Page 74 - Photoshop User December 2016

HOW TO ››
Photoshop Proving Ground
some challenges and solutions for working with the art history brush
SCOTT VALENTINE
Remember the Art History Brush? I have to admit, I haven’t been a huge fan of it. In fact, after it was first released, I spent about 10 minutes with it and decided it wasn’t for me. Recently, some colleagues started talk- ing about it and I spent another 10 minutes with it after seeing their beautiful results. This time I was stunned at how quickly I could get some really nice textures. The secret lies in working within the limits of the tool.
The Art History Brush (let’s call it AHB for short) relies on his- tory states. Basically, you do some filtering or correction on an image, set a particular point in the History panel as your source, and go to town with one of a handful of brush effects. But there’s some complexity to deal with before you can really start to unwind the unique capabilities here. Running over a few key concepts will help us warm up:
filtered layers, you’re constrained to paint only on the layer from which that snapshot was taken.
• You can create filtered or processed effects and save those as a snapshot in the History panel.
• When you close your image, the history and snapshots are erased.
• Several options for regular brushes can be used with the AHB, but not all—color blending and brush blend modes aren’t used, for example (except those in the Options Bar).
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The AHB needs a history state to sample from, and the easiest way to manage this is by using snapshots in the History panel.
Only the original history state is available for use on any arbitrary layer; if you create snapshots from other
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