Making cool photoshop brushes from scratch. 8-14-09

There are a lot of things out there to show you how to make a photoshop brush as far as putting something in a file and saying Edit, define brush, etc. But, there is almost nothing, at least that I have found, that teaches you HOW to make cool photoshop brushes. I think it's assumed you have to be a photoshop guru to make a photoshop brush. Not so. So if you've always wanted to know just how to make a cool photoshop brush without that much photoshop skill, read on.

Download the brushes shown here below:

Cool photoshop brushes

To demonstrate how easy it is to make cool photoshop brushes, I had my 2 year old daughter doodle on a piece of paper so that I could make it a photoshop brush for demonstration.

So what's the secret to making cool photoshop brushes? In a few words, white pixels equal transparent pixels. That's right, you can take any piece of white paper and any marker, crayon, pencil, charcoal, paint, etc. and doodle on that white piece of paper to make your cool photoshop brush come to life. You don't need any photoshop expertise in order to make a great photoshop brush. If you're great with physical media, use your strengths to make your photoshop brushes. All you have to do is scan it in or take a digital picture of it, open it in photoshop and you're half way there.

If you have a newer version of photoshop, CS3 and up I believe (it could be as early as CS2, but I'm not sure) you can make a new file, 2500x2500 pixels at 300 resolution greyscale to make your brush. Older versions I think are maxed out at 1000px. With your new file open, go over to your scan or picture, select all, copy, and go back over to your new brush file and paste. You can scale if you need to to get it to fit just right.

Why is grayscale important for making photoshop brushes? Because if white pixels equal transparent pixels, then black pixels equal opaque pixels. All the other grayish pixels are assigned an opacity that correlates to how dark or light the are. The lighter they are the more transparent they will be. So when you work with greyscale you'll get really good idea of how your brushes will look.

Once you have your artwork in your brush document. Play with the curves, and levels to achieve different effects. When you're done flatten your image, CMD a, to select all, and click edit, define brush preset, and give it a name. That's it. Once you have your brush, you can adjust the size, angle, and orientation of your brush in the brushes pallet.

If you are seeing a grayed out Define Brush Presets, your file is likely too large. Check the image size with image, image size and adjust if necessary.

This process with work anything. Say for example you are great in illustrator. You can use illustrator to make your brushes. Vector brushes are very nice, but you can also learn about making brushes inside of photoshop by playing with opacity, brush hardness, and size. You can use photography in conjunction with the levels and other adjustment settings. Take a picture of a really great sky and you can make it a brush. There are all sorts of tricks to white out the sky and keep the clouds or visa versa. In short, photoshop brushes are just pieces of artwork, don't worry about making the artwork a standalone piece on a transparent background. The real secret here is white equals transparent.

Download these photoshop brushes here. To install them, unzip and put them in your presets/brushes folder by CMD clicking your photoshop icon to open the package contents.