Section 3: Creating Your Own Photoshop Brushes

Why with all the brushes that already ship with Photoshop would anyone want to create their own brushes? The answer to this question is simple. You save custom brushes to do exactly what you want when you want to do it. You could, if you had the time and inclination, re-create a brush or create an entirely new brush every time you painted , but this would indeed be a lengthy and time-consuming way of working. Or suppose you are commissioned to do a series of images that all need to look and feelsimilar. Being able to create and save libraries and variants of brushes makes this possible. Fortunately, within Photoshop you do have the ability to create and save brushes and brush libraries. You can create an entire custom set for every project you work on if you care to. In this section we look at creating and organizing your brushes.

Creating and Saving Brushes in Photoshop

You already have learned how to change the settings of the default brushes to get them to behave like you want by using the brush options. Suppose there is one custom brush that you keep coming back to time and time again. Here is how to save your new brush to the Tools Preset menu.

Click on the Brush Preset Picker icon located on the left of the Tool Options bar. From the menu that opens, click on the small triangle in the circular button on the top left of the menu (Figure 13.49).

Figure 13.49: Click the small triangle on the Brush Preset Picker.

This displays a menu loaded with different commands. The top command is New Brush Preset. Click this and a dialog box opens asking you to name your new brush, as shown in Figure 13.50.

Figure 13.50: The New Brush Preset command.

Name your brush and click OK. Your newly saved brush now appears at the bottom of the entire list of brushes. It is as simple as that. There is even a small shortcut you can use if you want, and this is displayed on the Brush Preset Picker menu. This time, instead of clicking on the small triangle, click the button that is directly below it. This immediately opens the dialog box shown in Figure 13.51, where you can name your brush and save it.

Figure 13.51: The Save Brush dialog box.

You may have noticed that there are a lot of additional items on the menu displayed by clicking on the triangle on the Brush Preset Picker (Figure 13.52). For the most part, these commands are self-explanatory, but let's go over them quickly here.

Figure 13.52: All the commands.

Below the New Brush Preset command are two commands, Rename Brush and Delete Brush, which do just what they say; rename or delete brushes in the preset list.

The next six commands change the way the brushes are displayed in the Brush Preset picker. The best way to see what they do is to click on them and see what changes.

The next command opens the Preset Manager. Here you can arrange, name, delete, and perform a number of different operations on your brush libraries.

The next four commands do the following: the Reset Brushes command resets the brushes in Photoshop back to the default library and settings; Load Brushes allows you to load additional or custom brush libraries; Save Brushes lets you save all of the currently loaded brushes into a custom library; and Replace Brushes replaces the currently loaded library with a different one. Below those commands, you will see a list of brush libraries currently available to Photoshop.