The History Brush Tool

Tutorial

Click on thumbnailed images to enlarge

Have you ever seen this kind of Grayscale images with a touch of color?

Well making them in PS is very easy with the History Brush tool, but first I will like to explain a little about this tool

You can use the History Brush tool to revert part of an image to a previous state in your History palette. This is extremely useful if you want to correct a mistake you made steps ago, without undoing all of the steps in between

This technique allows you to return specific areas of an image as they appeared at an earlier state, without affecting the rest of the image. You can click in the box to the left of any state on the History palette to designate that state as the source you wish to return to

So lets take this image as an example for the purpose of this tut

1. Open your image in PS by going to File → Open, find your image and click Ok

2. Open your History palette, if you don't see it go to Window → History. Notice that PS always creates a History state for your opened images

3. PS gives you alot of options for making Grayscale images, but for the purpose of this tut I'm making this by going to Image → Adjustments → Black & White but you can also press the keyboard shortcut for this Ctrl + Shift + Alt + B, and in the Black & White dialog box click Ok

4. Now your History palette should resemble the image below

5. Now you can select the History Brush tool

by pressing Y or selecting it on the toolbox, and start painting on the part of the image that you would like to return to a previous state and Voila!