Ok so its time for a tutorial!
So as many know, making your own custom brushes in photoshop is painfully easy, and incredibly usefull. The reason it is so useful is because painting with a soft edged default brush is a time waster. Not just time consuming, its useless. What would take an artist hours to paint with a low opacity setting and a soft default brush could be drastically sped up by making their own brushes.
Let me give an example; Earlier in the year we were assigned the job of painting a sunset. The class slaved away trying to make realistic looking clouds, spending time switching opacity and brush size to get the right look. Once the fact was revealed that we could make our own brushes, individual clouds went from being multi minute tasks to seconds.
So lets begin. The first thing thats needed is an objective. One should already have this in mind when they decide to make their brush, and since your reading this hopefully you know what you need. If you were hoping for bark, your in luck! =)
Ok so i want to paint a tree texture, the first thing to do is find reference to extract a brush from. Wait extract a brush? I dont need to meticulously paint it by hand? Thats right. Time to set easymode on.
So i grabbed this image from wikipedia: Here
Next, grab the selection of bark that i want…
Now take it to black and white, aka grey scale: Image > Mode > Grayscale
Next, adjust the levels. Image > Adjustments > Levels. or ctrl-L. Here there are two primary sections. Inputs and Outputs. Briefly, outputs is the minimum and maximum value that the layer will have. In plain english, how dark the darks can be, and how bright the brights can be. The two little triangles represent the settings, so just test this out. Grab the triangle under the black side and slide it to the right. See how the black areas are getting brighter and brighter? By moving this slider your telling the image that the darkest part of the image is only allowed to be greyish, or wherever you set the slider to. The reverse is also true for the white.
Now onto what we want, so return the output sliders to their original positions. Now we focus on inputs. This does the opposite of the outputs, we will take the darks and make them darker, the lights lighter. You should see a graphical representation of your image, with three triangles under it. By moving the left most one towards the middle you will start to see the dark areas of the image really get dark. This is good, move it in untill the ‘shadowed’ areas are black. Now take the white slider and move it towards the middle as well. Dont worry about the middle one. After adjusting the levels your image should look somewhere in the ballpark of this:
Now that thats taken care of youll notice that the image your editing has a little lock beside it in the layer palette. That means the layer is locked and we dont want that. So select your layer, and copy it by clicking and dragging it onto the new layer icon (pointed out on next picture) or pressing ctrl-j.
now that we have an editable layer, make another new layer and fill it with black, put this layer between the two bark layers. Now hide the bottum layer by clicking the eye. We wont delete this just yet, in case we need to start over.
should look like this:
Ok now we get to the fun part. Grab your brush and set it to a nice fluffy brush and ghost the border of the bark. This is called feathering, the uhh, manual way haha.
this is what i have so far:
So now what im gunna do is knock the shape of the brush a little bit in a real cheeky way. This is one of those hidden in plain sight options that is simply fantastic.
Ok so we need some colour, so change the image to RGB (Image > Mode > RGB). When it prompts you say no to flattening the layers. Create a new layer and put it just above your solid black layer, fill it with a bright colour. Now open the blending options for the bark layer by double clicking to the right side of the layers name. Should still be layer 1. To get here by menu, go to Layer > Layer style > Blending options. Ok this window is fantastic and ill talk more about it some other day, but what you are staring at the vast majority of photoshop users ignore. And not on purpose is the worst part! Usually they immediatly switch to a drop shadow or stroke or whatever menu and miss the pure awsomeness right here.
At the bottom of this window theres a section that has 3 things. “Blend if” the dropdown menu (Keep it at gray) as well as “This Layer” and “Underlying Layer”. We want this layer. Now grab the black slider on and drag to the right. Notice something? I sure hope so! The colour i chose was red, and suddenly where black was, red is slowly creeping in. The reason why we are doing this is to eliminate the dark areas from our brush, and just keep the light parts. We do this because we only want to paint the ‘tips’ of the bark if you will. However the colour showing through is kinda pixelated is it not? Never fear, alt is here. Hold alt and grab the left side of the slider to split it, now creating a threshold where the pixels fade instead of abruptly disappear.
Mine looks like this:
Now we just need to do some tough ups. Grab a fluffly black brush and start to break up the outline of the bark (on a new layer). This is where I called it:
Hide the colour layer, then at the top go to “layer > flatten image” and click yes to discard hidden layers. Once this is done invert your image by pressing ctrl-i. Copy this layer again to a new layer, or unlock the layer. Change your foreground colour to white, and then go to Select > Colour range. Here you can either manually chose the colour you wish to be selected, but because we set our forground colour to white Photoshop already has that colour as its selection. Change the ‘fuzzyness’ slider untill your happy and press ok. Now delete the selection and you should be left with your brush on top of a transparent background.
Voila, your bark brush is complete, assuming your happy with it. You could always adjust the levels again to fine tune it if you wish.
To save it go to the edit menu and “define brush preset”. How easy was that eh? So the main 2 things to take from this tutorial would be 1st, Why i did each step. Everything done here can by applied to many situations. 2, make brushes for everything, it makes life easy.
Cheers!
