Custom brushes

Readers might be a little surprised to learn that Elements can be customized with a range of features, from third-party plugin software to custom brushes.

A custom brush is a tiny piece of software that describes the shape of a brush—it might be a traditional artist's style brush or it might be a brush tip made from a picture, as you'll see here. There are hundreds of (free and paid) brushes available online for download. Why would you bother? As there are more that 300 brushes already in Elements, I think you'd need to be after a very specific brush type to justify an online search. But, as mentioned, some brushes are made from pictures and it's this fact that opens up an entirely new set 
of options.

The following illustrations describe the process of looking for, locating, loading, and then using custom brushes to enhance your images. Sometimes, this might just be the addition 
of something small—a tiny cloud in...