My Photoshop brushes are stripped of their gradation

Question

Somehow I must have accidentally changed a setting somewhere and now my Photoshop brushes which are supposed to have grayscale detail are now showing up like 2-bit bitmaps. Not sure if that's the best way to describe it, but here's a screen shot:

You can see the brush selected is supposed to have a gradation falloff but instead it shows up like binary (pixel is either on or off) so it looks like a point cloud. this is happening with all my brushes ever since I made a brush from a b&w .tif image. The document in the screen shot is 8-bit RGB. Googling things like "photoshop brushes broken" just gives results for shattered textures etc so I figured I need to ask you guys. :-)

Answer 1

I figured it out. I had set the brush Mode to Dissolve while working on the bitmap .tif image. The solution was to simply set it to Normal again.

I did this because I believed the .tif was grayscale and so when I found that my brushes lacked gradation changing modes was one of the steps I tried in troubleshooting before I realized the cause was the image being in bitmap color. It's ironic that the Dissolve Mode gives a similar effect, so even after beginning work on a new image the problem persisted for a different reason. Mystery solved.