Lessons

Lesson Info

Day 22: Painting & Brush Options

here we are on day twenty two time flies when you're having fun with photo shop doesn't well this today's topic is also a very interesting and fun one because I'm going to show you a bunch of options to get you started but really the sky's the limit here when we talk about working with brushes and painting options so we're gonna talk about the brush tool and some of its settings and a little bit on tools like the mixer brush tool but a lot of the rolls and talk about how you can make your own brushes in some very interesting ways was basically anything in photo shop could be made into a brush so when you click on the brush to on photo shop and look at the brush picker and see the collection of brushes that are available those are just the ones that adobe then there's a pull down menu of other choices and if you're ever looking for something to do for I know on our two going to google and type three photoshopped brushes and I'll bet you'll be amazed at the collection of things you find ...

there because you'll find there's a whole community of people out there that create brushes and share them with everyone just because they like doing that so you'll find just about every possible topic you could find if you want brushes of spider webs and and retro advertising icons and who knows what else you can find them and then you can load them into photo shop very very easily so that's one of the cool parts about working in photo shop before we get into the brush aside let's just talk a little bit about painting in general and some of the options we could do that khun really dramatically alter the way a brush is applied when you paint with it so in typical fashion I have a background layer but I also want to add a blank layer so I paint on there just to make sure and if I didn't already mention this here's a little suggestion for you forever wondering why your brush is not displaying the way it should be because right now I'm single across here that's the caps lock key when the caps lock key is turned on you see a little precise cursor when he's turned off you see the actual brush so let's go up here and find first of all one of the typical brushes that comes in photo shop which is this little maple leaf and it already has some setting so let's just clear all this off so we have the way it normally would look so few normally clicked on a brush then you would say all right first of all I need my color picker to choose the color of my brush and she was this color right here and if I just click once it paints one if I click and drag it just does a big stroke because the brush by default is spaced so one piles right on top of another so in general we have in the picker we have the option of changing the size of the brush if it's a shape brush the hardness option will not be available if it's one of these bill ten brushes then we can adjust the hardness to make the edge softer or not now any time you have a brush if you try to make it too much bigger than the original you can see the edge of this brush is not looking very good so like anything else in photo shop if we increase the size it's never gonna look as good as we need to find the right happy medium where that's a good enough size for what we want so now let's start to look at some of the really interesting options as to how this brush can be applied and it's this one here first of all this brush presets is showing me this is what some of the brushes looked like including the kind of stroke you get so sometimes just looking at the icon of a brush doesn't really help us imagine what is that brush going to do whereas if we look at this one we can see an indication of this is the kind of effect you'll get from this brush pre set which is very helpful when you're trying to figure out what is this actually going to do now the other one we use all the time is this brush panel this is where we can control everything you can possibly imagine about this brush from the size of the brush and then even just putting on a slight angle let's undo those put back also as we'll see it'll make better sense with other brushes I could take this and make it kind of a squished brush so now I'm changing quite dramatically both the angle and the way it looks in terms of its appearance I want to be pretty much straight up and down and then we start getting into things like spacing so with a shape like this one where a leaf and I want to see a bunch of leafs let me we set it backto normal got it set on some weird option here okay a lot of work for a while I'll show you and if I put the spacing at the lowest is one percent of that means you get this really overlapping brush of fact as soon as I start to increase the spacing you'll see it's saying well I want to have more space between each one of the brushes and if you go high enough it'll really pushed them far apart now this preview is quite helpful but I think most people find that you actually want to paint on your image itself because sometimes the scales a little different this one happens to be about the same but sometimes is different enough that you really want to be ableto make sure you're getting a result that you want so I when I'm playing with these things I like to have a document and the layer and I just do a quick brush stroke and then undo it and all right that's pretty good let's try this and put spacing like this maybe that's a little better now all of these things kind of pile on top of another so one of the things that you'll find as you start experimenting is sometimes you may need to change the spacing then go on change some other factor like scattering or size jitter and then once you do that then go back to the spacing so don't be surprised if you have to jump around a little bit between these factors but that's what's going to give you the different options and the different results when you're actually painting so now let's jump into things like shape dynamics and we saw this a little bit earlier and earlier lesson when we talked about that little hair idea so right now shape dynamics turn on you see instantly something's happening and that's because some of these air turned on I'm using pressure sensitive pen so I can control it with that or you could just turn it off to say don't change that at all or feign which again is that command that means overtime I'd like you to do it so I'm going to use pen pressure since I have and size jeter means over time how much do you want the size to change a little bit or a lot you can change the minimum diameter so it's a tiny a percentage of the original or not too much I want my these particular leaves to be not quite so dramatically altering I can also change the angle jitter angle again jitter means overtime what do I want to change in this case you see I can say I want the angle to change very slightly or a whole lot and do I want them to be really rounded or not I can change that as well so now if I just paint you'll see it's just kind of changing slightly is going around a little bit if I press harder or softer it's going to change that on the fly so if I make a considerable difference let's make the minimum time we're quite a much and the angles that are a lot more could see now as I paint it's changing quite a bit more from over time each time and of course this is going very dramatically with the shape that you have then we can go to scattering do you want them to scatter do you wanna have one brush that just scatters a little bit have very little scatter so they'll be kind of stay in a relatively straight line or a lot of scatter so even though I'm trying to paint up here on a straight line it goes all over the place now this is one thing I want to mention right up front because scatter while it could be a really interesting command sometimes it if you have the higher you have the scatter function set it could be a little bit almost frustrating because you're going to paint right there and it appears over here because the scatter is just saying well that's what you told me scattered quite dramatically so when you're tryingto painted the particular area might take a few brushstrokes to say that's where I want that piece of paint to go overall though the scattered command is very useful and you can have multiple counts so if I want to have a whole bunch of leafs I can put the count up a little high and say overtime I want the count to khun change quite a bit and now just by painting I'm getting ah whole bunch of leafs all over the place on top of that and these are all again build on things you notice by the way I should pause and mention this that each one of these has a little padlock symbol so if you want to decide that from now on I want this brush to always do this one thing I can lock it and then it will stay this way I'm going to keep him unlock for now then I go to texture if they do I want some texture in here and we can access all of our patterns that we did previously including ones that have the brick wall maybe probably would look weird if I did that so I probably would use some of these built in patterns that I loaded previously which are the different art artistic paper and things like that we can scale it up and down weaken change the contrast to make it mohr or less obvious and again I'm taking advantage of this preview here and you can even decide do you want to change almost like the blend mode of how the texture interacts with the background so now you see him getting a much different effect now keep in mind throughout this whole thing and I should have mentioned this more specifically all I'm doing right now say all cause a pretty big change but the factor that I'm affecting right now is how the brushes applied it doesn't change the fact that I've said red as my foreground color so throw this whole thing red happens in my four on color so that's the effect that I'm getting and all these other effects are being apply through the way that this brush is working the settings that I'm choosing and as you see is we can keep going we can adjust that even more so that's kind of interesting dual brush means you're going to actually say I'd like to combine the brush I have with some kind of a texture brush of some kind and depending on how a combination you make it's going to have a very different effect because now in this case you see some of the leaves are actually disappearing because as combining this brush with the other one I don't like that option quite a cz much for situations like this but you never know that's the beauty of this experimental sort of face I'm gonna turn that off color dynamics is a really interesting one let's go and say okay we've got our foreground color is red let's make kind of an orangey ish color for our background color so now we're going to say let's make the jitter the change between foreground and background pretty high so that means as I paint you see it's automatically just changing on the fly between these two colors so I can do that I can change the huge it er so it's even more noticeable and puts more colors in between or keep it really low to say I really wanted to stick between those two colors are not introduce any other one so if you want like a rainbow effect you put this really high we have saturation jitter that's going to change over time as well so any time you see the word jitter that means overtime make some change and in many situations you'll find that the combination you do you say well let's see what happens if I do this and part of what makes this both interesting and potentially little frustrating at first is there's so many factors here that you might use a brush and kind of go why is that happening and it's one of those little factors in there but that's where we come through this experimentation this doesn't have this little preview of the bottom while it's useful I find you really have to paint it in context to see if it's going if you're gonna like it or not that's why we paint undo or you could also do this make a selection of the whole thing I've done select also now when I drag with my paintbrush agnes hit delete anytime I can try something so it's the same as undoing it a little quicker in some ways and we also have other options like transfer where do we want our brush to beam or less capacity so much more opaque I should say so over time I'm now making brushes that are partially see through now I may find that the combination of the texture I don't like it as much so let's delete that try yes I think I like that a little better I'm still having some variety of opacity and color dynamics but now that I do all that this is where I might go back and say you know what I think I might change the size jitter even more and let's see what that looks like like that lot that's cool and then we can also go in and if we have a tablet with the pen one of the functions that photo shop reads from the pen is not on ly the pressure sensitivity but the angle of the pen so what this allows me to brush poses almost like saying the same kind of thing if you don't have a pen you can adjust it in here but even with that turnoff I'm able to adjust different settings just by the angle with which I tilt my panel just checking to see you could actually see that as I'm doing I'm tilting and trying different options let's assume for a moment that I said okay I'm liking this combination I want the texture back on there and that's about all I want what's maybe put some build up some of these options out the bottoms he don't have any real options you just either turned them on or turn them off and see if you like it if I met the point like I really like that combination and I want to be able to use it on ongoing basis then I can save this as another one of my presets click on this button call it new preset and it's giving me the ability to include or create some name and I can also decide I would like you to remember the original brush size that I had which was seventy four and now when I click okay that brush preset means anytime I click on it I don't have to go back in and remember how did I get to this henry's halt I couldn't do it very easily now if I go and say all right well that's pretty cool let's get rid of all the stuff on here let's just go back and get a regular old brush with a soft edge so I should just be able to paint a straight brush line with it because hopefully as I was touching all those settings I did not click that padlock symbol beside them if I did it means this new brush quite possibly would suddenly have some weird settings on it wouldn't have spacing and everything else so ideally before you go to use any other brush just take a quick look to a quick brush stroke and make sure it works the way that you want you can very quickly tell as soon as I go onto something like I just clicked on shape dynamics that's completely changing the aspect of how this brush works now I can get kind of a much weirder line around the outside that might serve the purpose that I want let's talk a little bit will come back to this occasionally to try some other things but also just using the brush itself in different ways of course I can just paint with it I can also one of the things you see is a recurring theme and you notice that when we talked about the healing brush at one point the spot healing brush is if you want to paint a line instead of me trying to click and drag my brush in a relatively straight line instead I can click once hold down the shift key and click another time and it automatically paints that line now you can see this brush stroke is doing something else because it has some other setting in it that's creating that effect so it's because I have shaped dynamics turned on if I turned that off completely I would click up here shift click down here and it just paints a straight line I can continue to do a siri's of click move click and I just got the shifty held on the whole time so any time you're tryingto paint a straight line and this isn't just with this paint brushes again any tool that uses painting type functions like healing and cloning and everything else it's the same idea so instead of trying to drag along a straight line you click once hold on the shift key click a second time and it fills in that line for you as we are painting now the brushes that we're looking at here the the brush tips as it were is just part of the puzzle you can make anything you want into a brush just by identifying it really by either selecting it or opening a document and the way that it works is fairly simple let's just create little document here so you can see it so I'm just going to take my text tool and type something on here okay just fix us up just a little bit and let's say for the sake of argument I want to make a brush out of this so I could just click with it and have my name there now this could be anything it could be a copyright notice as you'll see in a minute we'll do it with a a photograph for our scan of a signature anything you want but the key to this working is this black is my brush white is see through so when you look at a document or a photograph for anything the darkest parts of that will be the brush the lightest parts will be see through so because I have black text on a white background it's going to work like a charm and I'll have a brush which is completely the way that I want and I would suggest for the most part if you have the option you want to define your brush as close to one hundred percent as you can way back in one of the early lessons I talked about setting yourself a ceiling that a few for example on a layer took your paintbrush and painted fifty percent see through fifty percent capacity you could never go higher than fifty percent and the same theory applies here if I define a brush and it's fifty percent gray that means my brush will always be fifty percent c thru and that's okay if you want that but I've seen that happen to people and they're like chalk on my brush isn't working properly because it's not black and white it's great and I'll show you the minute the difference of how that works but in this case I don't have to do anything other than go to the edit menu and shoes defined brush pre set and it says there you go there's your brush now I could switch to a different document I still have a layer there and we're going to pick some color that's the one we want now I go to my brush tool and way down the bottom is the tool that I just created it showing me it's this big because I have my preference set to say show me the shape of my brush I can see it and if I want a brush right here I just click one click and I've got a brush of course if I painted with it it would just be well weird so this is where once again come back here and say well let's see what happens if we change the spacing and the shape dynamics I don't know if I necessarily want to mama mia will rotate a little bit keep this off now as I'm painting it's just randomly adding dave's all the heck over the place but again here you see what's happening it looks to me like okay I've got the brushing over here I'm gonna click right here and it changes completely the other direction and as I mentioned before yes that can be frustrating but that's the price you pay for the creative part of these brushes of the fact that the jitter is random means sometimes you want to click right there and it will go and switching around complete different and that's just well life that's the life of working with brushes now let's come back here and say just for the sake of argument if I decided or didn't think about it and defined the brush so now my brushes great so we'll choose on make another new brush and come back to this document and I still have my brushes set to normal capacity one hundred let's go back to our buy everything has turned off with back to being normal I need to go and get my new brush I just made this is thie one you'll see I've got my color nice and dark but as soon as I click is automatically semi see through and I can't do anything except if I tried to click enough times and build it up and that's the the potential drawback to defining your brush out of something that's not black now if you want to create an effect maybe you're making old fashioned type that's really really you wanted to be very vague and blurry or something then you might want to do that but that's the kind of thought process we have tto go through when we're doing this okay so basically what it means is anything at all can be a brush so I'm just going to take this close up photo I took of some old wallpaper or something on ivan sure what it is and just see what happens I don't need it to be that big let's just make it smaller okay open that up and I'm not gonna do anything else except define it as a brush to see what happens now now that I've done that I can look and go is it black and white no it's got some areas that are somewhat dark but not that dark and some areas that are light but clearly not white so this brush will not be one hundred percent opaque with zero percent background it'll be somewhere in the middle so here now I have this prophecy it's already activated and when I click interesting might be a possibility but you see if I hide for a second it's it's not pure let me actually do it this way show you if I switch it to black it's not really pure black but it's not bad but this is kind of what we go through when we're trying things so if I wanted to try and make this more interesting this is what I would do is go back in here and I would convert it to a grey scale and then see if I can't play with my settings enough say I want to make the shadows really black and the whites really white that much okay now remember what's black is the brush what's light is not the brush on this case I might actually want it the other way round well because it's a camera smart object I can'tjust invert it using normally I would just go here and choose invert but you see that's great out but I can add an adjustment layer that does invert so now I can look at and say well that's not bad let's add levels on top of that and start to see if we can't darken up the black a little bit mohr and lighten up our background now let's choose I have to just do whoops sorry have to go back to my background and again choose defined brush preset and I'll just keep coming back to the same document so we can see now when I click you see it's a lot darker if I choose some color they will get that effect and of course I can still scale the brush down for some reason or if I really wanted to especially in this case because I'm just going to use it as kind of a background element I could make it really big click and then really lower the opacity down so it's way in the background so in that case I just randomly kind of picked a photo that had a pattern said let's make the half into a brush but that's what makes this so interesting it could be anything it could be a photograph of a person could be a crack and cement it could be anything at all and that's how people out there and I mentioned that are those people they're out there making brushes there either photographing or scanning things or finding old textures or whatever it might be and just using this as a way to create the effect that they want let me show you an example here of something else will just open this photograph and add a new layer take my brush not that's the only downside to having giant brush it initially it does that it's kind of distracting but in here somewhere I mean just take a quick look here it is I'll show you a couple of these uh I was at my parents house a few months ago when they were I was having to help take some stuff out and they had my dad usedto collect old maps so I was given a couple of a couple of my took photographs off and then sort of playing with them and found some really interesting elements inside that map so for example this was one of the things that was on the map now clearly doesn't make great sense to have this on top of photograph of a girl but just the fact that that to me that's just that's just cool now but no one had really use in a case like this that same map had a whole bunch of old handwriting so I would and it's in I don't know latin or something so I might put it in here like this and then take advantage of my laywer my background layer by making a selection and then I'm going to masses and surround way around so inverted and maybe you'll take that and change it to multiply mode or overlay mode lower the opacity I'll be with you in a second I just want to play for a bit but now that's kind of the point again is that anything can be a brush kind of cool now here's a probably a more practical example of what you might use this for here I took a ballpoint pen and I signed my name the way I normally do on a piece of paper and took a photograph of it now you can see it has some areas in here that are not quite black now my first inclination would be to go in and try and darken the whole thing to make sure it was one hundred percent black but if I'm tryingto emulate what my real signature looks like that's what it happens when I signed with them with most pens is there is a little bit of that half of just because the speed with which you do it so I'm okay with that however I'm just going to a quick inter virg is to make sure as I suspected you can see there's some noise in the background here so in this particular case what I might want to do just to make sure is take my paintbrush with a normal brush and I'm doing this to prepare to make the brush better I'm going it d for default and then do my little shortcut command shift or control shipped over overlay and just paint over this may be a lower their past a little bit and all I'm trying to do is make sure that the background around the outside is in fact nice and black and then I can invert it back because ultimately I still want the brush to be black on white but that way it's just a simple way to make sure it is in fact quite the other option I could do is use thie levels dialog box and this is a rare instance of not using adjustment layer because it's not necessary all I'm trying to do is make sure this background it really is white so I take the eyedropper and click on it that's just a way to say make sure that whole thing is actually white and one of the things that I'm sure I've mentioned no I've mentioned in various other areas about transforming pixels the same theory applies here if I was going to create a signature autograph brush I want to make sure it was I'd rather have it a bit big but not big enough so I took a photograph this at a pretty high resolution to make sure I would make it the brush itself would be big enough that I wouldn't end up having a problem later if I decided or realize it was old too big too small I need to make it larger so again just define brush pre set and now I have this brush so fine working on a project and I decide I want to sign it new layer you can see my brush is a giant size so I can press the left bracket keys to make it smaller I would probably if I had to guess make a little bit too big and then I have to decide the foreground columns enterprise d x because I want white I do not want overlay command ault shift or option shift end and I'm also gonna press zero for one hundred percent capacity and click once there I have my signature now because on a separate layer I can reposition with my move tool I can lower the opacity if I wanted to be less obvious I can free transform it if it's a little bit too big and it's worth noting I think even though you probably have guessed this by now because I've said it in other lessons for other topics once you define something like this and that applies to swatches and patterns and brushes and all these various presets that it will stay in photo shop until you remove it or hopefully not photoshopped crashes that hardly ever happens but if it does there's a slot small chance you might lose your preset so in the lesson summing up everything about presets we'll talk about how you can create a back up plan so you don't have to worry about whether your pre sets are gone so again anything khun b a brush and you could make a brush out of copyright notice so copy write my name and the year or something used all the time maybe as you're on your own you're making contact sheets for people and you want to put your phone number on there anything you want you could take the type tool type something in black on white define is a brush or all these other options where you find photographs of interesting textures or anything at all and you turned that into a brush one of things that I thought would be really interesting to try is I went through a couple of days of testing where I have a smoke machine and I just started taking photographs of smoke on a black against a black background thinking those might make interesting brushes and I also took photographs of feathers in my hand and little small type and so all of these air just experimented see what happens if I make trying to make a brush out of smoke so let's try a reset this one back to the default so here it is in camera and I have to look at it the way photoshopped defines brushes right now if I just opened this in photo shop and defined as a brush I would get a brush of all the background and nothing where there was smoke so ultimately I need to invert it the other way around so in here I'm just really looking at it from a standpoint of trying to make sure there's lots of contrast between the smoke and the background it's not going to be pure white because the smoke has white and gray in it but I still want to have a fair bit of contrast push the highlights up but also darken the shadows so I want to get dark and I want to get white and I might go clarity just a little bit looks pretty good and I think I'm going to make this one just a little bigger to give myself some room to go and I hit open object as we saw a moment ago when I opened that other texture photograph that I had if I defined this that it's a brush right now as I mentioned it's the wrong way round so I'm going to use again an adjustment layer and choose invert and see what that looks like I've got kind of a nice idea of all this stuff down here is not really necessary now because of the way the smoke this brush would cut off right at that edge and that's okay that just means that I I'm limiting myself a little bit so the other option now would be to say we'll have tried to make this into a brush that has a more definite kind of edge to it so I could do that bye take my brush tool and go back to one of my normal brushes smaller and all I'm going to do is just kind of paint a little bit and I've got this is deliberately has a soft edge to it and all I'm trying to do is make it look like my small kind of fades out and stops I don't want it to go and have a very hard edge like it did before as I'm doing this I'm still again picturing black on white so might be worth experiments a what happens if we add the very top of this a black and white adjustment layer to make sure it really is black and white and see if I move some sliders around if I could pull some more detailed ooh that was good that looks pretty good now what's interesting about defining a pattern are sees me defining a brush is that even though I'm adding all these things on top ultimately I have to either click down at the bottom here or well that's pretty much the way to do it and then in this case I don't really need well it's white anyway so I should be fine there was going to say you could make a selection but it's really not necessary and I choose define brush preset and there's my smoky brush so let's see what that looks like it looks like that so let's put it on first of all let's go that way get back to our very first little example we're doing let's get out of the contents of that layer and at first all just paint with black to see what it looks like and you'll see it's by nature very light well that's because the opacity so low sorry but you can see and so here's this I'm glad this happened because as I was craziness I thought ok that's gonna look pretty good but now that I paint it see this edge on the left hand side here I don't want to point out it because I've got my move toe right down here I can see that line so I guess I should have done that all looks that looks little hard there so this is sometimes the only way you can tell is to go to the step of actually defining the brush and then you look at it and say okay well let's take a step back now that I know that let's delete the contents of that layer and I'll go all the way back here to my smoky brush and I need to do a bit more painting to try and get this toe look the way that I want so I don't see a definite edge there so let's zoom in a bit here brush a little smaller and the problem ej was over here whips make sure your foreground color is white dave and on this edge was a little bit I could see a little bit as well and I could make this brush I'm doing a little smaller and maybe change to a slightly lower opacity as well to kind of make it more gradual my wispy but that was a bad one was now let me actually go back here and undo that remind myself okay that over their corner all right so let's take a look and see what we got here it was down here a little more whenever using a big brush like this to paint with white you have to remember it's going to be very soft so you need toe make sure you go over the edge a little bit yes I think that's looking a little better it's really low passing and just make one last little pass just to make sure that we're getting some variety in our edge so it doesn't look like I just suddenly cut it off and have a look unrealistic okay tried again to find brush pre set back to our other one that anymore okay so it's this again take her brush with a new one out should automatically I think pick the latest one I just did yeah but just to make sure I always go on look at it and now we click and don't do that because I had the capacity of my brush really low there's a lot of things to check on there so that's a little better now honestly the reason for me creating this brush is not just to say I'm going to paint with smoke like this I mean I could um that might be actually kind of interesting in certain instances but it's also I can use it for other purposes but let's for now let's just give an example here where if I wanted to I could make a new layer fill this with white and start to play around with opacity and move it around different positions so now she's there on a foggy day or whatever so you could actually use it for that purpose but one of the ways that I find it really interesting to use this kind of brush is for some situation like this so I'm going to add a new layer on going excuse me a new layer mask and I invert the layer masks so it's filled with black which of course will hide her completely now on this layer mask I take my paintbrush and I paint with white smoke now all of a sudden she's starting to appear and if we put a new layer below and fill it with some color so we can see it you start to see that's a pretty interesting border effect done very easily and all really is is just I painted over and over again the same middle part so it became pure white but the outer edges have this smoke effect and of course I could lower the size of it and go to my overall a little brush picker here and even just changed the rotation so it doesn't look exactly the same so I could add some more here interesting and needless to say non destructive not destructive in one sense I mean obviously this laywer mass the only way it's non destructive as if I didn't like it I could paint all over it and start again but at least I didn't elite the lead or race any pixels and this is still a camera smart object so I could still come in here and say I want to change this and change make it more high contrast kind of gritty look perhaps higher vibrance like this well more dramatic click okay and update and I could still retouch and do everything I want I could even add the text back and and puts um my signature on top it's a world of possibilities that's what makes this stuff so much fun so again anything can be turned into a brush including things like spoke now just so you know this smoke I did simply by ahead like I said a little inexpensive smoke machine I got for halloween and had a couple of lights back kind of back lighting it if you're interested there is another creative live class I did one called photo shop creativity which was a two day class on all kinds of this sort of thing and we actually did a live shoot with smoke to kind of see show the process of how it works and that's really what it is is just trying different combinations of blasting lots of smoke or a little bit of smoke moving around with your hands so you get different things I saw an interesting idea the other day that I was a really clever idea on a much smaller scale someone took a fairly large vase put a black card behind it and then dropped milk into the water so now they had white smoky stuff on a black background and took photos of that with very simple lighting so it doesn't have to be a big set up to get this effect in this case this was an interesting experiment years and years ago I remember seeing a technique that someone when they use when in the good old days when people you still use scanners a lot was they would take a pen and paper and deliberately right as small as they possibly could and then scanned it and blow it up and by nature that would make the text kind of grungy looking and and have a nice effect so I tried the same thing photographically I wrote very very small on a piece of paper took a photograph and then in camera raw brought it in and cropped it and now I've got this in this case I'd because I've got separate pieces this would be an example where I would first make a selection because I don't need want them all to be one brush so I would select this or maybe this text here and define that as a brush then this would be another defined as a brush but again it has this kind of hand written looked that while I suppose you might be able to find a typeface that did this this effect makes it even easier to do that so all kinds of possibilities the one thing that we have to remember with brushes is no matter what it's starting out life as for example this photograph of a peacock feather it's got all this color in it but if I were to find that into a brush I have to think black and white so at this point there's really no white and there's really a little bit of black so while you khun technically turn anything into a brush some things won't work as well for example if you take a photograph of a person and make it a brush let's just do that since I have one of those here somewhere here she is so let's hide these other things and I decide okay I want to make that excuse me her I want to make her into a brush I want to make a brush out of this photo of her would probably be a better way to say it and it's ah fairly large one but we'll do it anyway define brush preset and click okay and then you see we don't need that anymore let's go back to our other one clear off this smoke for a second get our new newly defined brush and I've got black is my foreign color and when I click it just kind of looks like a sea peotone photo which is and I deliberately started with black to show you but watch what happens if I choose some other color that's not so dark then it starts just toe look to me it looks a little odd it looks kind of mean it's still okay I guess but I'm not gonna do this I'm gonna tend to do it with darker colors and you can see this is what it actually created so we can some different blend mode see if that makes any difference now that's kind of cool didn't expect that but that's kind of fun it's about the same yeah it's just playing around let's see no normal and that I could add a mass to this and paint with my paintbrush okay you get the idea so in this particular case it worked okay but I'll just show you what I mean if you for example have make a brush out of a person and paint with white then you get a very odd inverse negative kind of thing happening so which might be okay but again you have to always be thinking from photoshopped standpoint brushes are black on a white background is the ideal scenario and everything else in between is that defines the results are going to get so grey is going to be partially see through so here for example to show you a couple of other examples of brushes uh see we've got some splashes in here these these are all like splashes as you can see that look like this cool but always one color some of these are things like another way to add your logo is we talked about doing that with custom shapes you could also just make a brush out of any shape so let's say you brought your logo into photo shop and you had decided now you just want to make a brush out of it well you could do that in exactly the same way ideally black on white the same theory applies here when we talked about shapes I said you can't make a two color logo is a shape you can't make a tubular logo is a brush because the brush is always gonna take on your one foreground color but here's let me just show you a new example here of the kind of interesting things we can get to glitz close up some of these other documents where we were experimenting and making brushes they don't really need them open right now and let's get this back to kind of normal again so I want to try an experiment here I want to see what it would look like if I can make her look a little more interesting by painting on a mask now in a later session that I call finishing touches I'll go into even mohr examples of this is just an idea to get you started as toe kind of process you would go through so I want to make a new brush I'm just gonna make a small little document doesn't have to be big and it's gonna make it a let's make it a little bigger actually let's make it fifty pixels yeah I know fifty pixels by fifty pixels and I want to do is in this case I do want my brush to be defined as being semi see through because I'm gonna deliberately create this in a way that I want the brush to pile up on top of itself so I'm gonna just philo of fifty percent gray and that's it and then just choose define brush pre set now I just got a gray square close that document because now it's served its purpose so let's see what this size of this brushes in the context of our document here's my little fifty pixel gray square I need to have a new layer so I can see okay so it's around that size it's actually even a little bigger than I'd hoped but that's okay I can I can work with that so on this layer I'm going to add a lair mass now you saw me a few minutes ago out of layer mask and then inverted to fill it with black the shortcut that mentioned before is to remind you if you ever want to add a layer mask and hide everything in one step you hold down optional ault and click on the ad mask button and now we'll height will show this layer below when that's gonna be kind of our background that will show through so right now I have the camera smart object that I've completely hidden using a black layer mask so I take my paintbrush that I have that square and let's put it one hundred percent capacity you see even at one hundred percent capacity and I've got my foreman card a white then when I click it's still going to be that was a total fluke that I got her I there but you'll see on the mask it's gray and that's ok because I want eventually to start doing this wearing a pile the's squares on top of another and get this kind of build up effect like this and I could sit here and do this myself actually is working relatively well anywhere I want full detail I click a couple of times so that would be one option but I'm gonna show you the other thing that goes back to our discussion of making various settings in my brushes panel so let's go back here and see what we've got okay so we've got our brush tip space is telling me it's fifty and the spacings of ten percent I like the spacing to be more like that and I'd also like the shape dynamics I would like there to be some difference in size with the minimum being slightly smaller and I would like to change the angle slightly I'd also like to do scattering I'd liketo have maybe two or three and then this is where I just decide okay that's not enough scattering that's probably too much but somewhere around there and sometimes the only way again to see is to try and so now as I paint on here think about what's gonna happen I have the camera smart object that's completely hidden using the black layer mask now I've defined a brush which is fifty percent grade so it's never going to show completely but I've got the brush set up so it's putting multiple squares of slight different angles and spacing and as I build over and over again hopefully it will start to build up the photo the way that I want and because of its random nature but I've deliberately kind of going making sure I go over her face multiple times I want you able to see that but I also want these other areas filled in and I'm varying the pressure pressure of my pen to make little small squares and now I've done that let's go back and go to shape dynamics and I'm going to make even smaller ones this time and have it set on pen pressure so I can go in here and just make little tiny ones here in there just like that make sure you get her all of her and I was gonna fill in and if we look at the layer mask that's what's happening the white areas in the middle that will reveal completely grey as we know is partial and black is hidden completely so by creating a brush that lets me kind of fill in the gaps I can do that and just kind of get the effect that I want now at a certain point if I want to make absolutely sure that this part is pure white I could switch to a regular brush and paint with white but I think it's actually working fairly well at this point and just to kind of finish off this little effect let's click on the background layer take our brush and find that smoke brush we created and that's not the smoke brush that's her say that doesn't look like smoke to me it was this one that's more like it and I'm just going to take my color picker and say I want this color but kind of a darker version so on a layer above the background layer I'm just gonna paint a bit of smoke on the backgrounds we have something else happening now when I do that it points out the fact that I've got some areas of her forehead now that I'm seeing through so this is where I might go back to my just a regular old brush I don't want to make sure that looks a little odd to me tohave her face have little smoky things showing through so I want to make sure that at least her face is completely visible and then everything else has that kind of fact now not sure if I really love that smoke effect or not but maybe if we change it to multiply mode and lower the opacity of a lot which is kind of a background element I don't know but you get the idea that's how we kind of go through and say well let's make a brush I know it doesn't have to be mean it could be of something you take a capture of somehow you take a photograph of something turning a brush or is on that case all it was started out as a simple square and I just said make it a square and then use all those brush settings to change it in such a way that I can use it as a valuable creative tool to try things and part of the reason I like showing this kind of thing and I discussed this previously we're talking about compositing is if you're a photographer again tryingto differentiate yourself from other people you can take a beautiful portrait but if you could take that beautiful portrait and turn into some kind of unusual artwork using methods like this that are frankly not terribly difficult just take a bit of set up but then it's just experimentation to get something this is one of things that can distinguish you from someone that has a good camera and photoshopped light room and takes photos and says hey I'm a professional yes they might be but you khun investing your time and knowledge and photoshopped to create this kind of effect as well so uh the one as I've mentioned before the only downside to this kind of thing is I feel like I never actually finished here just out of curiosity I'm wondering sure about this but let's see what happens if we were to ad a little drop shadow to all of our to our mask it's kind of interesting I'm not sure I might have to play with that mohr but maybe um so the world of brushes and painting really quite interesting one thought I should mention I mentioned before about going out and finding brushes if you download the brush is you'll find this comes as like a little collection of brushes and then you have to get them into photo shop and you have a couple of options you can either most of time you could just double click on that file then well loaded into photo shop but if you want a little more control and again we'll talk about this and way more detail in the preset lesson well but later I go to presets import or export import I usually would say import export rain way they have an export import and then if I go looking I'll say I want to go and find whatever imports I have let's see if I can find any in here I don't know if I have any probably not let's just see how quickly all kinds of things in this folder but apparently not brushes oh what's this okay these are other types of things they're not actually photoshopped brushes there just actual photographs apparently but anyhoo if I did have brushes this way I could find them and say let's look in this folder ok so there apparently it did find at least something now it still didn't see anything so this is where you would anyway see if there were brushes I have mine already stuck in a folder so that's why it's not seeing any of my download because usually when I download them I import them but that's how you can find them double click to say I would like to include it and then import and that's how you can get those brushes and if double clicking on it doesn't work so here's what I would ask you to do for your homework slash assignment fine years to get yourself a good old fashioned piece of paper and a pen maybe a sharpie if you have one doesn't have to be sign it and then make sure you have fairly decent lighting and take a photograph of it if you still have those devices called a scanner you could do it that way too and make sure it's fairly large then open that photo shop and go through the process of turning that into a signature rush remembering black is the brush white has see through so if you need to use levels or something to make sure you've really got real black and real white in the background make that as a brush and then try something completely different either an existing photograph you have or go walk around the block of your house and try and find something that makes a cool brush just some things you get used to looking at things through the eyes of defining a brush and what I mean by that is when you're walking along the street don't just look at the beautiful sun looked down the crack in the pavement and go that crack is quite dark the pavement is fairly light that's already well on its way to being a cool brush and that's how you can start defining brushes that then you khun use the various settings to make it look the way you want and it's definitely one of the top creative tools in photo shop so have fun doing that and we shall see you next time tomorrow whenever it is for the next lesson