Spacing tricks
There’s a lot you can do with the “spacing” feature. Here are a couple of ideas.
First: “spacing” is a brush feature that can be found near “hardness” in the brush pop-ups (it’s under “brush tip shape” in PS 7 and up). It’s usually not that important – the default setting of 25 is almost always good.
Simply put, Spacing controls the distance between the individual brush marks in a stroke, with the Spacing number representing the percentage if the brush diameter.
The first thing to try is using tools such as “Smudge”, “Blur”, “Burn” and “Dodge” with the Spacing turned down to 1. Wow! What a difference! If you wish you could get more out of those tools, this feature can turn the volume up to “10″. If you are having problems with your Smudge tool looking jagged, or not working smoothly with larger brush sizes, this should help!
Going the other direction, if you increase the spacing you can make interesting dotted lines with the brush tool. Note that this was done with pressure sensitivity turned on:
Another nice thing is to use spacing in conjunction with the “Stroke” feature. Here is a line created with the pen tool:
Select your brush tool with a simple setting; I used a 5-pixel diameter. Then select the “stroke path” feature:
Here’s how it looks:
Not too interesting. But now increase the Spacing on the brush – I set it to 250, which means the spacing is 2.5 times the original 5-pixel diameter:
