Brushing in straight lines automatically
How hard is it to brush in a perfectly straight line… very hard if you don’t know this little gem of a shortcut! If you have ever tried to brush a perfectly straight line in Photoshop you will know that it is just about impossible, you always end up with a bit of a wobble. You might encounter this issue if you are working with a layer mask, or even in quick mask mode.
Well, the solution is simple – with the brush you want to use active just click once where you want your straight line to start, then hold down shift whilst you move to the end of your straight line and click again – this will paint a straight line from the first point to where you just clicked.
If this doesn’t seem to work right, you want to check out your brush attributes - the most common culprit is ‘Spacing’ in the ‘Brush Tip Shape’ settings. This should be set to 1% to give you a perfectly solid line.
April 26th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
What a nice little tip. I will check this one out!
April 26th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Yup, it’s a goldie! It is suprising how many times you simply need to brush in a straight line - It’s soooo useful for lots of jobs, especially cleaning up dirty alpha channel masks.
January 5th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Great tip,.. just needed this thnx!