Art history brush

The art history brush is not exactly the most essential Photoshop tool ever invented. Basically, the art history brush samples from a history state, but the art history brush strokes can be applied using abstract characteristics that smudge the pixels when sampling from the selected history state. The brush characteristics are defined in the art history Options bar. The Tolerance determines how much paint to apply based on how close in color the paint strokes will be from the history to the destination color. And as the Area setting is made larger, the area coverage will increase and the paint strokes be more numerous.

Figure 1 The art history brush Options bar.

1 The art history brush is located next to the history brush in the Tools panel. And you can use it to paint from history with impressionistic type brush strokes. To explore the potential of the art history brush, I applied a Blur Gaussian Blur filter. I then selected the open history state, and clicked on the space next to the Gaussian Blur history state to set this as the history source.

2 The most significant factor will be the art history brush Style you have selected. In this example I mostly used the Tight Long and Loose Medium Styles. The brush shape will have an impact too. The bristle brush shapes can be effective. But in the picture you see here, I simply used a soft edged brush to paint in a soft, diffusion effect around the edges of the photograph.