How to make your own Photoshop brushes

Making your own custom Photoshop brushes is really quite quick and simple. This is a short guide on creating your own basic brush from an image found on the web. I’ll be writing more Photoshop tutorials in the near future, so be sure to subscribe to my feedburner feed. I’ll be using Adobe Photoshop CS3 for this tutorial.
You can make Photoshop brushes from practically any image, but you first need to think about a few things.

To create a brush, you simply select an image, part of an image, or shape and go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Photoshop will then create a new brush by taking the shape, image or area you have selected, converting it to black and white, and then using the black areas for solid pixels, white areas for transparent pixels, and grey areas for different levels of opacity depending on the grey tone.

This means you can create brushes that feature fades, transparent areas, or whole solid blocks of colour. Here’s an example of an image that has simply been turned into a brush and then used with the black colour selected.

Original Image (courtesy of Sias van Schalkwyk);

Output from sampled image;

Looks like a simple grey scale image, right? Let’s add a background behind it and see how it looks.

Background image;

Output when brush is used over background;

As you can see, the blue background form the original image has been converted to a mid-grey colour, which darkens the bright background because it’s not completely transparent. Notice also how the highlights on the ducks have also been converted to a slightly lighter shade of grey, which has a lower opacity level and so doesn’t darken the background as much.

On the other hand the shadows of the ducks are completely black and so have an opacity level of 100%, which means they are not see-through at all, resulting in a solid area of colour.

Let’s assume  that you don’t want a semi-transparent brush, you want a brush of just the ducks in flight. This means we need to isolate the ducks, which is easy enough thanks to the solid blue background of the original image. You could use the Quick Selection Tool or the Magic Wand to select the blue and then invert it but that’s fiddly, and over complicated for this particular image. It’s easier to simply convert the image to black and white and then adjust the levels so that we have solid black ducks contrasted against a pure white background.

With the image selected, go to Image > Adjustments > Black and White (alternatively you use the shortcut Alt + Shift + Ctrl +B). Move the Cyans slider right the way to the end, then move the Blues slider up until the background is pure white.

Here’s how the image should now look;

Now that we have effectively removed the background, we can adjust the levels on the ducks to make them a solid black.

From the menu bar, again go to Image > Adjustments and this time select Levels. Click on  the small black arrow beneath the Input Levels graph and slide it to the right. Ensure that Preview is ticked so that you can view the levels changing on the image in real-time as you adjust them. When you’re happy that the ducks are completely black click ‘OK’ to save the level adjustments.

If you’ve adjusted the sliders quite far, chances are you may notice a few specks of grey within the white area here and there. This is easily rectified by upping the brightness on the white area. Got to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and slide the Brightness slider up until the specks are gone (again, you may need to tick ‘Preview’).

Here’s how my image looks after these adjustments.

Perfect. Now all me need to do is ensure the image is selected (if it’s a layer) and go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Give it a name and click ‘OK’

We can now select the brush from the brushes pallet.  Press F5 to open it and ensure you have the brush tool selected, otherwise the pallet will be greyed out.

Great, the brush is there added to the end of the brush set that you currently have selected. From here you can adjust the settings for individual presets, such as spacing, scale and rotation, and save them as a new preset. This allows you to create a number of different brushes from the same original preset. I’ll be going into a bit more detail about the preset settings in a later post.

Now we need to save it to ensure that we don’t lose it. Beneath the minus sign in the top right corner of the brush pallet is a tiny arrow. Click that and you should be presented with a list of all the brush sets you have installed, as well as some other menu options at the start of the list. From this list, select Preset Manager.

You will probably see many brush presets here, with your brush placed at the very end. Press Ctrl + A to select all the brushes here, then Ctrl + Left Mouse Click on your brush preset to deselect it. Click the Delete button on the right and your brush should be the only one left.

Now simply select your brush, click Save Set, give it a name to save it to your system and you’re done! You can now go back and play around with the preset settings if you like. Here I adjusted various colour jitters, as well as some shape jitters and just drew away.

Hmm, it could almost be a Jackson Pollack!

Hopefully you found this tutorial of use. If not, please let me know why via the comments below, and I will refine it or clarify with a reply. I’ll be writing more tutorials and guides on future so make sure to subscribe to my feedburner feed or follow me on twitter.

I’m also open to brush and tutorial requests via comments, emails or tweets!

© Copyright Paul Murray 2010

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