Photoshop Ninja
Expert Photoshop tips and tricks for designers and photographers since 2005
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.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Written by Jonny Allbut - freelance graphic designer
Last modified: 13 October, 2006 (12:52) | First published: 13 October, 2006
Filed under Shortcuts - Other 6 Comments »
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Comment by Nicky
April 26, 2006 @ 4:33 pm
What a nice little tip. I will check this one out!
Comment by Jonny
April 26, 2006 @ 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.
Comment by Thomas
January 5, 2007 @ 11:04 am
Great tip,.. just needed this thnx!
Comment by Michele Sieniarecki
June 8, 2009 @ 9:37 am
You have no idea how happy I am that you wrote this blog entry! Somehow, my brush spacing got messed up, and I coudln’t do a proper straight line! Thanks to that last tidbit, I now have a funcitonal Photoshop again. Bless you, bless you, bless you!!!
Comment by Robert
January 14, 2010 @ 8:32 am
Thank so much… I have struggled with this for about 3months, and finally I decided to go online and see if there was a way to do it, and here I find this tip, thank you!
Comment by Photoshop Ninja
January 15, 2010 @ 3:58 pm
Yup – it’s those little ones that are sometimes the best Robert… this is useful all the time!