Photoshop Brushes | Web Design Whim

HOW TO CREATE PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES – QUICK & EASY GUIDE

August 26th, 2009 |

Author: Pixie

photoshop_brush

For this tutorial I have used Photoshop CS4 Extended.

Alot of people use Photoshop brushes to create artwork such as website templates or graphical work. I’ve used many myself. I’ve spent hours downloading different ones and I think they are great. What I had’nt tried was creating my own. So tonight about two hours ago I decided to create my own Photoshop brushes and write a tutorial on how I did it.

CREATE PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES QUICK AND EASY:

Firstly I used a mobile phone and went into the garden and took some basic photos of some leaves (yes there are many brushes out there already of leaves, but I found this the most easy thing to hand to create my first ever brushes)

Here is one of the pictures I took:

: Leaves from my garden

STEP ONE: First open your photo or image that you want to create into a brush in Photoshop.

: STEP ONE

STEP TWO: Change your image into Greyscale:

Open the photo you want to convert to black-and-white.
Choose Image > Mode > Grayscale.
Click Discard. Photoshop converts the colors in the image to black, white, and shades of gray.

STEP TWO

STEP THREE: Now we need to get rid of any background so we can make a good brush.

* Remember* Anything that is White will not be seen when the brush is created. It acts as transparent, so make anything white that you dont wish to be included when creating your brush.

We will be using the following tools in Photoshop.

: Quick Selection Tool

: Eraser Tool

Once you have selected all that you can with the quick selection tool go to EDIT and choose COPY. Then go File > NEW. It will automatically open a new document the correct size. Then select EDIT > PASTE. Once you have pasted your image onto a white background, now its time to tidy up the image with the eraser tool.
You will be left with something like this:

STEP FOUR: Now its time to save your new brush. So first go to EDIT > PRESET MANAGER

: STEP FOUR

Once here we need to delete your other brushes that are loaded so we only have the new brushes you create showing here. If we dont do this any other brushes you have loaded will join your newly created set. Once in preset manager press CTL +A to select ALL the brushes and then press the delete option. If your like me and had alot of other brushes loaded and you can’t be bothered to load them all separatly again, all you need to do it CTL+A and press SAVE SET, and save your brushes as a set instead of loading them all separate again.

(dont worry they are only deleted from this list not your computer)

STEP FIVE: Next. Go to EDIT> DEFINE BRUSH PRESET > and then name your newly created brush.

: STEP FIVE

Click OK and now you have created your first Photoshop brush!
Now follow this process for however many images/photos you want in this brush set. For my first try I only included 3 but you can add as many as you like to your brush set.

STEP SIX: Now it’s time to save all brushes as a set. So select your brush icon from your left hand side of icons in Photoshop. Once you do this, your brush toolbar will appear at the top of your Photoshop screen as your tool bar. Now we need you to click the drop down icon next to the selected brush. (1) A box like this will appear:

: STEP SIX

STEP SEVEN: Click the arrow in the circle as shown in the image below (2) and another menu will appear next to your open box.

STEP SEVEN

STEP EIGHT: Here is our last step. In the new menu that has appeared click SAVE BRUSHES… Now name your brush set and save it some where on your computer and there you have finished your new Photoshop brushes!

CONGRATULATIONS! It really is that easy

Here are the 3 brushes that I managed to create for my first try:

: Free Photoshop Brushes

* This article is written by Marie Barnes AKA Pixie of www.webdesignwhim.com Please do not copy our material and portray it as your own work. Feel free to post our articles but only without removing this notice and stating where you got this article from. Thank you *