it.

See my response here.

-john

#12

Thanks, John.

I actually read that response but wondered how it compared to something I’m used to. I take it that the Smudge Brush probably does something like the last thread (compositing), and the Mixer Brush adds two more threads on top of that? I was hoping maybe new blending routines were written in to speed things up to Painter’s speed.

#13

when does it officially go on sale

#14

History shows that Adobe likes to have about 30 days between announce and ship. I don’t have any official info, so YMMV.

#15

i saw some really nice tutorials on cs5 over at creative cow

http://library.creativecow.net/

History shows that Adobe likes to have about 30 days between announce and ship. I don’t have any official info, so YMMV.

i found on the adobe site that shipping should start early may, so i assume that’s probably when it might actually be on the shelf.

#16

@John Derry: thanks a lot for interesting informations about painting in cs5. You said here that new PS CS5 brush tool is multicore aware (subdivided in 3 threads).
However I read today the Ars Technica review about PS CS5 by Dave Girard, and he says here that PS CS5, like Painter, is using only one core when drawing and sketching with it:
“Both programs are equally slow at painting, unfortunately. Watching either app use only one of sixteen possible threads of my Nehalem Xeon Mac Pro just makes me weep expensive tears. For small strokes, it’s not a problem; but large, dense paint strokes look like they are taking public transit from point A to point B. As Photoshop adds more sophistication to its mixer brushes, better multithreading will become even more important.”
What do you think of this explanation ?

I plan to buy a new Apple computer, maybe a New Macpro 6 core, but after reading this, I wonder if the 27’ Imac Core-i7 with 4 cores would be or not a good deal"

#17

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