Photoshop Troubleshooting - Why has my brush shape outline changed to crosshair - help!
Have you ever come across this situation - you change to a brush based tool in Photoshop, but no matter how big or small you make the brush it just displays a small crosshair instead of the brush outline, even if you change the preference? This also might be mistaken for the brush disappearing as the crosshair is very small and tricky to see making you think that the brush size is not visible.
This is actually a useful feature for precise brushing…when you know how to switch it on and off, but it can be very annoying when you don’t! You simply have Caps Lock on - turning it off will return the brush tool view back to the outline of the brush shape.
This is really useful for precise cloning and touching up, especially when you have a repeating pattern to match up with. Just switch between brush shape and crosshair by pressing the Caps Lock key.
Users of Photoshop CS2 or above should note that there is a new preference for brush setting visibility - which shows both brush outline and crosshair at the same time, which saves switching between the two for more precise work, and is a nice additional option.
May 8th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Hey, thanks so much for posting this. I knew it was right around the Tab key, but couldn’t figure it out. Another reason to make sure Caps Lock is off.
June 26th, 2007 at 1:10 am
Thanks…I use a lot of grunge brushes and some of them are hard to visualize without the outline!
July 25th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Ah thanks, this has been bugging me for years!
July 26th, 2007 at 8:17 am
Same here, I have found this really annoying - I’ve never known why Photoshop does this - good one Photoshop Ninja!
January 9th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
thank you, you have so just f’ing saved my life!
what a life saver. this problem has bugged me for years.
thanks thank you, happy new year photoshop person!
love to ya
February 5th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
A quick google search, a link to this site and I’m back to the races after a baffling problem.
Thanks, I’m sure this one would have nagged me all day.
March 14th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
ditto on the above. i never would have figured it out on my own but help was easy to find thanks to google.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
This has been driving me nuts for years. I restart photoshop trying to fix the problem and then restart my computer, which usually fixed it. Obviously because it reset the caps lock state. Thanks for posting this!