How to Make Your Own Photosop Brush

Ever start a project in Photoshop and you need a very specific brush, but you just can't find one that will work? It happens to everyone that spend much time working on design or even just for fun. So when that happens, why not just make your own? This tutorial will show you how to make all those brushes you needed but couldn't find.

Before you start, you need to understand one basic idea of how making brushes work. The finished image that you will use for you new brush will be black and white and possibly various shades of gray. White will be transparent and black will be solid color. The various shades of gray will turn into corresponding opacities. The darker a pixel is, the more opaque it will draw. For example, a pixel that is 30% gray will draw with 30% opacity in your final brush. Just something you should keep in mind while making your brush.

First you need to decide what your brush will look like. For this tutorial, I'll use a picture of a leaf, but you can use pretty much anything. some things may need more work than others, but this will show you the basics.

Open your picture in Photoshop. Crop you picture to only show the part that you want to make into the brush. Erase anything that will not be part of the brush so that the only thing left is just what you want to be the actual brush. If you use a picture with a solid color background, you can get rid of all the background with the magic wand tool. You should end up with something like the image below.

Next, you want to make you image black and white, you'll see why in a bit. There are a couple of way to do this and which one works best will depend on the image.

The easiest is to just go to Image>Adjustments>Desaturate. This is best for higher contrast images because it keeps the light/dark values but takes out the colors. The next way is to go to Image>Mode>Grayscale. This method is best if you have details from several different colors that you want in your final brush because it adjusts the brightness and contrast a bit to compensate for not having any color. The last what I call the channel method. This is best if you have an image that is predominately one color, like the image of the leaf that I used.

Click on the channels tab, usually locate near the layers tab. Now turn off all the channels but one by clicking on the eye icons by each layer. Try out each one separately to see which one works the best. If none of them give you quite what you want, try out one of the other methods and see if that works better.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of each of the methods how they look used on the leaf photo. Top left is the original, for reference. Top right is the result using the desaturate method. Bottom left was converted to grayscale. The bottom right is the channels method, using only the green channel. See how each one is almost the same but still very different? You may have to try out the different methods on your own brushes until you get used to what each one will look like in the end.

After it is in black and white, you can make adjustments to get whatever result you would like. Go to Image>Levels or Brightness/Contrast and adjust the settings to bring out details for a more realistic image or hide them to acheive more of a line drawing effect. Use the other various drawing tools to add detail or to ad a design to it. Whatever you like. This part is totally up to you. Remeber though that it needs to be in black and white (or some shade of gray) adn that only the the white will be transparent and black will be solid color.

For my leaf example, I adjusted the levels to bring out the detail and raised th4e contrast. Then I used the magic wand to select teh blank area around it and went to Select>Modify>Expand and set it to 2 px to give a nice sharp edge.

The last step is just to save your new image as a brush. If you want your brush to be smaller than you image is now, go to Image>Image Size and change the size of your image there. Remember though that you can easily change the size of your brush just like any other brush so in most cases, this is not really needed.

To save your brush, go to Edit>Define Brush Preset and name your brush and hit OK. Your brush is now available in the active brushes. You can change the setting on your new brush when you use it just like any other. The only thing left to do is give it a test run.

In the example above, the left is the brush used at full size.  It shows quite a bit of detail. On the right, I changed some settings on the brush and made my own falling leaves (or at least a fairly quick example)

Making your own brushes in Photoshop is really not that hard at all, once you learned a few basic techniques.  Using your own custom made brushes in your artwork will really help take it to the next level.