Creating a Custom Brush in Photoshop Using a Photographic Texture

There is another way to create brushes in Photoshop that involves more than just tweaking default brushes. This method involves using images to create an almost endless supply of custom brushes. You can make brushes from photos or scanned images, or you can even draw your own.

This method of creating brushes is unbelievably simple and straightforward. In this section, we will create a brush from a photographic image, though you can use the same procedure for creating a brush from a drawing or anything else you can bring up within Photoshop.

Generally, you should look for imagery that has good contrasts between the lights and darks. For this example, a photo of tree bark makes the perfect subject (Figure 13.53). The image is included on the CD-ROM.

Figure 13.53: A photo of tree bark that is perfect for creating a custom brush.

While it is possible to make a brush as large as you want, for practical painting purposes it is probably best to stick with a brush that is around 200 pixels in the max direction. With the photo of the tree bark opened in Photoshop, resize the image so that the size of the image is 200 pixels in both dimensions, as shown in Figure 13.54.

Figure 13.54: The resized texture.

Though you can save a brush that is a combination of any width and height, square-based brushes seem to work very well. Increase the contrast somewhat and convert the image to grayscale, as shown in Figure 13.55.

Figure 13.55: The image converted to grayscale and contrast increased.

At this point you can, if you want, create a brush from this image. Actually, you can create a brush at any step in the process that suits you. To create the brush you simply go into the Edit menu and select Define Brush Preset, as shown in Figure 13.56.

Figure 13.56: The Define Brush Preset command.

Your new brush is displayed as a thumbnail in the Brush Name dialog box, shown in Figure 13.57.

Figure 13.57: Name your new brush.

Name the brush anything that you would like and click OK. You now have a new brush. The brush is at its rough state at this point. Now it is up to you to go into the brush options and tweak the brush to get it to behave just as you want.

While these steps will provide you with a perfectly usable brush, just the addition of a few more steps will give you a better and more customizable brush, so to continue do the following.

Once you have converted the image to grayscale and adjusted the contrast, to give you an idea of how the brush will look when painting, add an alpha channel under the Channels tab. It does not matter what you call the alpha; the default of 'Alpha 1' is just fine.

With the alpha channel active, pick the Gradient Fill tool and fill with a radial gradient using black and white, as shown in Figure 13.58.

Figure 13.58: The radial fill in the alpha channel.

Make the original layer active, and load the alpha channel as a selection. You should see marching ants around the middle of the image, as shown in Figure 13.59. You can see what the marching ants look like very lightly against the image.

Figure 13.59: The alpha channel loaded as a selection.

Copy, create a new image, and paste into the new image (Figure 13.60).

Figure 13.60: A new image created by pasting from the Clipboard.

Now you have a nice image that fades to white on the edges. Go ahead and tweak the contrast if you like. Once again, go to the Edit menu and select the Define Brush Preset command. Name your paper something descriptive and click Yes (Figure 13.61).

Figure 13.61: Saving your new brush.

The previous method will work with any image. With experimentation you will find a working method that suits your painting style best. A large number of rough brush libraries are included on the CD-ROM and were created using this procedure.

Now that you have created a number of different brushes, it is time to learn what to do with them. The next section describes how to save and create brush libraries. Use the following instructions and you will soon have a vast number of organized brush libraries that you can share with anyone who uses Photoshop.

Creating Brush Libraries of Your Custom Brushes

Assuming that you have created a number of new brushes and saved them, there is one last thing that you will want to do: create a library of your new brushes. The reason that you would want to do this is simple. Should you ever by accident (or intentionally) reset your brushes back to their default setting and if you have not saved all your custom brushes into another library, they will be lost.

It is very simple to save your own brushes, and you should do it regularly. Just select the Save Brushes command from the Brush Presets menu, as shown in Figure 13.62.

Figure 13.62: The Save Brushes command.

This opens a dialog box asking you what to call your new library and gives you the chance to save your library to any location on your computer, as shown in Figure 13.63.

Figure 13.63: Saving a brush library.

It is easiest to save to the default location so Photoshop always knows where to find your new brushes. Once you have saved your new brush library, you will want to open the Preset Manager (Figure 13.64). Here you can delete any brushes you may not want, rename, and click and drag the brush icons to rearrange the brushes.

Figure 13.64: The Brush Preset Manager.

There are several very good books that can take you deeper into Photoshop's brushes if you care to find out more information, but these few and simple steps will fill most all of your brush needs.

In this lengthy section, you have learned about Photoshop's powerful brush engine. You have learned how to tweak the default brushes to get them to behave for your particular painting style, how to create custom brushes from images, how to save brushes, and organize them into your own personal libraries. Beware that sometimes creating new and innovative brushes becomes almost as much fun as the actual painting.