Lessons

Lesson Info

Custom Brushes

Let's see when created different kind of brush because so far the brush that we have created is one where this already existed. The shape let's make our own brush. I want to make a brush that will do stitching I want to put stitching around the edge of something like let's say I make leather goods and I want to show a prototype of my leather good, but it's supposed to have stitching on it, and I'll get the pictures of big sheetal other somehow, I have to show it as if it's got some stitching on. So in order to do that, I'm gonna create a brand new document just went to the file menu chose new and I'm going to choose really care the size, but whatever it would take to contain a one individual stitch, so two hundred by two hundred pixel should be fine here. Ah, white background should be fine click okay, so just have a document in that document. I'm going too put a shape that looks like an individual stitch mark, and I'm thinking about just a straight line with rounded corners on it, so ...

to do that, I'll go down here to my shape tool because one of the choices under my shape tool is thie rounded rectangle tool now I think I played with this last night so I probably already have it set up, but I'm not certain let's just click and drag and see what we get. Yeah, that's pretty good. The main setting I changed was a setting up here called radius. I think the default setting was ten and so I had to experiment once I got up to forty uh, then it was all right. I'll choose undo because I usually want that to be black on a white background, so I just reset my foreground colored black, and all I'm gonna do is make one little I think here I'm not going to go to tall like this where I don't get the complete rounded nous. Instead, I'm gonna restrain myself there and try to get it so it looks more like a half circle on the end and that's going to represent my stitch that when I do this, I'll actually choose undo because I don't need a shape. I don't need fancy nous here, and actually I don't need to undo aiken just flatten. So all I have is a document that contains the shape I want that's in black. Everything else is white. He could do that go to the edit menu now and there's a choice in here called define brush preset. So now we just to find that and now we should be able to choose it from the brushes panel so that instead of using a blade of grass we could pay with that but this could just as easily be your logo this could just as easily be a cloud could be anything you want to put a bunch of women you know, a star and then when you paint you create stars uh whatever it is you want so now I don't need this document open anymore I can close it we'll go back to just are empty document here and go back to our brush tool and now if I scroll through here I think it might sort these based on names so it's not at that the end of the list I'd usually expected to be at the end but within this list of shapes depending on what I named it there's one right there there's the other one I created last night next to it you know, but let's use that now it's remembering the settings we had for our grass so we're getting some random weirdness going on. What I might want to do is just go to brush presets and goto a normal brush first here like around normal brush so just resets all the settings that we had with our weird brush then go back to the settings for that brush and underbrush tip shape see if I can find that shape again. I don't know which one of these two is the one I just made, but they're both similar. So now we have a brush, it like this, and when I paint with it, I get it. This stuff it's not quite doing what I want you so now let's, figure out how to manipulate the settings to get what I want. So if this is going to be stitching, then it should show one stitch and there should be a gap between it and the next to do that. We have a setting called spacing, and I'm just going to crank it up and I'm gonna have to get it so it's above one hundred because a hundred percent of the width of my stitch, I needed to move more than that. So get this up far enough, and you see how we're getting little gaps between our stitches, huh? The problem is, with just getting that up there, when I paint, I'll choose undoing. Just get a smaller brush, you know, the bracket keys to change my size, but when I paint, they're all oriented in the same way, it's not like real stitching where it goes around, you know? Follows the shape so let's see if we could change that I'm going to just look at the list of things that I have here so far we've just brought up my spacing but within this list let's see if there's anything I could do uh maybe under shaped dynamics because under shape dynamics first I'm going to turn down any jitter settings because it might remember what I had before I don't want a very things randomly I want control over the angle that this is that so do you see a setting called angle jitter angle cheddar would mean do it randomly if you watch the preview at the bottom we just get random little weirdness not looking for that instead I want to control the angle of them so I'll click on here and here are our choices some of these sightings have additional choices that weren't found with the others so in here let's see what we could do initial direction what's that well initial direction means paid attention to what direction I move my mouse in the very first time I move it so if I go up into the right like that but then it stays at at angle the whole time until I let go and then the next time I click it looks at what angle did I move at the moment I started moving it's not quite what I want but we're getting there memory under shaped dynamics and I'm down here under angle and then control I wanted set it based on direction and what that means has changed the angle of whatever that tip looks like based on what direction I'm painting and change it for the entire time I'm painting just always look at what direction I'm painting so let's see what I get now when I paint so you see how as I move around it's dynamically changing the direction based on what direction I'm paying, does that look a little bit more like stitching? Because I get pain around the edge of something? So that was actually relatively simple, wasn't it? We created a new document, we put our shape in it black shape, white background, and we chose to find brush, and then we on ly changed two settings one was a spacing setting to get it so they didn't touch and the other was the direction setting, and we got that for the angle setting we got that set two directions, so it pays attention. What direction? Where painting now, if he really wanted to make it look a lot more like stitching, we'd have to do a little bit more. First, I would need to choose a color so let's use our, uh our little heads up, I'm going to make some red stitching, so that way when I paint it red and the other thing that I might want to do is I'm gonna create a brand new empty layer to put my stitching on, and I'm just gonna put some down there to test and to make that look more like stitching, I'm just going to go to the bottom my layers panel, I'm going to click on the letters f x and you ever we played a little bit with these yesterday. Well, I'm gonna put in a bevel in, boss, if I bevel inem bosses it's going to give it a slight three d feeling so whatever's on that layer is gonna have this slight three d field, and I'll just need to adjust the size to make sure it's not too big. I think in this particular case, somewhere around five, I could also adjust the depth, and I could see if softening it helps or not. All right, so do you see little highlight and will shadow on there at least little sense for it? I'll consume up little bit, get a feeling for the other thing that, I might add here is within this list of affection left side, we have bevel in boss, but I want to also add a drop shadow in these settings over here worked just like the ones in our brushes, where, if there's a horizontal line between things that means that these air entire categories of settings instead of a simple check box so I don't just turn on the checkbox I click on the word so that I can see the settings and so with my drop shadow I just might make it so the distance is so low that it's snugged up really close to that edge and the setting called size controls how soft the edges I could bring that down a bit opacity controls the brightness so there it is the one hundred percent view now this is not attached to my brush this is attached to the layer that I'm putting my brushstrokes on so now I could come in here and paint in little stitches wherever I want I just need to get the color appropriate for what kind of threat I'm using uh in that type of thing all right now what if I'm not very good at painting if all I can paint a stick figures I got this brush set up and I need to make it a spiral well if I try to do it it's kind of a spiral now here's an idea if I needed to be precise about this let's say I actually have a design on my screen and I need the stitch around the edge of it that kind of thing well what I could do is the pen tool in photo shop with the pen tool you can click and if you need a curve you drag you go somewhere else and you click and you drag to create smooth shapes we talked about the pen tool I believe during one of my photo shop mastery classes which was known as advanced masking I think if I remember correctly and I could create whatever shape I need then what's cool is if you grab the paintbrush tool so it's active you got your brush all set up all that kind of stuff and you have this path visible on your screen because you just drew it then there's a panel on your screen called the past panel over here if it's not visible on your screen just go to the window menu because this list all the panels you can have in within there you'll find paths and one of the choices at the bottom of the past panel is one that just looks like an outline of a circle this one here if you hover over that without clicking on it it would tell you what it means it says hey stroke this path which means trace it with the brush so all I'm going to do is click on that icon in photo shop is going to take the brush tool that I currently have active it's gotta be active over there so it knows if it should use this tool or pencil tool or something else and I click on that I kind of the bottom of the brushes are not the brushes the past panel and itjust traced it for me and so that way if I suck it painting by gatto let's say I have a hand that you know I got the shakes or something that it's never straight I can use the path tool penn tool to draw the shape that I want so it's easier to get something smooth there and doing it freehand and I just go to my past panel at the bottom it's the second icon fromthe left it just looks like a, uh the outline of a circle and that means take the tool that I currently have active and trace that path after that I can throw away the path just click on its name in the past panel, drag it to the trash you don't need it anymore and that's how we could end up being much more, um sophisticated with that that makes sense. All right, so you see, I was starting off with more basic things like the round brush and you're looking at go own case basing opacity wanted but you see how it builds up and start creating more complex stuff so we got a bunch of things we could do here now you can make a brush based on a photograph a ce well, I'll show you that in a moment but first let's save our stitching brush so I have all the setting set up for my stitching I'm just going to go to the tab over here called brush presets if that's not open on your screen, go to the window menu anytime I ever go to a panel if you don't see it on your screen you find it under the window menu and just click on the new uh icon there and I will call this, um stitching so there's a difference between the list of things that you see when you're in brush tip shape up here that's just the shape of the actual little tip you're putting down where is the one that looks very similar to this that's under brush presets these look very similar to it uh they look the same, but this incorporates the brush presets all the settings that you've attached not just the shape of the tip but all the settings associated with it that you can define within this panel so when we're done, we want to go to brush presets to save it. So question just clarification you're only saving the shape dynamics and things like that in the panel you're not saving the bevel and embossed regrets you're not within this saving what I should say it this way brush presets on ly saves what's in the brushes panel if it's outside the brushes panel that you made your change it's not incorporated in that if it's stuff up here in the options bar that's specific to the tool you're using so you might want to instead create a tool preset if whatever affect your making requires one of those settings and if you need that devil in boston drop shadow that I can't save into a tool pre sex is not part of the tool that setting I could save in the styles panel, but then I'd probably have to have a post it notes stick around that says, you know, this preset for the painting this preset for the styles and stuff to remember to incorporate those together um but yeah, you can't get it to save all of those pieces and one uh, part also just so you know, when I'm in my brush presets years might look different than this in mind I have where I can see that shape of the tip of my brush right here and then a sample of what it looks like when I paint with it but you can change the way that preview looks by going to the side menu of this panel and there's a choice right here if you want to annoy your coworkers taxed only they can't see what their brushes looked like uh otherwise small thumbnail large thumb now smallest I had mine not on large list cause there just get the tax, but on stroke thumbnail and that way I can see the tip of my brush and a sample of what it looks like when I paint with it and so I don't know what the default is I'm assuming it's either, eh? I'm guessing it might be a small thumb now some like that but I'm going to the upper right corner of the panel right here to change him. All right? Do we have questions? I have a question from michelle in r v a and a couple people had asked about color brushes uh, michelle asked, can you make multi colored brush is like a yellow flower with an orange center? Or are you limited to working only in black and white for the source graphic the source graphic is black and white and when you paint usually your pending with your foreground color and so far as I know you can't make the center your brush a different color than the outer edge, that kind of thing so instead, if you need something like that, you might need to go to a different tool there's a tool called the pattern stamp tool in the pattern stamp tool you could define a pattern of a multi color um flour and then when you paint it would just repeat be repeating that flower over and over again when you paint and that would be if you go to the tool panel and over here is the normal clone stamp tool. If I click and hold on it, there's the pattern stamp tool and with that you could to find a pattern and then let's see if I have any patterns that are gonna have one of my here's one of my eyeball, it would gotta get big enough. I don't know if this document is big enough for this because I don't remember what I did, but it would paint with a repeating pattern, and if you turn off the choice called a line and I could just, uh, click in ad it multiple times, but I don't have this set up with a proper size document, proper sized brush, proper sized pattern, but just know that if you want to do something similar to what she's requesting, you might want to read up on the, uh, pattern stamp. Cool. Um sam cox asks, do customized the para meters of a brush stay with the document that is, if I send a psd fell to a friend, could she access that customize brush without having to recreate it? And if not, how would you transfer brushes to friends? Know the brushes? Stay with photo shop your copy of photo shop? They're going to stay if they're ones that you've made, they'll stay there until somehow, well they'll stay there and tell your preferences have been reset or they'll go away if your preferences never get saved. What happens is when you quit photo shop is when your preferences are saved. So you remember yesterday, didn't I bring photoshopped to its knees and it just quit on me? Well, if I had made a bunch of brushes and it just quit on me like that, it's at the time you quit photo shop manually, quit photoshopped that it saves your preferences, so she photoshopped bombs on you before you quit, you're going to have lost your brushes, you've made eso once you've made a bunch of brushes might wanna quit photoshopped quick started back up again so it's in your preferences or if you go to the side menu of the brush presets panel, there is a choice off load brushes in save brushes and that will save the set of brush is that you currently have in here. So if I want to give these brushes to a friend, I go to the side menu choose save brushes, it will ask me to save him and asked me where I'd like to save them after I saved those I could give them to a friend if they just double click on the file on most operating systems that would have installed them, but there will be no warning to say it happened we just double click photo shop will come to the front won't look like anything happened, but it went to your brushes, they'd be there or if that doesn't work for some reason, you go this side menu, choose load brushes and feed it the file that you had saved out, you know, if you e mailed it to a friend that coming great. Also, I think we might have a question in here. Somebody have one. Um, so I was wondering if you were to use if you wanted to use your watermark and your watermark is colored, would you do that? Is a stamp then, and not necessarily as a brush tool? Ah, you might do it is a stamp, because if it's multicolored, then you'd be ableto stamp it multicolor yeah, um what I often do is I'll have it as a brush, and I'll just have a layer style that I quickly apply usually it's something has an outer glow because that will lighten what's underneath so that it can separate from a dark document and also incorporate within it sometimes any kind of ah in her shadow or drop shadow so it can darken what's underneath as well, meaning it doesn't matter if I put it on a brighter, dark background, it'll still show up but yeah, if it's multicolored you might want to use the pattern stamp uh before when I defined a brush remember we defined like a stitch well, you could define it with a picture too the only thing is it's based on the brightness of the picture, so usually we want to make it so the background it ends up being something that solid white and whatever our brush that we want is is going towards black but it doesn't have to be like a black shape like what we had where we only did our little stitch we just had a little black shape on a white background. Well, here we have ah cloud sitting there with a mild so not that blue sky but it was a blue sky sitting there and let's see how we could create a brush based on a photo? We're going to make a cloud brush, so all I want to do is somehow transform this image so that we end up with white background in a black cloud. So first I'm going to end up creating the opposite that a white cloud on a black background when we're done, we'll just invert hit me and give me a negative or the opposite of that, so anyway, I got this image to start with just a photo I'm gonna come in here and adjust it using levels and with levels, I'm just going to try to get the background to either go solid black or at least go close to it and with image adjustments levels, we have a slider in the upper left where if I bring it in it's going to dark in the dark part of our image continue bringing it in it's going to start forcing some of those areas to black, you could even get a preview of where is the image becoming solid black because that background might right now be eighty percent or ninety percent it might just look black, so when you're moving in this upper left slaughter and levels, you can just hold down the option key alton windows when you do, it'll show you a different view of your picture where it will show you on ly the area that's becoming solid black and then the areas that are white and here means it's not solid black and something else. So I'm going to pull this in and see how far I need to move it until I get solid black going around the majority of that without getting the center to completely disappear. You know, if I bring this way over, everything will be gone, you know? Sure we'll get black, but I'm trying to just see what's the furthest I could move this over while still maintaining some of that middle stuff and I think about hears us faras I can go because beyond there I started losing the middle stuff, so let go and all that means is the rest of the stuff I'm gonna have to paint out manually because I need black to be surrounding this all the way around in order to really get it clean, isolated little cloud instead of one that has a sharp edge on the on the edge, which is the edge of the document. So I have moved this over to try to get that darkness if the middle and here is too dark now, you can move the middle slider in levels to control the brightness of what's left over, uh, that's getting to look a little bit more of that cloud in, they're gonna click okay? And now I'm just gonna grab my brush. Oh, sh just normal brush and we've played with brushes so much I might need teo just go in and see if I can get back to a normal brush in here hopefully wouldn't have too many weird settings turn on and I'm going to end up painting with black and just paint out any extra stuff, and I just need to be careful right here where I get really close to that actual chunk I want to keep clean up anything that's in the background, something like that looks kind of like an isolated little chunk of cloud, right? So that's going to be the the general material we're going to use to make a brush? I'm used to doing brushes on a white background because the white is considered to be nothing uh so when I'm done, I'll go over here and do an adjustment called invert all right? So now any area that's why it will be ignored, it won't be included in my brush and then these different brightness levels are going to define where we put down paint when we paint with this brush it's just well tell it to paint with white that's what's going to make the cloud white it's just gonna look at this and saying that the darker and darker this becomes, the more and more paint I should put down the lighter and lighter this is the less painter she put down and so once it hits the white, it means put down no paint that makes it so you can see how you could start with a photo you mainly want to edit your photograph to simplify, make it so it's completely surrounded with white and so that whatever it is you want is going deeper and deeper, darker and darker sometimes when it comes to things like clouds or lightning you're gonna have to invert uh when you're done so you end up with that white background so I'm going to take this now and go to the edit menu and I can come in here and say to find brush preset click okay? And now in fact it looks like it assigned that automatically, which I wasn't expecting, but because you see the shape of my brush matches this, I wasn't aware that it was going to do that uh if it didn't do that, I would go to my brushes uh panel go to brush tip shape and I would find it within here. This might be sorted alphabetically eso it might not be at the very bottom, so you have to look through it but see if you can find your newly defined brush if it doesn't automatically to find it right now, if I just click with this brush you see I got little cloud, but I'm paying with black that's why the cloud is black you know your foreground color controls the color you're paying with so let's see if I can use this somehow well, if I doing simple let's say children's illustrations for children's books or something like that, I could come in here and possibly create a new document and that's fine and within this new document I might put in a blue sky of some sort just a very simple loose guy one way I could do that is to define my color? Um, just going my head's up color picker. Remember it's the three keys to the left of the space bar here on the mac, I can choose blue deep blue, and then I could press the letter. X x means exchange does not meaning push this to my background color, and then I'll hold on the same keys again. The three keys next, the space bar, maybe getting a little more of a scion ish color so that I have a blue and a scion. Then I could use my grady in't tool, the default setting with grady and tools to go from your foreground, your background color. So if long's haven't changed anything on it with my, uh grady and tool up here, it should show me those two colors. If I don't see a grady in't from my foreground background, you click on the arrow to the right and the thief. First choice in this little preset thing means start with your foreground color and with your background so I'll click into the top of my document plan. I'll just drag down it'll give me a little grady in't about the bottom we could draw grass. I wonder how you know that kind of stuff, but let's, see if we could put a cloud in their eye. I didn't need to get fancy and use a grating until just throw some blue in the document now when I paint, usually this is going to paint with my ford on color in so my program color at the moments blew by click up here, we're going to get blue clouds on a blue sky so it's not going to show up, I just collect I didn't see a thing I click down here, you'll see it, I need to just change that setting a white white is one of the defaults for you forgot and background colors, so to accomplish that, I'm gonna press the letter d to get to defaults, but now the background is the white, so I need to exchange the two and the letter for exchanging was x here love it. S so now we have white is my four on color got my brush tool and I simply have that chosen and I could come in here now and add clouds, right? And you know that I could go into my brush dynamics in my shape, dynamics and all that kind of stuff and make it so these clouds vary in size make it so they're scattered around, make it so all that kind of stuff ought to matter of doing is coming in here and maybe bringing up your spacing so that they don't overlap and then experimenting with the stuff we already talked about size, jeter get to change in size, uh, angle. Sure, go ahead, don't make upside down, uh, roundness, which means distort just play scattering. Yeah, go ahead scattered around uh, all that kind of stuff. And so that now I should be able to come in here, maybe with a smaller brush and just paint around. I don't know that it's the best kind of clouds, but let's say to find about four different brush clouds, you know, from forty from photographs, then I can come in there and throw in a few, you know, in be careful with it, but the main thing to get across there was just if you want to create a brush from a photograph, you're simply going to need to simplify the photo to try to get it so it's surrounded with white and then whatever it is you want to be painting with is going towards black, even if you don't want it to look black when you paint, knowing that you don't paint with what you're gonna have when you define that brush, you paint with your foreground color. So even though that the cloud looked almost black when I defined it as a brush, the blackness just means how much ink should we put down? So the blacker it gets it means put down mooring. And so we could do that. This looks more like feathers or something that the sky that really clouds. That would be kind of cool. One, the little soft feathers that could could be coming down.