Photoshop CS Hard Brush Is Grainy and Pixelated

[SmileySmilodon]

I've been using photoshop for over 8 years and for some reason I can't seem to figure this out. I use photoshop and a wacom intuos pro tablet to make illustrations. The tablet is relatively new and has a problem where I have to reinstall the driver every other month, and I recently adopted a cat who likes to walk across my keyboard and step on all my keys. (Maybe she pressed something she shouldn't have?)

Essentially, my brush strokes using the hard brush in photoshop is giving me a gross, grainy look like this:

I've been trying to figure this out for hours and apparently no one else online seems to have this problem? I'm working with a 6000x2800px screen at 300dpi. It used to be 3000x1400px (which is the range I typically work in and it's been just fine), but I decided to increase the size of my canvas to see if maybe my brush would look better using larger settings.

But no, the edges of my strokes still look disgusting.

I sometimes do pixel art in photoshop as well, and I checked to make sure all of my settings where on "Bicubic" and not "Nearest Neighbor." What have I missed?

I would really appreciate it if someone could help me... I've never had this problem before, not even working in 72dpi with a 100x100px canvas...

(Ps. The majority of my brush settings are either at zero, or set to "pen pressure")

[davescm]

Hi

The only thing I see wrong in your screenshot is that you are viewing at 300%. At that level of zoom each image pixel is being represented by 9 (3x3) screen pixels. Therefore you start to see the individual pixels of the brush edge antialiasing, particularly on near vertical or near horizontal strokes.

Zoom out and view at 100%.

Dave

[SmileySmilodon]

I appreciate the thought but my brushes have always remained crisp at this zoom up until now. If I were to show you the brush strokes completely zoomed out they would look fine (perhaps with some fuzziness on the edges, which is, again, not supposed to be happening.)

The pixelation actually begins to really appear at %200 zoom, which is pretty bad. I need to zoom to be able to draw some of the finer details on my illustrations. If a customer receives the full res version of this image, they should be able to zoom in this far on the PNG and not see the pixelation of these lines.

I enlarged the image even further and still see this issue at %200 zoom with a brush size of 50px. This graininess should not be occurring for a 50px round brush. And the sheer size I've made my file is also a problem because file sizes need to be manageable and not 9000 pixels wide.

I'm sorry, it's just really frustrating.

[davescm]

Hi

At 200% zoom you will see the image pixels. At 200%, 4 screen pixels will be used to represent 1 image pixel making the individual pixels visible.

Can you post a link to your actual document and tell us the brush stroke size and settings. I am happy to add a stroke here for comparison in the same document.

Dave

[rayek.elfin]

I am looking at your posted image, and I see nothing wrong with those edges? Looks pretty much as expected. You turned off Spacing, I take it? Too much spacing may result in grainy and/or bumpy looking stroke edges.

I also drew a number of strokes in Photoshop, Krita, PhotoLine, etc. for comparison, and, using similar brush settings, they all look almost identical at 300% zoomed in.

Perhaps your screen settings were adjusted? You may not be seeing what we are seeing. Some screens will distort aliased edges when the contrast setting is too high.

[mglush · Accepted solution]

Hi!

I can understand your frustration. I played around with my brush and settings, and was wondering if what I'm posting below looks more like what you are expecting?

This is at 300 % and the image on the left is 0% spacing and the one on the right is at 25% I just want to see if are getting close to what you are looking for and then we'll figure out what's different.

Michelle

[SmileySmilodon]

Yes! that is exactly what I am looking for. The stroke on the left is more currently what I have, and the image on the right is pretty close to what I am used to!

[SmileySmilodon]

So I went in and turned the spacing completely off, it worked well until I hit about 10px. Then, upon dragging my brush across the screen, It got "dotty" and the line didn't connect. The brush still appears rough around the edges but slightly less so without the spacing. 

I've also tried increasing and decreasing the dpi, but it seems to be doing nothing for the brush. So my conclusion is that it is definitely the brush.

BUT, overall it does look much more crisp, so I'll call this a win for now.

Thanks for the input everyone!