The Pencil tool is a remnant of the pixel-painting days of the 1990s. Does it still have a place in today’s Photoshop?

I remember the Pencil Tool.

Back in high school, when I was just beginning to play with computer art, I was using Aldus SuperPaint to build Warhol-style clip art and copy Todd McFarlane’s drawings of Spider-Man (my favorite piece was a copy of [1] the art displayed on this cover). I used the Pencil Tool to draw shapes and then the Paint Bucket Tool to fill them in. It was painstaking work, and I was pretty meticulous so every missed pixel meant zooming in to 1600% and filling it in with that Pencil Tool. Pixel-based painting was a chore and a hassle and never caught on for me, which I suppose is one reason I use Photoshop mostly for photo retouching and compositing instead of as a painting and drawing application.

And I think the powers that be over at Adobe, especially now with the explosion of digital photography, have built up Photoshop as the standard for manipulating photographs but have neglected its function as a painting and drawing application. Applications like Painter and Illustrator are more attuned to painting and drawing than Photoshop is. Their tools are more flexible, act more like natural art media and allow artists to create better computer art. Photoshop has a lot of power in this arena as well, but it is not as important to the product as it was, say, a decade ago.

So what is the Pencil Tool still doing in Photoshop?

It’s tucked in with the Brush and Color Replacement Tools, and I can’t remember using it at all for probably five years now. 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. I can’t think of a reason nowadays to plunk down a dot of flat color. If you draw with it, you won’t get a smooth line either; you’ll end up with a jagged line of pixels that brings back memories of that Spider-Man art I did way back when. Illustrator has its own Pencil Tool, but since it’s a vector graphics application you get a nice smooth line when using that tool. There’s no way in Photoshop to get anything out of the Pencil Tool other than jagged edges.

So, now that Photoshop is focused on digital photography and smooth, slick graphics with fancy layer effects, is that line of pixels still necessary for anything? Does the Pencil Tool have a purpose anymore? I don’t think so.

I would be curious to hear if anyone out there still finds a need for the Pencil Tool in Photoshop. I used it to sketch out concepts a few years ago, but the novelty quickly wore off because the comps were too loose and I had a lot more control using a real pencil and paper. I can scan that if I like and get a better-looking sketch on the computer. I’m sure there’s other applications for the tool out there, but I don’t know them.

And the ironic thing is: even though Photoshop still sports a mean brush engine, there’s no Airbrush Tool anymore. It’s built into the Brush Tool nowadays and can be toggled on and off, but I don’t see a difference in the stroke one way or another.