Brushes

Brushes

You can make a brush out of anything in Photoshop, from type to photos. Just make a selection, and then from the Edit menu choose Define Brush Preset. Before we look at some specific examples, a couple of important notes first:

Brushes are defined using shades of gray, so if you select a portion of a color photo, your brush will be a grayscale version of the selected area of the photo.

You'll need to click on the Foreground color swatch and choose a color in the Picker. Now your new brush will be a color- tinted version of the grayscale brush. Also, try to define a brush at a large size. Although it is theoretically possible to scale the brush size larger, in many cases the quality will suffer when you make the brush size larger after it has been defined.

The following are some examples of custom brushes you can create. The first example will show you how it's done:

Step One.
Use any selection tool to select the area you want to use as a brush. You can apply feathering (Select>Feather) to soften the edges of your brush if you wish. Note: One of the quirks of Photoshop is that if you have nothing selected, it's the same as using Select>All. So if you have nothing selected and choose Edit>Define Brush Preset, you'll make a brush from the entire document.

ISTOCKPHOTO/SANG NGUYEN

Step Two.
From the Edit menu choose Define Brush Preset. In the resulting dialog, name your brush and click OK.

Step Three.
Now, to use your new brush, add a new blank layer (Command-Shift-N [PC: Control-Shift-N]) to your document, and choose a Foreground color. Press B to switch to the Brush tool, and in the Options Bar, choose your brush from the bottom of the Brush Picker (it's the down- facing arrow to the right of the word "Brush"). Click once in your document to paint. If the brush is too big, press the Left Bracket key ([) to make it smaller, or if it's too small, press the Right Bracket key (]).

ISTOCKPHOTO/JUSTIN HORROCKS

Step Four.
This isn't really a step, unless you want to save the brushes you've created as a set. Just use the same method we used for swatches. (You remember don't you? Go to Edit>Preset Manager, choose Brushes in the Preset Type pop-up menu, select your brushes, and then click Save Set, right?)

Here are a few more examples:

ISTOCKPHOTO/NAOMI HASEGAWA

A brush defined from a Type layer.

ISTOCKPHOTO/LISE GAGNE

A brush defined from an image of old text, with the layer blend mode set to Luminosity.

ISTOCKPHOTO/DARROCH PUTNUM

A brush defined from a scanned signature.

By the way, if you use the Brushes palette (it's nested in the Palette Well), you can alter any of the brushes you've defined. Here I clicked on Brush Tip Shape and changed the angle of rotation. Then I made the brush larger and clicked once to paint on a new layer. Finally, I changed the layer blend mode to Lighten and lowered the Opacity to 40%.



Photoshop CS2 Help Desk Book
The Photoshop CS2 Help Desk Book
ISBN: 0321337042
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 225
Authors: Dave Cross

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