Introduction to Sponge Tool in Photoshop
Sponge tool is a powerful tool in Adobe Photoshop used for controlling the image saturation to give depth or lighting appearance and this feature is mostly employed by professional photographers, VFX artists, designers and creators for their work as they use sponge tool on areas of the image to make it light with saturation mode on or to they can make the image area darken while using the sponge tool with de-saturate mode based on how the user wants the image to be appearing in terms of color, enhance the lighting, adding blur and so on which also saves time and used for designing anything from visiting cards, greeting cards to texture design.
How to use the Sponge Tool?
- Once Photoshop and select sponge tool from tools menu which enables all brushes from the menu bar and are ready to use brushes shape, orientation, thickness, and color can be configured there. We can configure the mode of the brush where to saturate or de-saturate the colors on the image taken below are the example for each to know the difference.
- We can see if we use saturate mode the existing color on the image becomes lighter and if we use de-saturate mode the color becomes darker it also depends on the number of reputations of sponge done on the image. The sponge must be moved only to the required portion of the image to maintain this many users select the portion using different selection tools and then they move sponge tool on the selected portion is the best practice which avoids to spread the color or don’t cause pixilation. The good quality edits can be performed using this trick on client images.
- If we don’t want to modify the original layer we can create the mask and work on it using sponge tool. There are few more properties such as Flow which helps in maintaining the opacity of color deposition on the image set the Value and use sponge accordingly, Airbrush must always be active it spreads the color equality around the portion of sponge moved if airbrush is off solid color dumping can happen which can affect the quality of the image after editing Vibrancy must also be active while working which avoids the pixilation spreading between different modes like saturation and de-saturation when they change where close to each other. Overall sponge tool has its best users from Photography, Animation, VFX making, Graphic designers and many more.
Steps to configure the sponge
- The sponge tool is used to add different saturation levels to image using a mask or on the existing image based on needs. The below is the step by step tools which helps in configuring the sponge tool before using each attribution has it the importance of working, below is one of the examples of using different saturation on sponge tool respectively. The number of reputations of sponge on the same area the depth of color keeps on changing darker if de-saturates mode or lighter id saturated mode.
Step #1
First open photoshop load the image which we are going to increase or decrease the saturation and select sponge tool which is located in tools menu hotkey to access them is “O”. Once after doing this, we can see all properties such as brush, mode, flow, airbrush, and vibrancy get activated on below to menu bar.
Step #2
All the brushes get enabled we can use the most suitable brush for our needs of the edit. With even adjustable properties as dimension and hardness.
Step #3
Mode has a drop-down list with Saturate and Desaturate options in it which helps in increasing and decreasing the saturation levels on the image using a mask or directly on the image up to the selected portion.
Step #4
Flow is the adjustment value similar to the opacity of brush color to be dumped on to the layer.
Step #5
Airbrush option must always be active which helps in maintaining color spreading equally without overlapping all around unwanted areas. Improves the quality of edits made.
Step #6
Vibrancy maintains the difference between saturation and De-saturation pixels of the image. The difference between mode will be shown clearly by enriching image quality needs.
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Step #7
Brushes panel is also available for more needs if required we can make color adjustments, other internal properties for image enhancements and can make sponge edits to look natural.
Conclusion
- Sponge tools help in adding effects on the image for saturation, de-saturation, enlightening, blurring and many more within the picture and using different mask layers to save edits. Practice on multiple patterns and images which make to understand the real visual feel of depth which is given to image using tool. Photographer, 2D and 3D vector based and Photoshop graphic can use this option to get visual richness to the images in their projects.
- Beginners and experience can compare their tricks using the sponge tool which saves time and process of many other options for the same needs. Visiting cards, greeting cards, texturing artists and there is many other professional technical solution using sponge tools in Photoshop.
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