How to Highlight Your Cursor in Photoshop on Mac

Photoshop's brush cursor can display either a crosshair or a circle matching the brush size. The crosshair is a few pixels wide and nearly invisible against detailed images. The brush circle helps during painting but disappears when switching tools. Every tool change means a different cursor shape, and none have built-in highlighting.

Tutorial creators recording Photoshop workflows face the worst of this problem — viewers watching at reduced resolution on phones and tablets cannot distinguish the small tool cursors from the image content being edited.

Standard cursor — Shows tool-specific icons (brush, eraser, stamp) that indicate the active tool but provide no size reference or highlighting.

Precise cursor — Replaces tool icons with a crosshair. The crosshair shows the exact center point but is thin and nearly invisible against detailed images.

Full Size Brush Tip — Displays the actual brush size as a circle. Useful during painting but only visible for brush-based tools. Non-brush tools revert to small icons or crosshairs.

Cursor highlighting that follows the pointer across all Photoshop tools and panels requires a system-level application like Mouzz.

Spotlight for retouching demos — Dims the Photoshop canvas around your cursor to isolate the area being edited. Clients and viewers see exactly which part of the image you are retouching, adjusting, or masking.

Ring cursor for tool navigation — Adds a persistent colored circle that stays visible as you switch between Photoshop tools, navigate panels, and move across the canvas. The ring provides consistency that Photoshop's changing tool cursors lack.

Click feedback for tutorials — Renders a visual ripple on every click, confirming tool selections, layer clicks, filter applications, and menu interactions. Viewers following a Photoshop tutorial see exactly when each action occurs.

Cursor trail for design workflows — Creates a particle path showing cursor movement direction. Useful for demonstrating brush strokes, selection paths, and navigation patterns across large canvases.

Step 1: Install Mouzz — Download from the Mac App Store. The app runs as a menu bar utility.

Step 2: Choose your effect — For Photoshop tutorials, enable spotlight with click feedback. For client reviews, enable spotlight to isolate specific image areas. For general editing visibility, enable ring cursor at subtle opacity.

Step 3: Set keyboard shortcuts — Assign hotkeys that do not conflict with Photoshop shortcuts. Toggle spotlight when demonstrating specific edits, disable it for free editing.

Step 4: Record or present — Mouzz effects are captured by OBS, ScreenFlow, QuickTime, and Loom. The effects also appear during Zoom and Google Meet screen sharing for client presentations.

Retouching tutorials — Enable spotlight at 40-50% dimming with a medium radius. The spotlight isolates the specific area being retouched while keeping enough surrounding context for viewers to understand the edit's impact.

Design and compositing — Enable ring cursor at a color that contrasts with your most common canvas content. The ring stays visible across light images, dark backgrounds, and the Photoshop gray workspace.

Client review sessions — Enable spotlight at lower dimming (20-30%) with a larger radius. The gentle dimming guides the client's attention without obscuring the overall design.

Recording Photoshop workflows — Enable click feedback with ring cursor. Click feedback confirms every tool selection, layer click, and filter application in the recorded video.