Creating Custom Brushes

Quick reference

• 00:04 Some of you guys wanna know how to create a custom brush, based on a texture like fire.
• 00:07 So I going to show you exactly how to do that,
• 00:12 plus another thing can you do with custom brushes a little later on the video.
• 00:16 So this image here I found over at Shutterstock dot com, where I get most
• 00:21 my images because they're incredibly high quality.
• 00:23 But of course you guys can find them pretty much anywhere.
• 00:26 The reason I choose Shutterstock is because if you take a look at the image
• 00:29 size,
• 00:30 8,000 by 8,000 at 300 DPI and if I zoom in to a hundred percent these images are massive.
• 00:35 So let me show you exactly how to extract these flames
• 00:41 and create a brush.
• 00:42 The first thing that we need to do, is to get rid of the black background.
• 00:46 And to do that we're going you something I told you guys about,
• 00:49 the Blend If feature.
• 00:52 Now if I go over to my Layers panel hold down my alt or option key and double-click on
• 00:57 the background layer, that will then be converted into a layer.
• 00:59 Now if I double click on that, its gonna bring up my layer styles dialog box,
• 01:03 Where at the bottom we have the blend if feature.
• 01:07 Now this feature allows you to work with this layer, or the underlying layer, but
• 01:11 as we only have one layer we're gonna be focusing on this layer.
• 01:15 And we want to get rid of the black areas where the shadows are.
• 01:18 So I'm gonna drag
• 01:19 this slider right here to the right, which you'll notice definitely does get
• 01:23 rid of the blacks.
• 01:24 But we have a problem: if you zoom in
• 01:27 you'll see it's very harsh and jagged. We don't want that, we want it
• 01:31 nice and smooth.
• 01:32 So i'm ganna drag this back a little bit somewhere around there:
• 01:36 and now with my option key held down on the Mac, Alt key
• 01:39 on Windows, I'm gonna drag the right part of the slider to the right.
• 01:42 You will notice we now have much
• 01:46 smoother extraction. Perfect!
• 01:49 I'm gonna press OK to accept the changes and now we're ready to create
• 01:53 a brush so how do we do this? Well the first step is very simple: we're gonna
• 01:57 grab our Rectangular Marquee tool from the Tools bar on the left
• 02:01 in a few zoom into one of these flames would say this one at the bottom right
• 02:05 hand corner
• 02:05 I can simply drag out a box around it
• 02:08 Now any point you wanna move that selection, hold on your space bar and
• 02:12 drag away.
• 02:13 I'll place it right there: perfect! My selection is complete.
• 02:18 Now how do I make this into a brush. Well it simple: under the Edit menu at the top
• 02:23 we go over here,
• 02:24 and down to Define Brush Preset we can go ahead and a name our brush
• 02:28 'long flame' and press ok.
• 02:31 Now that was the easy part. But what if you wanted a
• 02:34 flame like this over here where there are things obstructing it from using the
• 02:38 Rectangular Marquee Tool? You know despite
• 02:40 make a selection we have part of this flame in the way. Well it not that Simple:
• 02:44 we have to use a different selection method.
• 02:47 But luckily any selection method will work, so I can go back to my tools bar.
• 02:52 I'm gonna grab my Polygonal Lasso tool and very simply
• 02:56 create a selection. And its really nice, you don't have to have
• 03:04 a rectangular or a circular selection tool. It can be as obscure as you want it.
• 03:08 So now that we have another selection once again: Edit/
• 03:11 Define Brush Preset: I'm gonna name this one short flame and press OK.
• 03:15 Now we have two brush's defined, let me go ahead make a
• 03:20 new document,
• 03:21 and make it 1000 by 1000; 72 DPI and press OK.
• 03:27 I'm gonna fill the layer with black. Now, I don't wanna paint on this layers, I'm going to
• 03:31 make one new layer down here my layers panel.
• 03:34 And I'm gonna grab my brush to apply pressure in the B key on my keyboard
• 03:38 and right click to bring on my brush picker. It can also be accessed at the
• 03:41 top left corner of your options bar.
• 03:43 Now any new brushy defined will be placed at the bottom of your brush
• 03:47 picker so scroll down
• 03:49 and there we go: we have our first long flame brush,
• 03:53 and we have a second short flame brush. Let me go ahead and grab this one
• 03:56 I'm gonna set my color to
• 04:00 blue and press OK.
• 04:04 You'll notice because I used a massive image to make the brushes, the brush is big.
• 04:08 Now the adventure of this if you started with a very small image
• 04:12 scaling your brush upwards will result in pixelation: you don't want that.
• 04:17 So start with an image as large as possible which is why I recommend stock image sites
• 04:21 like Shutter stock.
• 04:22 This wa,y if I use the left square bracket here my keyboard I can
• 04:26 decrease the size of this brush and lose very little quality because I'm
• 04:31 decreasing and I'm not stretching out those pixels.
• 04:34 So all you have to do is click and you have a brush
• 04:38 click again to make a little bit stronger and there's your flame.
• 04:41 I can right click again select this flame
• 04:44 make this one smaller because its massive,
• 04:48 and let me go ahead and change the color. Let's go for red.
• 04:51 press OK and click again and duplicate as many times as you like to
• 04:55 increase the opacity of that brush: because as you extract things from a
• 04:59 background,
• 05:00 even if you use the blend if, features chances are it won't be a hundred
• 05:04 percent opacity.
• 05:05 but it'll be pretty close. So that's how to quickly create
• 05:09 brushes using textures in Photoshop. You can make as many brushes as you want
• 05:14 You take a look, this image has a lot of different flames we can extract and
• 05:17 create custom brushes with; it's fantastic.
• 05:20 But let me show you one more thing you can do with custom brushes. Let me create
• 05:23 another new document
• 05:25 600 by 200, and let's say 200 DPI press OK.
• 05:30 This time we're going to create a signature. so what I'm going to do is change
• 05:34 my brush because
• 05:34 I don't like this brush. I guess like a nice hard brush,
• 05:38 it definitely doesn't have to be this big so decrease that: nice and small.
• 05:41 I'm gonna make my brush black
• 05:45 press OK and use my Waco tablet to very quickly sign my name.
• 05:49 tTis isn't my actual signature but it'll do.
• 05:53 So I've signed my name and now I want to create a custom brush
• 05:57 out of my signature. So, once again, under the Edit Menu,
• 06:00 go down to Define Brush Preset
• 06:04 name it 'signature' and press OK. So now if I have any
• 06:08 photographs that i want to sign, as like a copyright, I can simply go into my brush
• 06:13 picker
• 06:13 select my signature brush; make a size that I want and click.
• 06:17 And I now have my signature
• 06:21 on my photos.

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