Photoshop brushes are fun to use and easy to make. They also save a lot of time if you are doing repetitive image editing. Making and giving away your own brushes is a great way to give back to the community. They’re better than downloading free Photoshop brushes because you have control over the subject matter. But how do you do it? Here’s a short tutorial on how to make Photoshop brushes.
How to Make Photoshop Brushes
Get Photoshop up and running and open the image or illustration you want to convert into a brush. Go ahead and save it as a different file name. Also, it’s generally a good practice to know where your images came from—make sure it’s okay to use and redistribute the image first. Images in the public domain and those published before 1923 are great ones to work with, as there’s no possibility you’re infringing on someone else’s copyright.
The image I’m working with was taken from an old newspaper ad. I have it sized as 800×800, but brushes can be as big as 2500 px. Know that, like all bitmap images, you lose quality and resolution if you have to upscale an image, so bigger is always better (who wants 100 px brushes anyway?).
Isolate your subject matter on the image. You can do this many different ways depending on the type of image you’re working with: the Magic Wand tool (W), the Lasso tool (L), and the Eraser tool (E), all work wonders on getting rid of unwanted material. Other ways to isolate material involve manipulating the threshold, posterizing, and changing the contrast and brightness of the image.
Once you’ve isolated the image, you’ll need to clear the brushes that are currently loaded in your library. Go to Edit >> Preset Manager and Ctrl + A to select all brushes. Select Delete. This will not permanently delete your brushes; it will just delete them from the active brush menu so you can save just your own brushes as a set. If you don’t delete them, once you save the set, the other brushes will be saved with your newly created ones. Hit Done.
Now, we want to define this image as a brush. To do this, go to Edit >> Define Brush Preset. You will have the option of naming the brush.
Now, if you go to your Brushes Palette, you will see your new brush. Save as many brushes as you want this way to make a set. When you have all the brushes you want, in your Brushes Palette, select the drop-down arrow on the top right of the dialog box, then select Save Brushes. Name your brush set and make sure you save the brushes in the right spot–for Windows, it’s Program Files >> Adobe >> Adobe Photoshop >> Presets >> Brushes. If you have Vista like I do (blech!), it won’t let you save directly to this folder, so save the brushes to your desktop and then drag the set (it will just be one file) into the folder.
There you have it–your very own Photoshop brushes! Once you see how little time it takes to make them, you’ll be creating all your own sets.
If you’d like a free download of the set that I used in this tutorial, visit my post on Free Adobe Photoshop Brushes.
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Comments
10.16.09
… I also find myself torn between the coffee shop and my dual monitor setup
11.04.09
May I suggest ABR Viewer as an alternative to loading and trying each brush in Photoshop? It’s free, and I use it regularly. You may find this a great time-saving alternative!
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Hope it helps!
11.04.09
Thanks for the referral, Cyndi! I’ll have to spend some time tonight trying it out.
02.11.10
I love you to pieces man!!
10.14.10
I wished and wished for a Mac, then was given one at work.
So I moved all my files over.
I HATE it. I’m a designer. I have about 50 folders for 50 different projects. I name the banner psd “banner.psd” for all of them. Try and search for them all, yeah the Mac finds them but then you have to do “get info” for each one (or change some such setting and still click on each to see where the dang thing is located. On windows. I glanced at the path to the folder and voila. Yeah changing permissions on Vista is a headache but it’s far better than the constant problems I have on the Mac. Photoshop is twitchy at best, the thing crashes, although my Roku, PS3, Wii, personal laptop all do fine with my wirless, the mac drops it all the time. I use multiple monitors. Oh my god what idiot thought of leaving the application menu on one screen when the application is on another? You can only choose one little sprout because Steve Jobs knows better than you how you should work.
can’t wait to ditch it.
sorry tirade over.
ps tons of free windows applications out there.
11.26.10
Um… how about not naming all of your files the same name? Sounds more like an organizational issue than an operating system issue, either way.
I might recommend using an identifier and THEN _banner.psd? I assume it’d be difficult to find photos as well if every picture on a drive had its own folder and was named “photo.jpg”.
Examples:
Projectname_size_banner.psd
Clientname_size_banner.psd
etc…
04.17.11
Ok, so… I’m a total newbie to photoshop. I have CS5 and a brickton of brushes. I have tried renaming them, but they do NOT show up in the list like I want them to. I’ve played around with it for like a half hour. Can anyone please help?