Is Photoshop’s Pencil Tool Worthless?

What about small and crisp pixel art such as small icons? What would you use other than the pencil tool for that?

At times it can be a time consuming tool but it still serves a very good purpose. I personally use it when creating web layouts exactly for those small pixel details that you can’t create properly any other way.

And I strongly disagree with the statement that Photoshop is used mainly for digital photography. Last time I checked it was the tool of choice for creating web layouts too.

InDesign Trainer’s use of the Pencil Tool to work on tiny spots (at 1600% zoom) is probably the one thing I might use the tool for. The Brush Tool does allow for a Hardness value of 100, but it still produces an anti-aliased edge (this is probably what disappointed you before). To avoid this, you’d have to use the Brush Tool in Bitmap color mode. The Pencil Tool creates a bitmap-like edge in any color mode.

Re: Lucian’s comments, I design icons for the web at larger sizes and then scale them down. I’ve very rarely had to create icons so small they required pixellated edges (which would certainly require the Pencil Tool), and I find those types of icons are being used less and less (an example are those smiley-face emoticons, which used to be pixellated but nowadays are smooth and anti-aliased).

I’d also be curious to hear what types of details in web layouts require the Pencil Tool. I can’t think of any myself. I don’t think I’ve ever had the need to detail something pixel-by-pixel.

Also, re: Photoshop and what it’s used for, my point was not that “Photoshop is used mainly for digital photography.” My point is that since version 7 or so, Adobe has developed Photoshop’s photography features (HDR, Camera Raw, File Browser/Bridge, et al) but not so much its drawing and painting tools (I believe the brush engine was last revamped in v.7). Adobe’s latest developments in painting and drawing has taken place more or less in Illustrator (Live Trace/Paint, expanded support for Wacom tablets, et al).

” It draws only in “line art mode”: you click with it, and it puts a dot down the size of your tip. There’s no subtle tones, no soft edges. It’s either 100% color in that pixel or nothing at all. ”
Well Jeremy, this is exactly the reason I use the pencil tool. It just depends on what you do. I work with a wacom tablet, and in order to be able to “plunk down a solid dot of color” or to draw a straight line (with the shift key pressed) I wil need the, right, you guessed it, Pencil Tool.
It just depend on what you do. I work for the textile/fashion industry, making artworks that will be put on fabric. Most of it is printed, embroidered, discharged, sandblasted, appliqued, whatever. No contone, just “solid plonks of color” in most cases.

Photoshop has no unnecessary tools, only tools that not everybody has a use for.

FYI: Mike’s tip not only works for the Pencil and Pen tools, but also any tool with a defined “tip”—including all brushes, cloners, erasers, Blur, Sharpen, Smudge, Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools (plus there’s probably a few I forgot).

: ))

pixel-art lives and prospers in web and gamedevelopment (console, mobile).. if you this does not know, this does not signify that this no

How else are you going to draw freehand aliased selections in Quick Mask mode? Morever, it’s faster than any brush tool - great for putting colors down with a graphic tablet. I do color work for comics on Photoshop, so the pencil tool still makes sense. (Hope they won’t take it away)

I’m so glad I found ths post. I’ve been furious at photoshop for doing the anti-aliasing thing with the line tool. I don’t need those faded edges and i’ts messing up my design. So I jacked up the pencil tool to 4px wide (the same width as the line in my current graphic) and did the shift-click thing and presto…. a clean un-fuzzy line. Thank you! Yay for pencil tool!

The Pencil is Still a Great Tool! A must have for Texture Artists and also great for clean web graphics as the person commented above.

I recently had cause to use the pencil command in Elements 3.

I had used a print screen save of a plan that had an overlay on it that I did not require to be printed out.

Using a combination of the eyedropper and the pencil command I was able to match the background tone and remove the undesirable mark albeit pixel by pixel.

I am glad that the command is still there as I can use it to delete and match the surrounding area though it does reguire patience.

The funny thing is: I want to get that old skool jagged line but i dont know how! I would like to make a big 10 point jagged line. Any idea’s are more then welcome.

Dafresco asked how to make a pencil line 10 points wide. I’m not sure about points, but the Pencil Tool can be enlarged to various pixel widths like other brush tools. That will get you a line 10 pixels tall.

I came across your site during a google search on a similar topic concerning a pencil tool in Photoshop.
I do have to disagree with your statement as to the worth of the pencil in Photoshop. Photoshop, though it’s geared towards photos is also used in designing interfaces and web graphics. The pencil tool is very useful when applying it to these types of design work.
If Photoshop did not have a pencil tool, they wouldn’t do too well in the interface design arena.
Another area of worth is the growing market for Manga and Anime art. Try hand drawing a city in Photoshop where crisp lines are needed without the pencil.

In short, every aspect of digital design should be explored before making the statement of somethings worthiness.

Regards, Gary

So many of Photoshop tools are worthless. Somebody can easily write a small book documenting the functional overlaps. And, Adobe is bent upon making the application even more complex woth each new version. Come on guys simple is powerful too. The writer of this article is spot on about the pencil tool.

what else are you going to use to fix the corners of a stroked border or filled selection after doing select -> modify -> expand?

photoshop isn’t just for photos!The pencil tool is absolutely necessary for webdesign, technical drawing, and for editing trapped line drawings. Its mostly used by technical renderers. If you’re wondering why there is a pencil tool, you probably haven’t discovered the wonders of being able to toggle the anti-alias box!

Yeah, I’m a pixel artist and I -exclusively- use photoshop, because photoshop has a lot of helpful features (selection, layers, animation, color-selection) that make it faster to do, compared with dedicated ‘pixel art’ programs.

Also, as a professional game artist, the point to pixel art in my mind isn’t the challenge of doing it that way; it’s precisely to achieve that specific look. I’m not doing pixel art to brag about having drawn something ‘the hard way’; I do pixel art because old-school games, which are still quite fun to play (e.g. Saleable) on platforms like the iPhone, need pixel art. It’s beneficial from a workflow (especially animation) standpoint, it’s beneficial from a compression and program size standpoint, and it just looks a lot crisper and more professional than drawing small game sprites with the brush tool. I also do it just because I personally love pixel art.

Here, though, is probably the lament of photoshop; it’s complicated because so many people, with such radically different usages, use it as their only tool, and thus it has a ton of complicated baggage which has nothing to do with that use-case. A prepress guy wants nothing to do with photoshop’s painting tools. A CG painter couldn’t care less about the slices and webdesign stuff. A web guy couldn’t care less about all the print functionality. Etc, etc. And yet we all use the same program, and complain about all the bloat from the stuff we don’t use.