The Mixer Brush simulates realistic painting techniques such as mixing colors on the canvas, combining colors on a brush, and varying paint wetness across a stroke.
The Mixer Brush has two paint wells, a reservoir and a pickup. The reservoir stores the final color deposited onto the canvas and has more paint capacity. The pickup well receives paint only from the canvas; its contents are continuously mixed with canvas colors.
Note:
For a video about the Mixer Brush, see Adobe Photoshop Tutorial – Using the Mixer Brush
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To load paint into the reservoir, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the canvas. Or, choose a foreground color.
Note:
When you load paint from the canvas, the brush tip reflects any color variation in the sampled area. If you prefer brush tips of uniform color, select Load Solid Colors Only from the Current Brush Load pop-up menu in the options bar.
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Choose a brush from the Brush Presets panel. See Select a preset brush.
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In the options bar, set tool options. For common options, see Paint tool options. For options unique to the Mixer Brush, see the following:
Current Brush Load swatch
From the pop-up panel, click Load Brush to fill the brush with the reservoir color, or Clean Brush to remove paint from the brush. To perform these tasks after each stroke, select the automatic Load
or
Clean 
options.Wet
Controls how much paint the brush picks up from the canvas. Higher settings produce longer paint streaks.
Increasing paint wetness
A. 0% B. 100%Load
Specifies the amount of paint loaded in the reservoir. At low load rates, paint strokes dry out more quickly.
Increasing load rates
A. 1% B. 100%
. (If
necessary, click and hold the standard Brush tool to reveal the
Mixer Brush.)
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