Technical data

Working with Paint and Text 49
You’ll notice that some brushes have hard edges, while others appear
fuzzy, with soft edges. The hardness of a brush is expressed as a
percentage of its outer diameter. If less than 100%, the brush has a soft
edge region within which the opacity of applied color falls off
gradually.
q To see what this means, try using a medium-sized hard-edge brush,
and then switch to a soft-edge brush. You’ll note the difference
immediately.
To customize a brush tip’s properties, double-click it on the Brush Tip
tab (or right-click it and use the popup menu) to open the Brush
Options dialog. As you vary the controls, you can see the effect of each
change in the preview window. Note there are five brush properties in
all. (See the tab’s Visual Reference entry in online help for details.)
Right-clicking a brush tip’s square on the Brush Tip tab provides
several other choices, including deleting a brush tip or creating a new
one.
Setting tool properties
The Tool Properties tab is really an
extension of each tool’s functionality.
Use it to customize the way each tool
affects pixels on the screen, and (if
you’re using a pressure-sensitive
drawing tablet) how the tool responds to pressure variations you apply
with the pen.
For the basic Paintbrush tool and most other creation tools, you can
alter the Opacity and number of Fade steps.