Creating a brush with smooth falloffs in Photoshop CS4?

Question

How do you set up a brush that has a falloff like the brush stroke on the left?:

Answer 1

There are a few factors that have an influence on the falloff of your brush stroke:

• The pressure curve in your tablet preferences
• Your chosen Shape Dynamics settings in Photoshop for your selected brush
• If you're unlucky, it may be that your tablet and/or tablet-driver has an issue with poor brush size falloff, even when all settings are correct. In this case you should report the bug to your tablet manufacturer.

• Step 1 •

Before adjusting your photoshop brush settings, have a look at your graphics tablet preferences and see if you can adjust the Pressure Curve. Unfortunately, not all tablets will have this option.

The pressure-curve allows you to tweak how much applied pressure is needed to render thick/thin strokes with your stylus. For each adjustment you should be able to test the resulting changes to how pressure interacts with the thickness of the brushstroke.

• Step 2 •

In your brush settings dialog, make sure that Shape Dynamics is ticked with "pen pressure" selected for Brush-control.

In your Size Dynamics dialog, you'll see that there is a Minimum Diameter slider. Unless this slider is set to 0, the smallest brush size that your stylus will output will depend on this setting, regardless of other settings.

Answer 2

This has to do with the pressure setting of your tablet. If you aren't using a tablet some brushes are made to taper but they will be set like it and so you won't have any control.