Learn How to Use Photoshop Elements

Lesson Info

How to Load Brushes into Elements

You should also know that you can get even more brushes. So beyond all of the ones that come with Elements, you can actually download free brushes. And you can buy brushes too, but you can download brushes from the Internet. There's a website that I check out often called Brusheezy, it's b-r-u-s-h-e-e-z-y. Brusheezy.com And they have a lot of free brushes that you can download and pull in. I'll show you here how you could do that. With the Brush tool active, you click here where we found all of our fun brushes. And then there's this little menu right here, and you would just click on this, and then click load brushes. And then you navigate to the Brushes file. And I happen to have a few right in this folder that I have downloaded. So the brush files are gonna be .abr files, which stands, I forget, Adobe Brush? Adobe Brush Renderings, I don't know. Dot a-b-r. So that's all you have to do, then you click on that, so, like, for example, here are some splatter brushes. And when I click ope...

n, it loads those into my brush panel, and then I could double-click and I have a splatter brush that I can now use. So that is how you can take your brushes even further. But before we wrap up this segment, I also wanna show you the shape cookie cutters. I think it's called the Cookie Cutters tool. But I thought it might be fun since everyone's a cat lover, right? Who doesn't love cats? I thought we could take this fun picture of this cat and bring it over and I'm gonna show you some fun things you can do with the shape cutter. I need one more image. Actually, we'll just pull it from here. So you can open images, as you know, from the editor, but also up here. File, open. I'm gonna go grab something from over here. I have file that's just like a pattern paper. So you can use this particular tool to cut your image into shapes. For example, it's similar to the Shape tool, only instead of drawing a shape, it actually cuts a shape. So it's found, actually, with the Crop tool over here. So if I click on the Crop tool, you'll notice there are two additional Crop tool options available to me. We have this Cookie Cutter crop and this is a Perspective crop. So the one I'm talking about right now is the Cookie Cutter. When you select that, you see the same shapes that we just saw a moment ago. So I'm gonna dig through here, and I am looking for a tie, I guess of some sort. I was thinking a bow tie, but this one would have a hollow inside because it's white. So I like this necktie that is black so it will make a better use of this pattern. So I'm gonna double-click to select that. And then in this image, I'm just gonna click and drag, and I'll hold shift to keep it proportional. And when I let go, I'm given the opportunity to move this if I want. I can move it around if I, maybe I don't like the particular pattern, like where the tie landed. So I can move it around over the pattern. I could scale it or resize it. When I'm happy with it, I go ahead and click this check mark. And what I've got now is that pattern paper cut into the shape of a tie, and it's already on a transparent background. What that allows me to do is then take the Move tool, and we clicked and dragged, we paused up here on this bar. I'm still holding the button down on my mouse. And then I drag down into the image and shift key drop. And now I have a little tie for the cat. And maybe I wanna resize it, so I'm gonna press command or control T, and I'll just drag inwards from a corner. I'm not holding shift 'cause it's already gonna constrain the proportions. I'll hit the check mark and now our little cat has a tie.

We all have hundreds of images on our smartphones and cameras that we never do anything with. Adobe Photoshop Elements is the perfect tool for beginners to use for organizing and editing those images. Khara Plicanic will show you the practical ways to use this software by using step-by-step projects you can follow along with at home. You’ll get hands-on practice at making selections and working with layers, doing simple retouching, and adding text to your images.

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