Departika Design Studio

Art and Design

Photoshop Brush Tutorial

Basics
This tutorial will show how to create a textured Photoshop brush using Photoshop CS3. Texture and grunge brushes are great resources to have if you want to add aging effects to your work. Making your own set guarantees your design will have it’s own unique style.

This tutorial will be done using Photoshop CS3. Although all versions can make brushes, there are rules for sharing them between versions. Unfortunately no brush sets are backwards compatible.

Getting Started
Before we begin you need to decide just what type of brush you would like to make. This tutorial was meant to provide all the information and techniques to create rough style brushes, but you will most likely learn enough by following these steps to create most types.

We will be starting out with a high resolution photo of a rough texture. We will take steps to alter the photo into a usable grunge style brush that can be used thousands of times in the future to enhance the look of your designs. In Photoshop we will have already created a separate layer for your texture, and a layer containing a white background.

Color and Contrast

Since Photoshop brushes are made in black and white, we can immediately desaturate our image. To do this press Command+Shift+U.

Next we need to adjust the levels to gain the contrast needed for a good grunge style brush. To do so press Command+L to open the levels window and adjust them accordingly. You will want to gain a high level of contrast without loosing all of the images details.

Curves and Cutting

Our next step is to adjust the curves to further raise the contrast without loosing the textures detail. Press Command+M to bring up the curves dialog box. From here, you simply need to adjust the curves while watching your texture to reach the best possible level of contrast.

Now we need to decide what shape, or structure the brush should have. There are a variety of options here—we could create a border, corner, or just smooth out the edges and keep it open. For this example we will create a brush that will fit perfectly in the bottom left corner when stamped. To do this, we will need to remove everything that is black from the other three corners.

In order to avoid loosing the rough feel, you can use a layer mask and default brushes to remove the black areas. To do this, start by adding a layer mask to the layer that contains your texture. To do this, go to Layer » Layer Mask » Reveal All. Make sure the foreground color is black, and then select the brush tool (hot key- B). This can work even better if you already have grunge brushes and utilize those to create rough edges on your new brush.

Now we are ready to put the final touches on our brush. We currently have a great brush for adding aging effects to photos and things of that nature, but it really doesn’t stand well on it’s own. To solve this problem, we can add elements into the brush to help spice it up. On this example I have brought in a pattern created by our very own Jason Gaylor, and roughed it up a bit. I also inserted black bars, and gave them a worn effect. This is our brush ready to set up.

Creating Your Set
Go to the Preset Manager - Edit > Preset Manager. Before we can make our brush set, we have to have a place to put them. When you first open the Preset Manager it will have your active brushes in the box. You need to delete all of the brushes in this box (select the first one, hold shift and select the last one, then hit delete) Don’t worry, this will not permanently delete those brushes, just clear the box.

Define your brush, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Give your brush whatever name you would like. Repeat this step for every brush you would like to include in this set.

Open the Preset Manager again, and you will now see your new bush set. Make sure you have included all the brushes you wish to be in this set and click Save Set button.For some versions of Photoshop you may need to click the little arrow button just to the upper left of the done button, then go to save set in that list.

Name your set, and you’re done!