Changing brush diameters in PS

[Coyotemax]

If you open your Brushes palette, you can certainly adjust that.

Go to the Brush Tip Shape, and your settings are there.

This is what it looks like, with my current brush set to 50% height compaerd to width


And if you grab that little arrow, you can adjust the direction you want the angle to be
Or type in the angle you want : eg 90 degrees will change so it's 50% wide on the vertical..

like so:

[Diamond]

Ascension: yeah, that's what I was playing around with, and I noticed the distortion you mentioned. Same thing on the shape dynamics, Coyote; it just distorts certain parts of the border too much.

I was hoping to avoid it but... I guess I'll have to do what Ascension is suggesting and parse in different chunks for the corners and straights. Only problem with that is going to be getting the shadow underneath it correct. I'm planning to have a drop shadow underneath the border, and I want it to 'line up' correctly. Guess I can do a separate layer for each corner and each straight and fiddle the shadow so it matches it's companions.

Very time consuming though... Ah well. If I didn't have a crapload of patience, I guess I wouldn't be making maps.

[Nomadic]

Only problem with that is going to be getting the shadow underneath it correct. I'm planning to have a drop shadow underneath the border, and I want it to 'line up' correctly. Guess I can do a separate layer for each corner and each straight and fiddle the shadow so it matches it's companions.

Very time consuming though... Ah well. If I didn't have a crapload of patience, I guess I wouldn't be making maps.

Just copy and merge your new border layers into a final border layer (and hide your separated ones) then apply any effects to the merged layer. Or if you don't care about backing things up you can just merge the originals and add the effects to that.

[Diamond]

I always forget about the Merge function.