Tutorial: Custom Photoshop Brushes

posted by Liz

You can make many types of Photoshop brushes and achieve lots of different effects depending on what you make a brush out of. I'm going to go over making a brush from a shape in a photo.

Tulip Brush
I chose a flower because this week, the free image at iStockphoto is a bunch of red tulips. Create a login for a free hi-res download to practice with.



1. Choose the flower you want and zoom in to make a selection. You can do this countless ways: erase the surrounding image, use the magic wand, etc. My favorite tool for this is the pen tool. If you're not accustomed to using the pen tool, the bezier curves can be tricky, but I consider this method to be the most exact. If you go this route, make sure you set it to Paths before starting, as shown below. If you use a different selection method, skip to step 3.



Tip: You can convert the pen tool into the direct select tool and adjust your selection quickly as you work by holding down the command button.



2. Once you've drawn a complete path around your flower, go to the Paths palette (which is grouped with the layers palette by default) and click on the Load Path as a Selection button at the bottom.



3. With your flower selected, go to Edit>Define Brush Preset and name your brush. You can now see it listed in the brushes menu.



4. Select it and choose the color you want to use. Click on a new layer to place the flower stroke. You'll notice it paints in all the depth and light from the photo and isn't just an outline of the shape. This makes portions of it more transparent than others.



You can make brushes out of anything. One popular effect is to make brushes out of water rings or paint splatters to create grunge effects. Another thing that's fun to do is to play with the blending modes on your custom brush layers. Unless you're doing a specific project, like a photo retouch, the most important thing to remember when you're in Photoshop is to play around.

That wraps it up for...