Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating and Using Brushes and Backgrounds

let's start off by looking at an example of what I might do a reason I might use a brush. So I want to add my signature very easily, too. Photographs that I've done and I took a photograph and I deliberately kind of didn't quite hit the exposure on it because I want to show What do you do if you I don't have a lot of light or whatever the situation is, And that's the best you got. So remember the recurring theme with the brushes Black on white black is gonna be the brush. White is going to be transparent. So I need to give myself a better chance of this turning into a brush. And just to make it clear, I could make a brush right out of this. Well, what happened is the brush would have a semi see through background because the background is pale yellow, not pure white. So in an ideal world, I would make this black on white. So first I would probably take the crop tool just because I don't want that other little bit of stuff that was off the piece of paper. This is just me signing a piece...

of paper with a Sharpie, and I also captured this at a fairly large size because one of the other rules of brushes, if there's such a thing, is I want the brush to be defined large because I can always make it smaller. If you define the brush to smallest size and then trying enlarge it, depending on what the brushes like something like this, it would start to lose a little bit of quality. So I'd rather air on the side of having a great big brush up until CS six, the largest pixel dimension of brush was pixels, I want to say now it's doubled to 5000 which for most people is more than enough. Uh, probably so at this point. Now I want to try and make it black on white and having talked before about harping on and on about adjustment layers versus not this would be one example where I might not bother, because all I'm trying to do is make this black and white make it a brush and throw it away. So there's no real ongoing flexibility things on this is a rare case, probably where you'll see me actually go levels because I don't need to make it an adjustment. I mean, I still could, but I don't need to in this case. So the simplest way, when you're doing something like this to start off a say, I just need to take this background area and make it white. So I click on the white eye dropper. When I click on that, I'm saying this should be white and very quickly it says, Let me shift that toe white When you do that, sometimes the part that's black shifts a little bit. So I clicked the black eye dropper and click on something to say and this should be black and I just kind of accentuates now. With this in mind, I usually still push a little bit further one way or the other to find Figure it out. Excuse me, cause I want to make really sure that the background is pure white, because if it's even slightly off of white when you go to use a brush, you'll know it's just a little lingering amount of information on there Now, what some people do just to excuse me to make sure that it's there's no issue of that. Another option, which I don't think I would do in this case. But you could try, is go in here and shoes select color range shadows, and this is gonna give me a preview that you can see there's is not great. So if I make the selection and then put on a layer by itself, see what that looks like? So you see this part here kind of got lost a little bit, but that's one way to kind of do a little pretest associating. Or I could, if it did work beautifully, that I could use that to define my brush because I have eliminated the whole Is the background white or not? So depending what it is in this case, I'm OK with it being a little bit of that, even there's a little tiny bit of white cause I really like the way that looks kind of like a real signature, as opposed to something I did very carefully. Excuse me. So now I go to define brush preset. What will happen is it'll in this little preview area, it will show you your brush, and you shouldn't be surprised if Sometimes it looks kind of compacted if it's really long, because that's the way this preview works is it's usually kind of a square, So if you have a very long rectangular brush, don't be thrown off of it. Looks like it's squished it down a bit. And, of course you could name it something more specific. If you want to, like signature brush what you could do, and this is one, things will seem. Or, as we start experimenting with our smoke is normally I'll just okay, done throw this away. But I might want to just do a quick test just to make sure that I don't need to redo it. So I would just make a new document and fill it with some color. Doesn't have to be a color, but just easier to see. Make a new layer. Take my brush tool that whatever brush you to finally be the last one in there, and I'm gonna pick some color like black just to see when I click and look close. That looks pretty good to me. I don't see any obvious little patches here and there, so that actually looks like it worked. But that's kind of the process I would go through is they do it, define it, and then actually do a quick little test run, because what you might see occasionally is in one corner see a little tiny patch where you go that wasn't couldn't must have not been completely white. So if that where the case, then I would go back to my brush and select the area and fill it with white to make sure it really was pure white. So a lot of this depends. I deliberately took a photograph that was under exposed and not the greatest white balance to show that in a pinch, you can still make it work when we start making brushes out of other things, like an old map. The paper on the map might be yellow wish. So you may have through the same kind of thing to try and get pure black, pure white kind of stuff going on. So once the brush is defined, then you can close the document, and now it's there. I usually very few exceptions make a new layer. Put the brush on the layer because I want to implement the brush back to our whole nondestructive, flexible way of working. So I would rather define the brush at 100% opacity by using black and then if I need to in the layers panel, lower the opacity, the worry I have And I've seen people do This is they think, Well, I know all the time. I want my brush to be semi see through so they make it out of gray. When you define a brush using grey, it means by nature it's gonna be a lower opacity, and I suppose that's OK. My worry is you just set the ceiling that you can't go higher because if you define a brush 50% see through, you can easily say Wait, I just want to make it 70% because you've set that ceiling. So I would recommend defining everything at 100% even for you end up using it a lot of the time at a lower opacity in your layers panel. At least you know if you need to, you can go back. So, as an example, I defined this as a brush, thinking, I'll add it. You don't want photos as a signature, and I've used it on a couple of pdf files. Where it's that sign here. I'm like, you bet. Click, Because I don't want to print it out. Sign and scan it back in. So I just go. Yes, I have just signed it with my photo shop signature brush. It works because it looks like a real signature. No one would know the difference. I just said that on air. So when I rest looks at that. It was my real signature. I really printed it out and signed it with the pen. So this was just the kind of set the tone to say. Actually, leave this open so I can use this is my brush testing facility. Anything can be a brush. So when I walk around taking photos, I look for things like this. Not because it's the most compelling photograph ever, but I like there's something in there thing that could potentially be a brush. Just because it has something happen has got cracks and patterns. Um, this was just some old wallpaper store that had some samples. I mean, look at anything thinking, you know, could I make this a brush? And some things will work better than others and just to make a point. And this is where it gets a little more unusual. Anything could be a brush so I could take a photograph like this and say, Let's try and really blow it out Get something unusual happening here. Actually, let me step back of it. This would be an example of where I would probably do it non destructively, because I actually want to experiment with this brush making a little bit. So it actually would be better in this case to go to levels, do it this way, kind of blow things out a bit and get some of that black in there. And one of the cool things about the way brushes work is you can use non destructive methods to change before you define. But the trick is to define the brush. You have to click on the background layer, but it's gonna include the adjustment because it sees it as part of the brush. So this way I can go and choose defined brush preset look, okay. And they're very quickly Come over here and see what are brush looks like. Remember, the brush is going to take on your foreground. color. So if I make this little bigger already looks fun, I don't know what's gonna do. Let's see. I don't know that potential. I mean, it's kind of weird, but But that might That might be something you might use. Occasionally, you can make your life a little easier by saying Not only do I want to add a levels adjustment, but something else like black and white. Because remember, a brush in effect is like a gray scale brush. So you might be distracted by the fact that she's got red shoes. So I might also not that it's necessary, but it helps me visualize. It'll better if I were to add a black and white adjustment layer as well. That's gonna give me a better impression of what? How my brush will act. So as a result, this is a good reason for doing this now. Sorry. Gotta give her that other brush on top of the brush. The red to me is a little too light because I'd like, though, with her shoes, to be as part of the brush. So this is where I could take advantage of the nature of the black and white adjustment layer and start pushing sliders like move the red. So now her brush her one of those things will shoes. I should know that her shoes look darker, so that theory applies to anything. So you're is you're looking. You're saying I want mawr there or less there and then click on the background layer and define it as a brush. So the important lesson here, I think, is don't be satisfied with. Oh, well, that's the photo I have to make into a brush. Not at all. You can start playing with it and doing all kinds of things, including bobs. Everything blend if sliders, You could blend if to try and get a different look and then define a brush. So all the things we did in the previous two days on productivity were setting ourselves up for this. So now we can say now that I know how to do these flexible experimental things, then I can get all kinds of cool brush capabilities by doing this. So if we go back and look at this one, this is a raw file, so I could do the same thing using camera. I already have that camera smart object is for me. It's always on. So I would say, Well, to start off, I'm just gonna I don't know. I'll just leave it like that. Maybe put the clarity up a little bit. I don't know, really have an idea yet, So I'm gonna open that. And then I would look at it and say, All right, so same kind of thing. Let's add, I could have gone and get that other black and white just marvelous. Do it this way for the sake of speed. And even though I said black and white once again, I clicked on the wrong one. One of these days, Photoshopped will be voice activated and I can just say at a black and white adjustment layer. There we go. So now remember, I'm thinking black and white. All right. Now the middle part is white, so my brush will be kind of this weird background and I really prefer the other way around. I'd really prefer what's white to be the brush. Well, thankfully, there's an easy solution for that, and that's that. Another adjustment layer, which I used to never use because there's no settings, is called invert. But it will invert it. So now, as I'm playing, I'm really previewing my brush. So now I can come in and say All right, now I know that Let's see if I can get more detail out of this by playing around 30 settings and the answer may be no. But at least at least I know that now. So the answer. Maybe take go back to camera raw and really change the contrast or exposure or whatever. I mean, just start playing around each time you little update, and then we'll reapply the invert. Now it's getting a little better. It might also be just as easy to duplicate this and use a blend mode like multiply or in this case, and probably be overly to make things a little darker. So everything I'm doing, I'm just experimenting, trying to go. What will happen if I make this this way? Now I'm picturing ITM or like a brush because that black on white thing, without exception, though I should say that most of the time, unless I'm absolutely sure this is gonna work, I just have like we did before that little test file open, by the way he knows I'm not selecting anything when I choose defined brush preset. That's because I'm assuming the whole thing. If I wanted to say, just make this into a brush, I could do that so you can make a selection first and say That's the only part I wanted my brush. We'll do that probably with the smoke, just by the nature of those photos. So I come in here and choose defined brush preset again and go back to my little test place. I'm just using keyboard shortcuts, like for a new layer and pressing B for brush. And here's my test brush that I made. It's kind of cool now. This would be example where normally I wouldn't be a big fan of enlarging a brush bigger, but because it's already kind of a rough texture, I don't think it would be a horrible thing to make the brush really big and do that because that's still starting to be interesting. And then I'd convert that to a smart object and apply a filter and never stops. So this is just to kind of prove the point that anything has the potential to be a brush. So we said that during the photo shoot segment, but it really is true. Something's lend themselves better than others. But that's kind of the thought process I would go through. So now let's go and look at our smoke. So we're gonna go into bridge. So here's all of our smoke and this is the the cool thing about this is normally if I do a photo shoot and I look at my images in bridge because I happen to use bridge, I very quickly go. That's a reject that's a reject when it comes to brushes. I'm a lot less quick to do that, because even this one that I could instantly see is out of focus may still have some potential. Probably not, But, I mean, I wouldn't be too quick to go. That's nothing unless it was just a straight miss shot where pure black or something. I mean, I wouldn't be too quick to kind of go. That didn't work at all. I'm just pressing the space bar so I can go full screen. So even just the first couple of tests those I'm already liking those a lot. In an ideal world, you would find ones like this that are fairly self contained. You can just kind of select out that smoke machine. But even the ones that aren't still have potential and you can still combine it together. I also look at once like that. I'm a little disappointed that it's continues off the bottom, but then again, I might use it at the bottom of a photograph where it doesn't matter that there is a straight line. So again, don't be too quick to kind of write off. Okay, I didn't get that one right. That didn't work. It always has potential toe work. The biggest problem is your brushes panel is going to get ridiculously large because you're going to find so many versions of your smoking drying things. But that's kind of the ideas. I'm just gonna look through quickly here and find a couple that I think I like a lot some of those early ones. That's kind of neat to using the right arrow key to look through them all. We're like that one curlicue stuff going. Okay, let's try that. So this is the process I use now I shot J Peg just because we were tether and want to make it speed up and go more quickly. I could have easily done raw. Normally, I like to shoot raw because I want the full range of editing abilities that camera gives me. But even if I opened, this is it this J P gets a raw for what I want to do. I'm not worried about damaging the clarity or the quality of the photo because it's smoke. It's not someone's face or a product shot that I'm so worried about. So I'm gonna press Commander Control are, which is a shortcut for roping in raw. I remember so that forces the J Peg to open in camera. And now, as I look at it, I'm thinking picturing the opposite black on white. So at first my first thought as well, let's get the background a little more black. Let's make the smoke a little more white, but beyond that, everything's open to discussion. I could want to push it too far, cause then I just lose detail. If you're looking at the edges, that's fine, but I still want some detail in the middle area There, Um, clarity will do some interesting things. See how it's pulling out a bit more edges there, but fairly quickly, I would say, OK, I want to just move on. So let's see. Start with a fairly good size. So my brushes nice and big on gun hit open object. So, as we saw before, that opens it in photo shop. First thing I'm gonna do as I showed you a moment ago is instead of just picturing this the opposite way around, I'm gonna add that adjustment layer called invert because that's going to show me This is starting to get old with me not being ableto See, I guess I need my glasses or something. There it is. So now I'm seeing black on white. So as soon as I've done that now, I would start going back and forth the camera raw and say, What more can I do? And I don't want to be jet black like I would with a signature, because the whole point of something like smoke is to get that kind of smoky Tex Cherie kind of look. But it's the same time. I think I might still have a bit more I could do so we'll go back to camera and this is the only kind of tricky faras. You have to adjust it here thinking opposite because you only see it when you click OK and go back to photo shop and see the opposite in effect. So exposure a little bit. Maybe put the shadows down more and sometimes even bumping up the saturation. C has putting a little bit more shading there. It's not gonna be that color, but it adds a bit more texture to it, playing around with contrast, so there's no written rule. I normally want to see exactly what you're seeing there, not just pure white. And this is different because with a brush like the signature brush, I'm trying to say pure white background, pure black text. Here, the beauty of a brush like this is the smokiness. The semi see through areas, the contours, the cloudiness sold at all those good things. So I make some adjustments here and I click OK and the updates and shows you here's now what you're working on. So now I have a couple of choices. I want to define a brush just out of this area here, and I've got part of the lights on either side. of that part of the smoke machine, so one option would be on top at a new layer and just paint literally paint with white. Not with that brush, though. So little shortcut. If you're playing with brushes, it will always remember the last brush you have. So you always end up with some really crazy brush when you don't want it. So if you right click or control click, you can pop up the brushes panel and very quickly to say For now, I just want regular old brush, not some crazy kind of brush, because my only goal here is to just go over and say, Get rid of all this stuff like this. So this is one option would be to paint it out the other one, which, frankly, I would do probably most of the time because it's quicker is just kind of make rough selection, and they only have to worry about a kind of in these areas as to where I'm selecting. And then that's when I defined my brush preset. Okay, now make sure that if you have that invert adjustment layer, you can't be clicked on that layer. When you goto define a brush. Even though you're seeing it, it'll be great out because it thinks you're trying to define a brush out of an adjustment layer. So in this case, I have two layers. I have to be clicked on one of them. And by the way, I should make a n'importe point. Before someone noticed that an ass in my head I was saying I should say that around verbally. I said, Paint with white. But in my head I knew I was painting with black because it's underneath an invert layer. So I wanted to look white because I had the invert adjustment on top. You look, if you look and see, you can see the layer beneath is actually painted with black, but the invert layers making an all white. So we have to end up with it, making it look as if it's white. Okay, then we click. OK, we've got a little brush sample thing going. Of course, I very cleverly closed my sample image, so let's get that back again. This time I remember. Just keep it open, you layer brush and go and find our first smoky brush, By the way, for those of you didn't watch the 1st 2 days. One things that talk but from proactively standpoint, was editing keyboard shortcuts. So I have a keyboard shortcut. Now that's p for color picker. So that's how I'm able toe pop up that color picker so quickly is just by having that brush already or that keyboard shortcut already find. And now I find a spot, my click, and I've got this really cool things starting to happen. Now remember, it's always gonna take on whatever the foreground color is. So instead of being a white cloud, all of smoke all time, it's gonna be the foreground color of smoke. But that's how we can start to implement it. Where it starts to get kind of interesting is when you do things like change the blend mode of the smoke and then, as you put Mauritz gonna multiply on top of each other, do some interesting things. You can always lower the opacity of the brush little bit so it starts to build up, and very quickly we're starting to build up some kind of designed, background kind of thing where we're just again. I don't have any specific plan in mind. I'm just saying, Here's what happens if I put a series of things, but already that's starting to be kind of interesting background you could put behind someone. Okay, so whenever you define a brush like this and you can see one of the nine really nice things is the my preference is set up to show me the outline of the brush, which I highly recommend me. You're working with this type of brush. Otherwise, it's a shot in the dark you're trying to paint. You have no idea how big is gonna be. So that's really beneficial because one of things I'll be constantly doing with this is go to this enormous brushes panel. This is what controls everything about this brush. So I look over here and so far all I've been doing is painting exactly the same brush exactly the same way. And that's not gonna look terribly interesting and random at a certain point. So I would consider coming in here and saying, Let's make some there this way and let's all were out of just pick a different color just to see. So just by taking a quick little switch, all of a sudden we're mixing it up a little bit. We could spend the whole afternoon in this dialogue, boss, because there's so many options here in terms off things like shape dynamics. This is kind of interesting if I barely touched on my walk and tablet. I have little tiny if I press harder, have bigger cloud. That's cause I turned on pen pressure shaped dynamics pen pressure. So that means I'm controlling the size of the cloud of smoke on the fly, and we start using these brushes for things like cool edge effects and stuff like that. That's where this starts to become. More interesting is using these brushes in different ways. So the key controls we're gonna use for this is things like the angle so you can rotate around. You don't really. The preview down here doesn't isn't terribly helpful because it's treating. It is if you've got a whole bunch of brushes overlapping each other, you could spread it out like this. So at least you're seeing a bit of a representation there still very small. But at least this way, as I rotate, I'm getting a better idea. My personal preference is to have a file open move over and add a brush. Strokes the one click. I'm not painting with it because that would just put multiple paint and defeat the purpose of having all this smoke effect going on. Okay, so I spent an awful lot of time going back and forth between just painting and coming over to this control. Depending on what it is you're doing, you may also just decide. I just want to change the size of its. You could do that from this main brush picker. Or you could use the bracket keys left bracket makes a smaller right bracket makes a bigger if you're just trying to kind of basic control. But my personal preference is to come to this overall brush panel. It's a little bit confusing, I think, in Photoshop, because we have several different places. This is the considered the brush preset picker, where you choose the brush you want, and for the most part you can change the size of it. That's about it. And then we have a brush presets panel, which is effectively the same thing as this up here. So all it's it's riel main benefit. As you can see, examples of what brushstrokes look like with that brush, but the one that you're gonna want to use the most is the one that's just simply called brush. Shortest name most options because in here there's a Brazilian choices. For what? What? How do I change the operation that brought? So I want to do scattering. I want to add texture I want to use to brush it together. All of these options are really, really interesting. One thing I would we're suggest you about this. The one thing you have to be cautious off, and we've talked about this a little bit over the last few days. Very often. Force up has a long memory, So if you're working with a brush and you click, Oh, I'm gonna change the scattering. It's going to stay on there until you turned back off again. So if you go to use this brush two weeks later and go Oh, that's kind of weird. Why is that happening? Is because it's still remembering when you define this brush you did scattering. So it's just kind of a reminder to self go in and kind of try different things. Try different settings, so the benefit of working this way is now that I've done this, I can use that same concept and just try other ones. Let's just look and see through some of our other brushes a little bit different, just to give you an idea of how I get a different effect. It was a couple in here, remember towards the end that were just kind of had interesting little things. Okay, so here's one that's interesting, because there's a lot of smoke going on, so this is quite a different one. So I'm gonna, um, remember, That's the one I want now, since I've already done some of the work, not a huge amount, but I've already added that invert adjustment layer. It probably would be just as easy to come in from bridge and shoes place in photo shop. It's still a camera raw file, so it'll come in here long. Short cut. Sorry about that. Let's try that again. Police in polish up, not ready. It's already now in invert mode because I put it, place it into a document already had it in there, and that just saves me having to go open the document at an inversion. Not a big deal. But if you're already experiment brushes, this makes it'll simply so Now that I know that in there once again now, I would go back to camera raw and start working on it some more. Okay, So that process gives you now the pain. How? You said I just realized this isn't not gonna work the way I want to in this case, because they're JPEG files. When you place a JPEG into photo shop, it becomes a smart object, but not a camera raw, smart object. So I need to revert. What I just said in this case, I forgot they were Jay Peak. So I'd have to open it in camera raw and open the object and then do it that way, drag it into my other document where I can then take advantage off that whole invert thing that was going on. Dario. So now I have the ability to go back and say, All right, now that I've got that lets play with the exposure, let's try really high contrast, pump the highlights up a lot, but the shadows down a whole lot. But the whites up even more with the blacks down Mawr, and I'm just experimenting to go. Let's see what this does. I still wanna. I love clarity in this case because it pulls out little details that you might not otherwise get. But look how cool clarity is. So really high. Clarity pulls out all sorts of little details. If you want to, Something just very different go negative clarity, and all of a sudden you get foggy thing that's very, very different. And there's no right or wrong answers like, Yes, that's the way you should do it. It's try it because you can do this. Click OK, define a brush and then move it to the exact opposite end. Click. OK, define it as a brush. Okay, so the procedure is always the same. Then it's a matter of deciding. How do I want to get the effect that I want? I'm gonna move this down here and just kind of rework this layer up here a bit because that's OK, but I think I want a little more. And once again, let's just go back to a more regular brush. And I hate to paint with black and it's up to you. I could also at this point Pate in sort of shades of gray to try and make things fade out of it. So it's not quite as obvious an edge. And some This is the kind of thing where you don't really know exactly what to do until you've tried it before. So even here I'm thinking that I'm not sure I gonna like the way that looks, but I'll find out in a second. So as you're working away using anything as a brush this method of saying, put an invert adjustment layer in there so that you can go back and forth and keep tweaking. And you may that way define three brushes from the same original file. You might make one overall where the entire file is made into a brush. And on top of that, then you may also select just one small area. In this case, I'm a days take the whole thing defined not as a pattern but as a brush. It might be a cool pattern. Okay, let's that now I'm deliberately kind of just zipping around using keyboard shortcuts, because the point is just kind of show you variations. But if you haven't got the idea By now, keyboard shortcuts are really useful because by the time you go, let me go click on the brush to on Go click on the new layer button and go click on the color picker. I just did that. Go on my keyboard. Picked it. I didn't actually make that noise. Wants more like you know what I mean? Whatever the name. Whatever the noise, the keyboard shortcuts may. Now here's where I need to we think a little bit. The other brush I made was signing kind of self contained, so there was no definite edge. If I use this brush, I'm going to see kind of that straight line across the top. So because of that, I would probably keep that in mind. Say, Well, maybe I should put it right up to the top so it becomes more of a border or something. So even in situations where your first thought as an if I like that because there's a straight edge, you can work around that by going, for example, back to your brushes, they will now will make one this way. So now the straight edges on this side, and I can put that down here and then go to the other side and the brush will leave will be left However you do, it's if you kind of logically go around the circle. You can start saying I want one of the bottom down here. I want one like this on this edge. No, sudden, I've got the beginnings of something a little more unusual. I don't know what it is exactly, but that's kind of the recurring point. This is. Remember the theme for our today and tomorrow is creativity. So the world creatively, nothing is wrong. So someone like that and say, I would never use that Fair enough that other persons living on that is awesome. That's the whole point of doing things this way is you could just say I think I could I could see using that as the background behind something. Or I could take that whole thing and then change the blend mode to multiply, and suddenly it look. I didn't do anything overlay, and now that's completely changed the look of it. So the creative way of looking things is not OK. That didn't work. It's that didn't work yet. At this point, it didn't work, but it still has potential and occasional running situation. We will try 10 things go OK, I guess this really isn't going to be a great brush after all, but it didn't take that long to try it, and it might not be a great brush for what? Your original intention. But it could be a great brush to use on a layer mask. I just don't know until you try it. He did. It's really to auto. Rotate a brush depending on the settings that there are like you could set up. You're welcome tablet to do that so that can rotate on the fly. I don't use that aspect because I'm constantly just kind of going. I wanted to be around like this, so I just used that brushes panel. But you can. There's a touch ring on the tablet that you could set up to say be things like Rotate brush and things like that. Cool. All I'm really doing to take advantage of the pressure sensitivity for the brush size right? Cool and camera guy from Dallas, Texas, asks. Do you ever create custom brushes for other uses than stamping? Yes, In fact, we're gonna talk about what else to do with the So this is at this point, this is mostly just how we make a brush and doing single clicks like stamping. The one thing to keep in mind is, if you use the brush in the normal way, which is brushing it completely changes the aspect of how it looks. Now I've got it set on really high space in my Senate, really low. Then it just look at that. This is like a poor man's animation. If you ever bored one day, you just take a really big brush and drag. It slowly goes, But you see, the problem is other than the outside edge, the middle is just solid. So for a lot of brushes, that doesn't really help. It just slows things down because having to re calculate spacing this brush over and over again. So for the most part, I do. For these type of brushes, I to I do tend to say, stamped with it at different rotations and intensities I have in the past, made of brush or just that I'm just not taken oval and squish it put on angle and paint with it so It's more like a calligraphy edge because I know that that's gonna act differently than you know something. It's just a big chunk of in this case Smoke. Okay? You want to see the other questions, or can we just sweetie? Okay, Perfect. Okay, So I'm not going to belabor the point. I could I could just hear often do make more smoke brushes, but you kind of get the idea. Hopefully, by now is toe how it works. I'm gonna keep all of these, except for I'm still not 100% convinced on this one, because that may just be a total reject. But you never know could be worth saving. I don't know. Probably not. But all of these have potential. And like I said before, any one of these could be several different brushes. All of these things have the potential. So don't be caught in the trap of going overall. I don't like it. Pieces of it still might be really good. As we were in the studio. I remember one point looking at one of them in Cambridge when it was now was one of these where I just really liked thing was that one Yeah, this these little parts here, I just think they're kind of cool. So even just that one little piece of it could turn into something interesting. Okay, so what do we actually do with these brushes? Because of all we were doing was saying click, click, click and put a colorful background on the in the back. That's kind of cool, but that's not certainly not the only thing. So here's a couple examples how I might use this. Here's a an example. Open this as a camera raw file and for you, anything else? I'm going to just use the eyedropper to sample that color because what I'm gonna do is and this is it. This is an interesting concept to me. The first time I try this I thought, Oh, this is actually kind of cool because normally, normally, often people extract someone off a background to put on a different colored background. I'm gonna extract her off the background to put her on the same color background. We should be like, Well, why would you do that as because Then I'll have a layer mask and I can use my smoke brushes on the edge of the mass to make a really interesting effect I don't have to worry about. But now the colors won't match up because it's a different color. Background is gonna be the same color background, so it will hopefully make better sense when I actually do it as both just talk about it. So here's my quick selection tool. Gotta love the quick selection tool when you have something with great edges like this because it just pretty much does the job you want go to refine edge. And I might I think there were a few more little hairs in here somewhere. It seemed to me somewhere in here, painting with this refined edge tool to try and make the edge. But honestly, I'm nowhere near as worried about as I normally would be if I was actually changing up the background color here. I'm not, but I want to make absolutely sure I choose Layer Mask is my option for refined edge. So it's gonna initially happen, is gonna hide that yellow background. So my first step is I want to put it back looking the way it waas. So I'm gonna add a new layer below Commander Control click on the new layer button puts the layer below. I've already chosen the color earlier, so I use a keyboard shortcut. Option leader All backspace is a quick shortcut for filled with foreground color. You could just easily go fill foreground. That's the same thing. And I think because I can actually now I think about it. I have one other thing because I am creating my own solid background and I make this more like a square and then refill that background. So that's gonna get me Mawr room to play and do some interesting things. I can't move her because she's gonna be cut off there. But now I could, but other design elements or another photograph of her whatever I want. And I should say Sarah, not her. One of my good friends daughter Sarah, very kindly posed for me a couple years ago. So when I look at the mask, it looks like that now, normally, if this was a true extraction, I go, Well, I don't really like that hair there, but this case I'm not at all worried about that because I'm just trying toe do an extraction so I could start to play. So first of all, let's go on top of the background layer and use what I would consider the traditional use or most common use of defining a brush like we just did, which is just to help with our background. Go back here and pick one of our smokey brushes. Let's choose some color. And because I'm in the background behind her, I don't have to worry about the fact. Looks like I'm painting over face, but I'm painting one layer below, so I might just kind of do a few these and then go to work brushes. Let's change this. Actually, let's find there. But I'm gonna move this a little bit, rotated a bit and where you can start that funds when you change the blend mode of the brush itself to multiply. So now, each time you do, it's kind of multiplying or getting smoky on top of smoky smoke that started looking cool. So that's one of the ways you can really take advantage of. The brush from a background standpoint is not just doing stamp, but stamp in a blend mode. So you're gonna stamp on top of another or to be even more flexible make three layers, each of which are blending with each other. I just chose to paint all on one because I'm just kind of in experimental mode. All right, so now the next thing I want to do is try toe, make this a little more artistic. So I'm gonna try and find an edge like this. Now, let me pause and say, This is not for everyone because some people look doesn't go, uh, don't know about that cause you're deleting part of her. So this is a kind of an artistic portrait where you're not saying I will put you on a new background. It's like I will create something very unusual, artistic. Like there's a few photo shop photographer artists out there. One that comes to mind is Richard start of and who does this kind of stuff where he creates art because he takes photos and blends them together. And sometimes the person is only partially visible, and so it's not intended to be a classic portrait on a different background. So the reason I I'm trying to rotate this brush. I'm gonna go to the my layer mask and I make the brush a little smaller, and I'm gonna start painting on the mask. And as I do that, see what's starting to happen. It's kind of biting into her a little bit, so it almost looks like the smoke now is starting to come in front of her. But what it really is happening is it's seeing through to the background below. So what I'm doing is I'm so my layer mask now is looking like this. It's gone from being a beautiful edge all around her toe edge that has the smoking is built into it. So that's amore Unusual, but yet really interesting option is to paint on the mask. The thing you have to be prepared for is at a certain point, if you hate it well, unless you made a duplicate copy, I can't easily get back to the mask I made previously. I mean, there is a way I could do it, which we'll talk about a second, but that's the one. Thing is, you're experimenting. Be aware that you are painting on the mask so you can always throw the mask away. But unless you can in this case, step backwards a few steps, so if I was really clever. What I would have done is right. At this point, I would have said Load this as a selection. So Commander Control Click on the Layer Mass to make it back into a selection and then from the select menu, choose save selection. When you do that, it's going to make this thing called New Channel Click. OK, what has happened now is safely stored away in the channels panel is basically the same mask. But the difference is, here's why I would do that. Let's imagine for a moment I decided to try this experiment of kind of painting on the mask with my smokey brush, and I'm actually kind of cutting into her little bed night pick. A different angle might be smaller. I'll get to actual size and seconds. You can see close, lower opacity, maybe. Okay, I don't see more closely what that looks. You see how that's starting to get really kind of interesting because it's making giving the illusion that I've painted over the top of her. But at a certain point, if you look at the layer mask and go OK suddenly decided. I don't really like this. I'm kind of out of luck because I've painted over the mask than one solution. For that would be to say, All right, abort, Throw that away And then we go into our select menu and choose load selection, and we're gonna choose this one called Alfa One, which was the one that we saved. So now, when I add the layer mask, I'm kind of back to square one. So as a backup plan, before you start painting all craziness on the layer mask, load the mask as a selection or even do it before you added a layer mask one way or the other. When you have a live selection, go to the select menu and choose save selection that will generate this thing called an Alfa Channel. An Alfa channels of placed, among other things, will store your selection for future use on one of the ways you could use. That would be as a backup for this kind of thing, where you get to the point of going. I'm not sure, so let's just go back a little bit so we can paint a bit. I, as I'm painting one of things that I do is a habit that I have to remember to say out loud is that and this was a question was asked this morning about painting at 100% on a layer mask versus 50%. I like to paint, sometimes a lower percentage to kind of build it up gradually, and what I'm doing is as a shortcut anytime you have a painting tool that has things like opacity instead of going up there and moving it, I'm just typing the for tapping the first number. So I want 80% on passing at his type eight and now is 80% if I want 10% or 20%. So you just it's a short cut instead of you always constantly on the fly, I can go 2060 80 40 30. Just try different things. The only one that's a little bit odd is zero is 100%. If you want to get back to 100% you press zero now. This is going to sound really weird because it kind of is up until CSX. Before CSX, the options were 10% so one to theorize at nine was one through 90 0 was 100 But some people said, What if I want zero opacity, which for painting frankly, would be kind of pointless because painting a zero past we would mean nothing. But where I use this, this is a new shortcut where you can press to get zero opacity, you press So you're thinking, Why would you make your brush? Zero? I wouldn't. But if I'm working with a non painting tool, Sam working over here and I think I want to hide this layer. But instead of going all the way over there and click on the eyeball on the go back again, if I disco it's hidden Viper zero. It's 100%. So let's review that, shall we? 0000 was 100. I love saying that causes like wait a minute. So the non painting tool 00 is saying change the opacity 20 which is another way in this case is saying, Hide the layer. I want to now show it again to see what it's looking like. I press zero for 100%. Same thing works for painting tools, but I can't think of too many reasons why you would paint at a 0% opacity because, frankly, nothing would happen. I would say 10%. Maybe 20% higher. Probably more likely. But that's up to you. Throughout this process. I'm deciding. Okay, now I want to paint on the mask. So click on the layer mask. I want to paint on this background the layer thing, click on that layer. So I'm making a deliberate effort to go through and say, OK, at this point, I need to click on this at this, pointing to click on that. And I'm trying these different things in this way. Okay? And just to show you some how the different possibilities, I'm gonna keep the layer mask the way it is. But I'm gonna click back, make a new layer, go back to my brushes, right, or control? Click. And I'm just curious to see what this big, mammoth brushed thing I made before would look like. So I'm just gonna pump that on there. Yeah, Interesting. Now what do you do if you're painting with a brush like this? And because of the nature of how I define the brush, even I painted 100% opacity. It's a little too subtle, like I'd like that pattern to be more obvious. So a simple way that is duplicate and then right away. Here's an interesting thing about the way Photoshopped works, depending on what's on the layer. If you simply duplicate, why watch the background gets more intense? I didn't change. The blend mode is just more of it is visible, so if I do that several times, I can actually pull up more detail. If on top of that I also use a blend mode, I could potentially do even more. But I would get the point of saying, That's kind of cool. Let me take those layers and just group them together. So I now have what amounts to one layer for another background option, and I could certainly have and maybe, let's say, maybe the smoke behind that to not so much, but this is, I guess my one of the points I really want to try and get across during this discussion is there's never anything wrong with trying something. No, I mean, you may turn on the layer and go No, no, no. But you don't know that until you try it and go does this work and sometimes is we talked about this morning. You may need to add a layer, say the document, Close it. Come back later that day and take a look at it again and go. Actually, that is kind of has potential. And here's the other thing. This is the way I'm gonna do that Same kind of what I'm thinking. At this moment, I don't have a specific plan in mind to say, I know for a fact that if I do these five things, this will happen. But I'm kind of liking what this is doing right now, for the most part. But there's still I think it still has some work to be done to. Remember, This was me making four copies of the same layer, and I put them in a group or what I would call folder. But it's called a group. Then, as we nicely discovered yesterday, I can convert that whole group to a smart object, which therefore means I can treated as one element why you might I do that? Because I might decide to use the blend of sliders. Say what if I start to play with this little bit and say, Let's take this part here and I need to find the rights bottle case all right about there, maybe, and start to just see if I can't change the way it's starting to blend with the background It It may not have any effect that as anything of consequence, but because I've taken those what were four separate painted layers, put them in a group, made that group into a smart object. Now it's treated more like one layer, which also means I could, of course, do things like smart filters. So if I decide what if I don't know, sharpen this whole lot, maybe that will change. So let's see. This was what it looked like before there were little snippets of color everywhere, and I pushed the radius really high, and all of a sudden I'm starting to change the look of a little bit, so it's not quite looking the same with the words. Before, I had no going in expectation. I bet you if I do one sharp mask, it will fix it because I really didn't know. And that's the a recurring theme of Be willing to try things because someone who there a number people there that really understand. Okay, on sharp mask is taking the pixel, blah, blah, blah. Most of us don't. So we're like, well, move the slider. Nope. Cancel or move this others lighter and along the way, the other thing. And I've mentioned this before. I keep mentioning a gang, so I think it's important that whole happy accident thing where for this particular project using on Sharp mask may not help. But you make no to yourself that had an interesting impact on this. So maybe another time. All remember that and try it as another alternative. I could do some of our facts like before. Like I always like this one. I like the look of this where I deliberately over blur something and then come back to our little smart filter thing. And it's lower. The opacity just creates kind of this softer effects. It wasn't quite so intense as how I create the brush intentionally, so there's there's no you must do things in this order of this point. That's kind of our point of being trying. The creative side is just experimenting and see what happens if I really, really wanted to give myself more options, even though would make for a more complicated looking document. When I was doing this multiple smoky background thing, I might have been better. I would have quit me better if I said Let's make those five separate layers and paint on each one because then I'd have more choices of going. I don't really like that middle part At this point, I kind of I'm committed because the way I did, it's all on one layer. So my only real choices be lower the opacity or do something of that nature. Okay, so that's kind of what were aiming to do. Here is just fine ways where we can add different effects, whether it's a background or edge or anything you want. It's still very much revolves around what I would call typical Photoshopped things like, If I'm gonna give myself more options, I might want to extract her onto a separate layer so that I can, in effect, make it look like there's painted behind her. But sometimes that might be too hard, so another option would be to go on, get our brush, and let's go back to that kind of weird to use the same brush on her. But it might be cool. Who knows? Let's use this one. It's a little big. Let's. Here's, Ah, useful shortcut quite often and follows up, especially when you're trying to match up kind of the existing colors I've already chosen. I have a foreground color chosen. I've already picked the brush that I want. I'm starting to find kind of the size that I want, but I think I would love this for us to be the same colors or shoes. So rather me leaving what I'm doing option or Ault temporarily gives you the eyedropper, and then you can pick a color. And when you let go, you're right back whatever tool you have. So they're really nice Quick way of doing something we can do that. I still minus set on multiply 50% months, change it up a little bit, and then at a another layer, slightly different color. Probably change this shape of this a little bit. And all these things I'm doing, of course I'm covering her up. This would be a case where I might now take these in or make a smart object or group. Um and then temporarily hide this cause. Now I want to make a selection. So again, this is one of the reasons when people have had conversation people and they say If I there's any one or two skills that I should get better at in Photoshopped, what would they be? And I always include selections because matter what you're doing, there is a place where going to say at this, pointing to make an accurate selection of this object or a person or thing so I could do whatever the next step I want to do in this case. The reason I'm doing this because I want to add a mask so that it looks like that pattern I was creating is behind her. So I'm trying to be relatively accurate for now. Doesn't have to be perfect, especially up here, because I'm keeping the smoke Maurin this general vicinity. But now I could come back here, click on this group and click on the mayor layer mask, which again is deciding today is just not going to work, apparently, which is always fun. This is where it's a good thing that there are multiple options, so I'm going to this way now it's not perfect yet, but you get the idea that now, without having to worry about extracting her it was actually easier in this case to say, Let's just put the background in effect on a layer above her and then use a Mass to make it look like it's behind her. There's a good friend of mine. His name is Rick Salmon, and he does doing photography forever. And he actually has so many famous quotes that people are calling them salmon ISMs. Where he talks about photography like the name of the game, is to fill the frame and all these really good things that help you remember stuff. And I feel like there should be a similar thing in photo shop where there's these things you should always think about, like end up with the result you want and think backwards like I want to make it look like this background was behind her. But by the time I go to all the trouble of extracting her off, to put something behind in this case might be is easy to go. Or I could just mascot the part that I don't want. So hopefully at the end of this will keep all those quotes that people did in the contest. And that will be all the date cross ISMs or something. I don't know. Um so here's a reminder of the way we work with masks if you look at the mask I created. And again, I was not concerned about the quality of the mascot the bottom part because the smoky background was up here at this point, if I went to say, While I want to just move this smoke down a little bit, it's not gonna work very well because the Masters moved with it because that's what happens by nature. So if you ever think about what you're doing, it's okay. What I really want to do is don't move the mask, just move the contents. So that's what this little link symbol does. If you turn it off now, what's gonna happen as I have at least a bit of room now to kind of play around and decide where I want things to go? So one of the many advantages of a layer mask is it gives you that possibility of, say I want when I start out I wanted to be there. Now I can continue to tweak and try other things. Now, if I was had spending more time on this, I'd be much more careful about the fact that she has will see through parts of her dress that need to be mass semi see through to make it look realistic. But since we're just gonna keep them up here, it's not an issue, because that just would take more time. But that's all. I mean, I just have to go in and repaint that part of the Mass, so you could. But it's a matter of thinking about the end result, and the end result is I wanna have some cloudy stuff behind her than there's many ways I could do it. This is just one, and this gives me the option of going in saying That's a little much. Maybe let's lower that a passing a bit So it's less obvious and put this one like this. Change the blend mode to this and get tired of hearing me say this, but there's no right or wrong. It's just try it and see what you like kind of thing. What I'm trying to is equipped people with once, you know, the procedure of making a brush, then you can start to see what what can I do with it? Okay, so this is kind of the, um Ah, basic approach. I guess you could say, let's look at another one. That's gonna be a little more unusual, but it is that sort of like the other day you give a man a fish. The same thing with brushes. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, and that's actually glad you said that because during one of the breaks, someone said So do you have a collection of brushes? And I'm like I do, but they're ones I made and that maybe someone else would like them. But maybe not. I mean, they're not. There are plenty of places on when you search free photo shop brushes, you'll find a Brazilian of, um and like anything, some of them are really good and others are like, I don't think I would use that. Be prepared, though. If you do search for free Photoshopped brushes. I'm not kidding you to say you can find a brush, and I mean, like, the vampire collection and the blood spatter collection and really the horribly grotesque collects. I mean, there's just stuff that people like you really thought people would like a brush out of that, Did you? Okay, then. So But it does prove the point that anything could be a brush. Okay, so let's look at a whole kind of a different approach to try something. And this is really this is not everyone's cup of tea, because this is definitely kind of going a little bit a different direction. And with our Sara that the singer, I just did a little tiny bit of stuff on the edge of the mass to make a little bit different. So this is this next example is just get your mind thinking of other possibilities. So what we're gonna do is this is still a camera smart object, as I want that ability and add a new layer below. And I think I'm just gonna fill that with black that on the top layer, I'm gonna add a layer mask when add a layer mask in this mode called hide All, which is the same as saying make a mask that's filled with black, which initially would is just kind of odd option are all clicking because now I have a photograph that's completely hidden on a black background. So if I want to do that, I could just as easily filled the background with black. But of course I'm not finished yet because what I want to do is on the mask. Take my brush, find one of these little smokey brushes. But in this case, I want it back to normal. And I I have a kind of, ah, medium opacity, but I want the foreground color to be white. Remember, the way a layer mask works is whatever black is hiding the layer. Whatever's white is reviewing anything is in between is my favorite technical term. Kinda. I kind of see through kind of not so if I were to paint with a cloudy brush, then it starts to kind of show her a little bit, and all of a sudden, in a few clicks later, I've got this kind of interesting, more artsy looking portrait than just Here you are. It's a rectangle, so it's one of the many ways we can start to do things like edge effects by look at the layer mask you can see. It's just a bunch of the little cloudy things, but because I've pile them on top of another, some parts are white, some parts or gray, and that's what's changing the opacity. So if you want it to be really accurate about it and make sure, well, the very least I want to see her face. I want to make sure in here that I came in and painted a little bit, so at least I'm making sure that part is visible. But at this point, this is an interesting little effect that you're creating. And if you imagine that I'm just using one smoke brush. If I had gone through and defying eight of them and somewhere big and some were small and somewhere this angle just by picking different brushes and different capacities that brush, we get a very different effect. Now replace smoke with other cool brush, so anything out there if you have done water splashes, that's why can't wait to do splashing things, someone who especially background so. But the concept is always the same. So Adam ask Phil with black paint with white gradually with unusually shaped brushes. And here's the other thing, folks. It's important to note, while it's fun to make your own smoke brushes, I could have done exactly the same thing with brushes that are built into Photoshopped. Because Photoshopped has some, they're not smoke brushes, but some of them are kind of interesting because they're kind of like a texture. So I could do exactly the same thing and just start kind of building this up a little bit of the time. This is just a brush that's built into Photoshopped. So as fun as it is to make your own brush and don't want anyone to think well, this only works if you've gone to the trouble of making your own brushes. Not at all. The only thing I would say is most of the brushes are built into Photoshopped. They're I think they're intention. Is there really good if you're stroking with them? But if you start doing almost like stamping, you'll get a more interesting effect because then you see the unusual edges that are built into that brush. Otherwise it won't be quite so obvious. But look at that interesting edge that's just to me. That's just interesting and cool and different than Well, here's your rectangular photograph that you could frame and blah blah. Okay, I want to be different. Unusual, but even here to revisit our favorite theme. Police mine. I've done all that. I think I really am liking that. But I want to just try one thing, and that's make her just a little brighter. So camera smart object. Click. Okay, As soon as I updated it updates the mask that I've done to give me a slight different look. If I don't like it, I just undo to put it back one step. So even when you're creating what looks like a very unusual effect because you're adding some kind of mask, that's really crazy. It's never Ah, final step because you couldn't do anything you want. Just keep experimenting to say, Let's update this update that try that everything else now not to get crazy or anything but the fact that we can a make of rush out of anything and b try anything we want. I wouldn't be adverse to saying it's gonna seem really strange, but we were made to brush out of that girl. I don't know. I wonder what that would look like. really, really weird. You know what? You don't know until you try it. So perhaps not in this case, but you know what? Maybe it is because even that I could look at and say, however, if I did a motion blur on that dramatically Now I'm it's no longer a girl. Standing with their foot in the air was just a random shape that I'm creating that might make an interesting border or effect. So there's nothing wrong with, I mean, that's that, actually looks kind of neat or even know what started as weird brush I made out of girls standing on one. You all saw that. But it ain't No one else has to do with that. And so here's the other aspect of this. I like that a lot. So let's do this. Any time you have a layer mask, you have the ability to reuse it. So if I like that affect so much, I might just decide to take this whole thing dragging on this other photograph wherever it is. Files open. Hold on, make this anymore. And this one Okay, that's close to that either. All right, so here's the mask I create I take this whole adjustment are smart object with a mass Bring it over, which initially means it will be on here. But I can just say, you know what? I really just want on this one and not have that there. So without any effort, I've already started on this one. Now, here's where I might say, All right. Well, that's in this case. It doesn't look quite as interesting partially because I don't have any background behind her. Whenever you're looking at transparency, that's a bit of an illusion, because you're not gonna print it like this and see checkerboard is gonna be something underneath it. So ivory quickly come in and say, Let's either fill it with white to simulate paper or some other color. If I want some other color here with a mask, we always have this option as well, which is a similar concept of blurring feather. It is going to soften and make it look less obvious, or density is going to say I don't want the mass to be quite as intense. So let me show you that in the context of the mask, normally come in like this with very black areas. But as I move the density down, it's introducing Mawr gray and making the mass more subtle. So this is a way where if you created some effect with a master like overall, I really like it. But I want to pull it back just a notch. Then taking the density of it back is one way to do that. Um, OK, because I'm really lazy. So you showed the mask s so we could see in a black and white fashion. Can we? At that point after we've adjusted, can we save that is another rush? Sure, right off that. OK, if you're looking at something and you can see it, so, yes, that could be a brush because it's black and white. Now, what you might want to do is inverted first, to get it to look the way you want, Sure or not. I mean, either way, but you might do both, but yeah, that's that's I'm really glad you said that, because any time you can see something, especially you're seeing it in that black and white context. Then it's already very brush like, because it's already kind of what you want. Even so, I mean you could make that into a brush. You know, the portrait with that weird edge could be a brush for some reason. So you take a texture, apply a weird mass to it, and then make a brush from that mass texture. So it's a never ending story. You can always say, Well, that works them. I bet this would work, too. My worry is that because people who have searched for a photo shop brushes, all they see is blood spatter, brush paints, batter brush, cobweb brush, which is they're all cool. But that's just so limiting because there's so many more things you could do. And or if you download those brushes and use them, use them in all kinds of ways, not just click once and look, there's a cobweb. But put that on a mask and then blur it and suddenly go. That's a whole different look that I didn't expect. So this as long as we're trying as much as possible, and I broke my own rule a little bit on a couple of examples where I just painted multiple times on one layer normally wouldn't do that as much because I got to a certain point. Really? Oh, now I can't back out of it quite as easily. So if we're trying to do things you know in that way than that, that's gonna help us out a whole lot. Now, C five. This was actually when I was doing some smoky. Look at how lame my smoke machine is compared to yours. Look at this. That's just that's not good at all. Surprise. Got any good smoke brushes at all? So here's an interest. I thought this was an interesting idea. Many years ago, there was this wonderful book that was called Design Essentials. And it was this long white book and it was talking about how to do things with. And I want to say it was Photoshopped three and Will share 88 tells you how long ago Waas and a lot of them were kind of workarounds and and for you younger folks watching there was a couple of techniques. It said, Take your scanner. And so for some of you, a scanner was the device we used tohave. It had a lid on it and you would put things on. But one of the techniques they talked about was writing as small as you could on a piece of paper, scanning it in and blowing it up really big and getting this really cool, grungy type effect and for some reason that kind of stuck in the back of my mind. So when I was on this trend of trying brushes, this is exactly what I did. I took a piece of paper and I wrote with a pen as small as I possibly could, different words that I thought might be in like a senior portrait, like, you know, their graduation year or best friends or the kind of things that people would do. So that's what this is now It's all I've already kind of enlarged because it was actually me photographing a piece of paper, and I'm gonna try and make this as big as I can, and it's already black on white, so it's looking pretty good, but I might try to accentuate this little bit more to make sure I'm getting white background in black text. We open that, and now I could start trying some things like maybe just make this into a brush. So simple is that now I have some kind of brush and I wanna use it. It has always take my brush tool, find my brush. Just, you know, it's another thing to try my first test run at it. I was like, That's got potential, you know? Or you could as your imagine doing a portrait session with someone say, Oh, by the way, while you're here, can you sign this all of a sudden? When you give them their portrait, they've got their name and their handwriting as part of your design. So if you start thinking about what could be made into a brush, it might cause you to think Okay. When you come in for your senior portrait, bring your varsity jacket that has your school letter on it. That could be a cool brush. Take a photograph of like, textured leather and the little one called She Neil Letter thing. I mean, that's the kind of thought process I want people to start thinking about. Is not what can I make out of a brush with what I have at hand? But if you're doing a porter shoot, if you're outside somewhere and you see this really interesting brick wall or cracking the cement photograph. It could be either a background or overlay texture or a brush or all of them. So, back in our little test run, here's another one. I was playing with it. So Feather Bola I wasn't 100% sold on this one. But again, it's as a black and white you can start to see. It still has some interesting shapes to it. My main disappointment when I thought this would look so cool. And then when I went black and white, I was like, Not so much, but you never know. Could still be something you know. So in camera Raw very often will start like this and look at it white on black, just cause that's easier doing camera and then inverted in Photoshop to make it into a brush to see if it has potential or not. So even the ones that I'm kind of like, I'm not sure if that's worth looking at or not. It's still it's worth a shot. I mean, don't forget when we're in our experimental phase, One of the true ways to tell is to define a brush and try it, so a certain point you get the point of going Well, you know, some of these just aren't working at all, and I don't really need to keep them. So I go in the preset manager, Go delete that experiment. Delete that experiment because it just didn't work out the way had in mind. So initially, you're gonna have lots and lots of brush is building up in your collection, But a certain point. Then you go. Okay. Now, timeto kind of get rid of some of the ones that I working with or the opposite important. Remember, At a certain point, you say I'm loving these brushes I've created. I'm going to save them as a set because I want to make sure that I'm not gonna lose thes brushes that I have created. So want to create a backup set of these brushes? Bigger brushes to some degree will start to take up a bit of space. So if you have a bunch of really big brushes, it might be well versed to take those and put those in a separate little folder only load them as you need them. It was kind of continue on the path. I was going down with this one but do it better this time because I wasn't hugely convinced I did such a good job on this. So I'm gonna show you another way that I would build on this concept a little bit. So I took a couple of photographs of Sarah with the thought of mind of putting together not just one photo, but several, but not just here she is. And here she is, but something that kind of a little more interesting. So I'm gonna go to canvas size and give myself some more with so that I have all that space and then new layer below fill with this color. I just used a group instead of new layer below. So let's try that again. Okay? And I'm not worried about the fact that it's not completely matching up here because we're gonna be covering most of that up any So back here, as we did before in this case, I think I do want to extract her to give myself more choices. One of things I want to do is continue down that path of making on edge on the layer mask a little bit. So see how that's looking. The only downside is right now I've got her looking through to the same color below, so I can't really check the edge that way. So let's do it this way. See, normally I would be worried about that, but because ultimately you're still gonna end up on a mostly yellow background. I'm not as concerned as I normally would be about that when we talk about compositing tomorrow, I would be worried about that, and I would fix that. But for now, because I'm just extracting or off the yellow only to put her back on kind of the same yellow and not anywhere near as concerned as I normally would be. Always make a layer mask, click. OK, then have this other raw file in this case because it is camera. I can choose place in the photo shop, and it's gonna first, of course, come into raw okay, position over here somewhere. But I'm gonna really kind of make this second photograph much more of a sort of a design element where I'm just playing around with colors and things like that because I'm gonna ultimately start to cover that up a little bit. I want her to be kind of in the background. A little bit different blend. Know that might be more when I had mind. Okay, so now make another layer. And this would be the first time I was showing I was kind of got caught up in playing with brushes. But this is the way I would tend toe work normally is. And I only have a couple of smokey brushes that I created. I've normally have several, so I could experiments. We're gonna have to live with the fact that I only created one or two at this point, and shoes are color we want to play with on this new layer. Make just a couple of it's of this. What you set up your past, these kind of low and blend mode. This a little bit not 100% sold on that color. Let's go a little darker as well and change our brush rotation and things like that. However, in a certain point, now is when I would probably say Okay, before we go too far, let me make another new layer. And if I had a different brush, I would change to a brush at this point and try some of these other different settings, like the rotation on a different color. I could stay in the same family, or I could even go back to some of the colors that are kind of in the image a little bit like some of the gold orangey colors. Maybe that's kind of my own choice. And then now is why I want to start kind of playing this little bit Mawr. So we're gonna lower that a little bit. I could also decide. I really do want to see what it would look like if I just kind of made it look like there was overall smoke just in front of her. So when a new layer on top start to paint a little bit here and then play with opacity, so it is possible if you want to just make it look like there's, you know, she's in a smoking environment or foggy whatever it might be, but always making sure we're doing it on layers. So at a certain point you say OK, that's OK, but I'm not sure yet, but that's OK, because until I do more steps, I'm not sure about that yet, But it's still just a layer. So the Remember those But you're here in the first couple of days. The whole reason I harped on and on about flexibility and and non destructiveness was Frick's really leading up to this so that as I'm trying things, I'm like, I'm not sure yet if I like that. But that's OK, because I couldn't do eight more layers and try six more brushes knowing I could still come back to this layer and go, Yeah, now I look at it, I'm not convinced. So that's kind of the thought process that I'm trying to go through here again. I would before I go too far, I'm gonna start exploring with this layer mass. I'm gonna make a backup plan. We can talk about that part again, save that selection as this thing called an Alfa Channel just so that when I start really messing with this mask edge, I'm not gonna paint myself into a corner that I can't get out of in case I go too far. So let's just see what other brushes that I have at least one other smoke brush that I made previously, though it's a little small that actually will probably work in this case. So I've got my brush set 70%. I'm painting on the mascot the moment because what I want to do is in certain areas, like the edge of the microphone, because I'm asking with a smoky brushes, making the edge less obvious. But because things underneath it started, give the illusion that paint it or smoke it started starting to come in front. So when I combine this kind of idea with the smoke that I was putting in front, it just starts to add who that was bad. Don't never change the dissolved mode. That's just and you want a blizzard of snow. It's like the only thing people have used his element. Rain or snow dissolved. Perfect Other nap. Not so much. I've never known anybody available to use that dissolved mode. I, you know, it actually does if you've ever want to make it look like someone's in pouring rain or in a snowstorm or starry night. That's what the three things people used is all right, thank you, but that the trick is, since I mentioned that, I'll just say one thing, that the thing that throws people off with dissolve mode is you never see in effect unless it's less than 100% opacity. So if I have a layer that's white and I changed to dissolve mode, you go. Nothing happened. Assumes you go 99%. All of a sudden it starts dissolving. So dissolve mode does nothing. At 100% opacity, you won't see any difference. So if you put a layer toe like apes and opacity plus dissolve mode, then you get little speckles which look like starry nights or the start of snow where rain or something like that. That's just in the side. Okay, so can you throw that brush request thing at me again? There they want a national grunge brush that they could use to make lines that looked grungy. Okay, so 100% sure what you mean by that by the will give a shop, I think I might throw out the word distressed. Okay, so let's just see here some thoughts that we might do with this a little bit. Now, in typical Photoshopped, fashion is probably lots of different ways to do it. But what I might consider is taking some shaped like this and then making a slightly smaller selection to which I add a layer mask, which at first will just look like I have a skinnier line that day before. But the reason for doing that is now on the mask itself. I could start, for example, painting. So here's how you can use a brush to lead towards making a brush. So I've got this little brush here. I choose White as my foreground color. Now, as I'm painting with white, this ultimately it's making the edge of the black brush be a little grungy. Er, then I could take this and define This is a brush now whether that will work or not, or whether it will look the way you want. I don't really know. You're in Seattle, Dave. You gotta be a bust on the ground. I guess it Everyone has own definition of what grunge looks like, too. So we'll see here. Now I gotta be honest and say, most of the time when I'm creating custom brushes, it's more to do this whole kind of stamping thing, because if I painted with it is just gonna look like a brush, it's not gonna be a great advantage unless potentially I said, Well, what if we we're two up? Sorry, Rotate this at some other angle than potentially that side of the brush may look different. I don't know. It's hard to see it. This sighs, but you see the edge of it's a little more unusual, so that's probably not exactly what they were having in mind. But we're I'll use the excuse of that whole teach a man to fish. Thing is, why don't you should explore making grungy brushes Now that you know the concept of it, Go make your own. Be much more fun. Question. Could you explain again? OK, so you took the time you did. You smoke? You made a whole series of brushes. How can you save them as a selected set of brushes without all of the other voter shop brushes? So thank you for asking a question. Everything to do with presets is in the preset manager. So if I've gone through and defined 15 smoke brushes or a couple of these and one of those and whatever combination they might be than a certain point, I'm going to see all these last brushes are the ones I've defined and it could be two or three or 17 or however many you've made, and in this case I've got a collection of different ones. So let's say that I want to kind of pick and choose and try and find just the kind of smoky ones that I have and this beautiful, grungy line brush because it's so awesome. So I'm gonna. If I was doing a whole roll of them, I would do this. Click on the 1st 1 shift click on the last one. It selects all of them. If I want to be discontinuous, I guess the word would be I would hold click on the 1st 1 command, click on any other one, and now it's gonna identify just those ones that I select if you want, like a whole range just shift shift and that does everything in between. Once I've done that, then I click save set. What's gonna happen initially? It's going to prompt me to say, Would you like me to save this into the Photoshopped Brushes folder? And initially I would say yes, please, and call it some name that puts it into the brushes presets folder inside photo shop. I hit safe. If I were to restart Photoshopped the next time I was looking at brushes down the very bottom here, it would say smoke brushes so that my brushes air right there, ready to load in at a moments notice, which is really useful. What I recommend is, once you do that the first time that's building it into Photoshopped, I would then go back with the same brush. Is shoes safe set again. But this time, somewhere outside of photo shop, like on the desktop, make a new folder and call it my presets and save it into there. And the reasons that's just simply a backup plan. Because if something happened to photo shop where something went so wrong, you lost all your presets, you'd be out of luck. So it's great to build them into photo shop in that brushes preset folder. But I would also very quickly say, and I want my own set over here That weight, as in a as a useful aside, it's also easier when your friend or colleague says, Didn't you make some cool brushes like No, I did not. I'm sorry you're on your own now. then you could go to that folder and say, Here's the brushes I created Let me just send them to you because it's a little file. It's not that big. And the brushes gold dot a br for adobe brushes and then they would get that go. Let me load those into my version of a barbershop. So is that the set that you said that you then upload to cloud? Yes, if you want another backup. That's one of the advantages of Creative Cloud is I have this storage space. So on my creative cloud account, I have a folder is called Presets, and I load not everything but for me personally, because I spent most my time traveling to do training. I want to make sure I have this collection of presets that I've want to use as part of a demonstration you had. There's a lot of fair amount of stories based, so I guess, directly could upload a whole bunch of brushes. But that part's more up to you. But I would say the two important things are first save in the folder that it prompts you to save it into, because that means it's just built into photo soft, which is a really nice advantage toe have. Once you've done that, then make a 2nd 1 Now the other option, which is this is assuming you've made sets of brushes already and you've saved them. And this is new and CS six is the option, which is called import slash export slash Import. You could say I want to actually export the ones that I have office previously made, and it automatically looks and says, Well, right now, here's the ones I found, but only find those. If you've created a preset set, the words, the fact that I've defined brushes, they won't show up in there. I had to first do that step of going, say that set of presets as smoke brushes. Now it will find those. Now I'll be able to copy them to see there is the one that I just did called smoke. It found those because I say that as a set I made 15 other brushes that had ignored completely because faras it concerned it's not a set yet, so importing exporting presets really means sets of presets that you have saved, not just whatever it confined with the exception things like actions and adjustment layer presets. It finds those but any of the presets, like brushes and swatches, those kind things. You have to save a set first in order for this command to see it. But this is a huge leap. Fork is in the past. Frankly, if someone said, Just send me your presets it was like a nightmare to go look for them all because they're all over the place. Because brushes Aaron, the priest that brushes folder and watch it in this watches folder and have to go to each one ago. Copy that. Copy that this way, it says. Here's all the ones I confined now for those people that work watching. If when you install a new version of photo shop now it looks and if it confined presets from previous verses, would you like me to migrate them? So if you've done a whole bunch of brushes and photo shop CS five first time you launch CS six will say, Would you like me to migrate thes presets? And if you say yes, it will find anyone's that can and put them in there for you that did not used to be the case before CS five. It was a completely manual procedure to move presets by yourself, unfortunately, but the good news is, it's now just so this will save them all into a single folder. Yes, what is considered a set So that Oh, you mean this part right here? The export. Yet, whatever you choose to put them, I'll have all create a folder called My Presets, and it will copy everything into Okay, Question from Kelly, M. Said she's downloaded many brushes into her brush palette but occasionally go to use them and they aren't there. I have to reload them all. What am I doing wrong? Um, you've just broken Photoshopped. It's all you, you know. And that's one of those things where who knows what the answer is, But there's no logical answer. If you low brushes, they should be there. But if they're not, it doesn't mean you've done something wrong. It means something has gone wrong. One of the realities of life and photo shop is you could be using photos up every day, and then one day you click on a tool and go. That's weird. Why is it acting like that, and it just happens. And for reasons that I'm not an engineer, so I don't know the reason they call it this, But sometimes they say, Well, the problem is your preferences have been corrupted and, well, you can probably tell I have a weird sense of humor. So the first time some of that to me, I just pictured these preferences going, Hey, kid, come here, have our smoke. And they're like, corrupting these references was It just seems like a weird term to say your preferences are corrupted. Oh, no, But it just means the preferences aren't acting properly, so it's getting bad instructions to photo shop. So if you reset your preferences, then it puts everything back to out of the box as if you've reinstalled it. Usually that resets a lot of those problems. Unfortunately, in the area of things like brushes that may or may not. So that's the other reason for having that backup is if you they should be there. But if they're not, then load him as you need it. I would run into something similar to that and reinstalling the program we're repairing. The program usually takes that bug out it could be a virus or something. Now, the one thing I would very quickly say in the world of Photoshopped reinstalling photo shop is last resort. First resort is reset the preferences cause that takes, like, 15 seconds. So if you are given advice by someone says, well, just reinstall photo shop Before doing that, I would reset the preferences and I won't do it because it I don't really wanna set my preferences. But the way you do that easily without going and finding where the heck are my preferences is you quit photo shop and then you re launch it. And on the Mac, you hold down command option shift and we knows you keep command story control. Ault shift held down until a little dialog box comes up and says, Are you sure you want to lead the settings file, which really should say, Make sure you want to reset your preferences because that's really what it's saying, But that's just the way it happens. So you say Yes, it continues launching Photoshopped, but it puts all the preferences back to square one. The downside is for some people. If you spend a lot of time going in saying I'm gonna set this preferences. They all go back to square one. But given the alternate between, put your preferences Square one and have some functions not working properly, that's that's just the way it is. Now, some people say, And I used to say this to and I realized, realistically, I never, ever do this, But I always tell people. So the other option is when your preferences, someday when you're working, going gosh, my preferences air working really well right now, I should save those as a backup. And I say that all the time. I've never done it because I never think about it until my preferences stop working. But one day, when you're just going, gosh, everything is going swimmingly. Then I should go on, find my preferences file and save that. So you search for whatever it is Photoshopped preferences and find their buried away in some user folder and duplicated and copy it somewhere. So then the day when your preference get corrupted by those bad preferences from like, you know, cork express corrupt their corrupting you, Then you find your preferences and copy them back in. But I've honestly, I've given that advice for 10 years and never, ever remember to do it. I always think how darn it. Now my preference are working. I don't have never to get around toe copying that good set of preferences. So brush presets are any kind of priest as, like brushes. Because even though as you saw, it doesn't take that long. If I'm gonna make 15 smoke brushes, I don't want to do it all over again. So I'm gonna finish making brushes, save a set as a backup. And the other day, he showed us the amazing preset manager. For now, you can see that all that stuff And there's a question from Photoshopped addict. Is there a way to save all your Photoshopped preferences in one step? Styles, shortcuts, workspaces, brushes and so on. Well, there is in this. Once you've saved the individual sets that that's what in CS six, that's what this export import enforcing Like I said, it only works once. You've already made a set, so you would have to would have to be a two step process where you would first go to the preset manager. Okay. Where are my brushes? Here they are. save a set. Now go to swatches where my swatches save a set. So unfortunately, it's that part. But honestly, it's still easier now than it used to be, because in the past they would all be somewhere. And then you have to gather them up. The preset import export thing. I was called Import Export Export Import, which is weird to me. But anyway, that command finds anything that's considered a preset dot a br dot You know, grd, whatever all the extensions are for all the different persons. Here's all the ones I confined. Would you like me to export those out? So at least the second part is a lot easier. But the first step, you still have to go and say Fine, make all these little sense for me. And we do have one more question from our M from South Dakota, in reference to creating brushes when I whenever I do a selection, I have a friend or a fringe around the selection. How do I prevent or delete the fringe? Okay, they're enough Well, and that's one of those things where it depends. Let's see, What can I do? Interesting thing. Let's make a brush out of that now, I wouldn't be very interesting. Okay, so, uh, let's see. Right layer. Too many things going on here. Hold on a second months. Make this better organized. Okay, so in my wisdom, I decide. Gosh, Sarah would make a nice brush. Don't know. So any time we're making a selection, I'm gonna go to this refined edge command and see what I've got. Now, let's ignore the part in between in here, and look just at the edge. There's a bit of an edge, but one things you have to be always thinking from a brush. You have to put on your brush goggles and say, But it's not gonna be color. It's gonna be a grayscale version of this. So with that in mind, the fact there's a little tiny fringe around the outside of her hair may not really have an influence, because I'm gonna define this into a brush. So my suggestion is, any time you're looking at something to go, I could makes into a brush think black and white, not color, cause color fringes. We see our eyes are immediately drawn to the yellow around her hair. Having said that If you try making a brush and you still don't like it, I would either shift the edge in a little bit. Or there's also understand command called decontaminate colors, which attempts to try and remove any little fringe that's available or is showing this case part of reasons not because my initial selection wasn't ideal. But I would say that when I'm making selections, I'm a lot less worried about it. When I know my end result is a brush than I am. When I'm doing things like compositing because they're the edge is vital here it's more. How would this work is a brush? So, just as in as a suggestion may do just quickly this do that again. Remember one of things that the recurring theme with brushes is. Think black and white. So in Before I started making my selection, perhaps it would not be a bad idea for me to convert this to black and white. So now what? I'm doing things like make a selection. So let's go get our it's selection here, Okay, so now when I go to refine edge is a little bit of a French, but it's nowhere nearer notice well before my eyes were drawn to it because it was yellow. So think about the fact that brushes ultimately always end up being a grayscale version of whatever you're using to find your brush. Maybe that not always, but some of times will make you realize the worry quite somewhat of a much about that thing like that edge that I would normally worry about here. It's perhaps not as important. So just reminded me when did that? I actually have a couple of other brushes I wanted to show you. I don't have the original file, unfortunately, to show you how I made the brush, but I can least describe it for you. I mentioned during the photo shoot of monitoring the smoke that I was given these old maps, and they're beautiful because they have the oldie English E type that you can't read cause it's Latin. But it still looks really cool or graphics that they don't do any more like these really nice, complicated map type things around the title of the map, all that kind of stuff. So I'll just have to visually are describe it in words because I don't have the original I didn't think to bring the the non brush version. So when I brought it into Photoshopped, it was The paper was pale yellow wasn't like really old. But it is just enough that it didn't really look as good as I wanted. So I cropped down to the area of type that I wanted, and I did that levels trick I showed you with the signature. I said, Click with white eyedropper. Click with a black eye dropper that eliminated a good portion of the issues. But then I still because it was a one little text block as part of a greater map. I had to take a few minutes ago. Clone out that those lines because they were going out of the edge of my area. I didn't want lines going out. Just wanted this block of text. So the investment in this case was me cleaning up garbage. So I just saw black text on a white background or in some cases, mostly black text on an almost white background because depending on you want a little bit of that texture in there. All right, so where the heck are those? So here's one. That's music That's what you want to the music brush. I don't know why not. I have a bit of music. Sit around Here is the one I think it is. Yeah, I love this. I just think that's really neat as an embellishment to say, I've got ah photograph and I just need to want It's something that's a design element that doesn't necessarily expecting people to read it. It's just like, Oh, look, that's maybe a love poem I don't know. It's actually description of a map, but unless you can read Ancient Latin, you hopefully wouldn't know that. And then also in here I have the swim I to me, that's just I don't know where I use that, but it's just cool because it's just you don't see artwork like that anymore. So that's meat is trying and saying, I wonder that you know that one is one of a kind. So just to kind of reiterate the recurring theme here of why not? The worst thing is gonna happen is you'll. In this case, you have a big, long list of brushes that you have to organize somehow, but you set up some kind of organizational system to say, I'm gonna make a series of smoke brushes. So as you said, Bob, take those brushes and export them and that's that one set. Now let me go back it ago. Here's all the kind of ancient map text like brushes, and however you want to organize it, that will make your life simpler because then you load him as you need him. I want to experiment. You create brushes where you've taken photographs of those she Neil senior letters and make a collection of different years and letters. And, you know, the little one of those Those things called with little bars that say I was on the soccer team and the varsity cheerleading and all those kind of things just become other elements that could be made into a brush and or we'll talk about this more the next section. If it could be a brush, it can also be a texture, overlay kind of thing. So a lot of these things have a dual purpose where they can either be used as a brush. Um, and probably if I could rewind right to the beginning of this segment, I probably would have said now that I think about it when I say brush for the next. Whatever this length of time has been, I probably could have been saying Stamp because most of the time I haven't been brushing. I've been going add, add add. I think that's important to note is that even though the brush is intended most of time to be making brushing motions, when you're making this kind of brush, it makes better sense to go click once. And then it becomes just almost like a way of a library of elements. You can just add by clicking, and you can still change the size and rotate. But ultimately we're not generally clicking and painting, because that would just look kind of. I mean, you could do it, but it would just be different. But who knows? It might work and by the way, again don't discount the fact that there's some pretty interesting brushes. Most of these are built in these air, all brushes that come with Photoshopped, including the grass and the marijuana. I mean, the maple leaf and the other leafs and the dexterous things, and up until about here thes air all built in So and these are the ones that display on use the pop up menu, and these are even more so with very few exceptions. All of these are also built into photo shop. So if you want to just try different things, they got some nice ones that look more like have a watercolor effect. So I want to reemphasize the point that, as fun and cool is, it is to make your own brushes. There's a lot that are already built in. You know, just look at all the titles like calligraphy and Dry media and faux finish and Wet Media. So all of these are just different options where you can try those as well, either in addition to or instead of making your own.