Painter Style Brush resize and canvas rotation in Photoshop CS4
I used painter for a little while to check it out and see if I liked it better than photoshop for artistic stuff. The brush engine is quite nice but I can recreate everything with photoshops brush engine, vastly superior blending modes and layer styles and painter was just to slow and clunky for my taste and the lack of photoshops masking abillities is a total showstopper.
I did however LOVE the way you can bind keys so you can resize the brushes and rotate the canvas with the mouse/pen; something that’s impossible to setup in photoshop.
Well, where there’s a will there’s a way; in the form of a couple neat Autohotkey Scripts that I have attached to this post. You will need to download AutopHotKey first, it’s free and contains no spyware so go ahead and download Autohotkey first.
Now download the 2 scripts below, they are simple text files, so be my guest and review them before running them, it’s not a smart idea to just download and run shit from some dude on the internet.
Ok, now that the scripts are running you will se 2 green icons in your taskbar, that means they are ready and looking for something to react to.
First, make sure nothing is bound to the W and S keys in photoshop, otherwize remap that to something else, I promise you will LOVE what you get in return.
Now map a couple keys on your mouse (Or Wacom pen as I use. I mapped the side button Up/Down click to W and S) to W and S.
Select your brush tool and press the mouse/pen button you bound to the S key, drag the pen/mouse left/right and you will resize your brush. If you do a normal click while doing this you will pick up the underlying color with the eyedropper color picker, so it’s 2 tools in one.
Now press the button you mapped to W and drag left/right on the canvas in photoshop and you will rotate the canvas. This button is also multifunctional. Just tapping it will switch to your brush tool.
Have fun 
