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Lesson Info

Changing the Behavior of Brushes

So here's one of the challenges. When you look at them, you have these ways you can look at just little thumbnails or what they call large thumbnail, which to me is it's large. But it's still you can kind of see better what the brushes are, but maybe not quite as much as you really like. For ones like these, a lot of the brushes that I have here, like these last ones. These are what I would consider stamp brushes because I'm gonna use them by just clicking, once not actually painting with them. But for once like this, the whole point of these is that as you paint along with them, they're going to do some kind of a stroke. So one of the views that some people miss what's very useful is called stroke thumbnail, and that shows you this is what actually looks like when you paint with it and you can see some of them don't make any sense because it's not really meant to be a brush that you paint with. But look back at these ones up here to see how these ones you can see it's actually has som...

ething built into it so that as you're painting over time, the shape is actually changing. It's not just a static line, so looking at it as a stroke thumbnail is often a very good way to get a better prediction of what's gonna happen. If you want a brush with texture in it, then you can see some of these brushes have a wonderful texture that's going to change over time. Others are just a shape that was meant to be like, for example, when I defined the signature brush, there'd be no reason for me to paint with that because it would just be really odd. That was intended to be a one click kind of, ah, stamped brush. Okay, so let's take a look a little more of this idea of what we can do with this. So let's start Ah, fresh. I'm gonna make a new document, which is just 800 by 800 pixels on. I want o make a brush that I could do things with by using not just the shape, because the shape itself will be boring. But how I set up the brush toe work is what makes it interesting. So I'm gonna do on a new layer is take my elliptical marquee tool and just make a circle and fill it with black because I want it to be that 100% opaque brush to begin with and then define brush preset. So now I have the world's most boring brush because it's just a big black circle. Now, if I left it like that, that would be kind of pointless and not very creative. But where this is interesting is, once you do that, you can start changing the way the brush actually works. So let's go here, find something that's use this for a change base, okay? And a new layer. So if I press be for brush? Yes, indeed, there's my lovely brush. Isn't that awesome? It's a big black circle. Yea, great. And of course I could change the color and say, I really want to be this color. So now I have a brush, which is, you know, that color, which is like, not that much better. So when we're looking at the brushes, here's a couple of other ways to look at it. This is the brush preset panel, which is always in that stroke view. If you don't want to change your other brush priests, that picker, you can see that here. So if I look right now, it's showing you Yep, It's gonna buy, click and drag with is gonna paint like that again? Not terribly interesting. Now, before I jump in it, I'm gonna tell you, I'm just gonna barely touch the surface here because there's so many options of what you can do in this next brushes panel. You probably do a full day just on this. I'm not going to cause I want to just get you started with this idea just to give you some possibilities of how this works. So this is the main brush panel where we can change the behavior off our brush. All I did remember was I just said Black Circle. So by nature, this brush is a black circle that can paint with whatever color in this case, this gold color I have. So let's kind of look through quickly. It's telling me it's 552 pixels. That's fine down here. It's saying, Would you like to change this relevant now? Since it's round. If I rotated it courses, not gonna do anything XYZ rotating the circle. But if you pull on the edges all of a sudden, it's an oval shaped brush instead of a circle. Okay, so that's gonna affect something. I can also change the spacing right now, when the spacing is very low, that means they're gonna paint as if it's a brushstroke. But if I put the spacing higher put high enough, you can see now there's a bit of space between those and I start painting. It starts to paint very differently, so that's a good start. Makes little more interesting. I'd also like to have it change a little bit, so it's not always the same size and kinda randomize it more so when in this brushes panel, when you see the word jitter, that's a way of saying change over time. So size Jeter means the more I paint have the size change, and how much is going to change is depending on the factors that I put in here, and you can use this little preview down the bottom to kind of give you an idea. What I usually do is this. I had a new layer and then I make a change, and I paint a quick brush stroke to see what it looks like Maurin context than just looking at that little preview. So if I choose size jitter and say I want to make it about this much now you'll see it's changing size as well as anything else, so I just undo it. The control for that can be set up in different ways. If you have a pan like I do, you can set it on pen pressure. So that means when I press lightly, it small. When I press harder, they get bigger and smaller. So that way I'm having a bit of influence on that. If you don't care about that, you can also choose off, and that just means going to sort of randomly. It still does it, but you just don't have any real control. It doesn't automatically. There's also a function here called Fade, which is really odd in the sense that it's really hard to understand what number to put in, because when you see it saying fate 25 it doesn't tell you what unit of measurement doesn't say pixels or percent. It's actually something called steps, which in the context of Photoshopped. What on earth does that mean? 25 steps. So okay, so it's doing that. So, really, To be honest with you, when you're playing with using fade, try different numbers bigger the number the longer will take to see any difference. So in my case, pressure works better. You can also change the minimum diameter if you don't want as much of a change. In this case, it's a circle, so it wouldn't make any difference. But if it was a non circular shape, I could change the angle so would also change angle over time. So let's do this. Let's go back and put it back to a squished oval shape instead. So now we can see what happens if we change the angle. Jitter. Also based on pen pressure. So now you can see there's my brush and as I paint, see how that's just completely changed the behavior that started out as just a black circle of now, just with a few changes, I'm making something complete different out of it. Cancel it, Step back over there. Uh, I can also do scattering. So right now there's one oval repeating. I get sad like there to be maybe two. I like to scatter them quite a bit, and now, over time, see, more of them are appearing there was before. And all this, remember, is coming just from my original boring black round brush. That's why I started away deliberately, to make a point that just by going through and changing some of these things, you can completely change the way the brush operates. There's also the option to include texture. There's a pop up list of patterns, some of which are built in other ones. As we will see, we can make our own. Let's just add some texture to that and, uh, that it's kinda hard to see in this particular case, but, um, multiply maybe a little better. Now you can see the textural Morrison. I've added texture in there. You can even do things with, like more than one brush. So have on two brushes together, where the second brushes like a different shape, and now it kind of changes the impact of how that's gonna work, and a lot of these you just have to sort of try it and see and want to show you this one That was really interesting color dynamics. You can say I would like to go between the foreground, a background color, actually just there. So now let's pick it different, dramatically different ones. The weakened. See this? So it's changing. I mean to make it more obvious, maybe sure why? It's not quite doing the way that I want pressure. That's probably why here we go to see now it's changing on the fly as I change the pressure. All these things were changing, changing the size, the angle and the color aspect of it. The way this function works is while these air all on this brush, will work this way, if you want to keep it so that it always works this way, I would then turn this into a new brush preset because by nature my brush really still that black circle. But all these other setting just kind of add ons. If I want to make that a brush that operates this way all this time, then I would come down here and say, Let's make this a new brush preset, and I would call it something you know that would tell me oval, scatter, brush or something so I would know what it does. And what should happen here is now. If we go back to our brush presets, you can even see in the preview. Here's my original boring black circle. Here's what it looks like now. So now this brush is by nature. One is going to do this kind of effect. Now. What would you do with that? I don't know, but I mean, it would be an overlay or could be part of a border or a mask. We'll get to that later on. It's want to show you that starting with something as simple as a black circle, you can start experience with these things and start seeing How can I make this mawr interesting act differently? And usually it's just playing around with some of these brush settings. And there's even more having talked about where you can change the way that the edges look correct to brush is acting together all kinds of things. So imagine this. I did that, starting with a plain old round brush. If I took one of the brushes that we scanned in before that already had some shape toe and started doing these things to it, then we're building up even more options. And at this point again, this is still just okay. It's it's a brush. But let's issue one example of what I might try doing is I'm gonna put this back toe circular for a second, make a brushing bigger change it up a bit. This doing all this on this layer in this weird kind of way, pull this up on top, make a clipping mask, and again, I'm just playing here. I have no idea what it's gonna look like, but we'll see in a moment it's not. It's OK, but you get I mean, that was just five seconds of going. Hey, what if I did this had made a clipping mask and put it on top and change the blend mode. I usually whenever and you'll see this is a recurring family. Next couple of days, I find it. I'm always picturing what will this look like if I was to print it or put it on Ah Web Gallery somewhere and it wouldn't have transparency behind it. That's just while I'm working in photo shop, so I almost always put a new layer at the bottom and fill it with white just so I can better picture in my head. This is what it will eventually look like once that I export this out. So now that I've done that, I could do a bit more painting, trying to fill in some of these gaps here. You know, whatever and probably different sizes and different brushes. And, you know, this is me just playing at this point, but you get the idea that all things are possible once you start experimenting. And I was just repeating myself more than I already do. That was a basic round brush that took me two seconds to say makeup brushes round defined as a brush. Then start playing with all these options for how it actually operates. And the way this works is, as I mentioned, when you play around with settings for these brushes, it will assume you want that from now on. So if you ever wanted to go back to the way the brush was before, that's why I suggested making a preset of it because then you'll have both. You'll have your original brush and just plain old regular brush, and one that has these extra settings on so lots and lots of options, and there some brushes already have these things set up. So, for example, let's go back here, Dave. Just a quick question that came up. While you're doing that. Sam Cox posted this and a couple of other people of a similar question that brush set with the yellow and red. Will it be dependent on what you have as the foreground and the background color when you next use the brush? Yeah, well, that brush is set up to say whatever. You're OK. It's the in that case, the color jitter or changes between whatever your foreground background colors are Okay, so that would be for use that brush. Yes, you would want to make a quick Jack to say, How do I want it to operate? And then it would operate According So look at some of these brushes. You can see anyone that looks like this that tells me this is a brush which looks like, let's just call it a maple leaf. But some people have an opinion that looks like some other kind of leaf, but I'm not gonna go down that path. So if I choose it and just click once you see it doesn't just click once it makes a lot of them because this brush has all those settings set in. So just with the click, we it's got like brush galore. So I didn't have to do anything. That's one. The reasons for using this brushstroke look in the brush preset picker up over here. It just looks when I look at it normally like this, when you look at it, it just looks like one single leaf because it is kind of. But it also isn't because that preset is built in with all those other things. And that's why it's useful to look at these settings first. Because otherwise you might get a surprise if you think it's gonna work a certain way and something like, Whoa, what's happening here? So a lot of the brushes that come built into Photoshopped already have some of that built in. But the great news is you can either use it the way it is or build on it yourself inside like that. But I wish it went slightly different. This angle, or the bigger brush with little bigger, are the smaller Burton was smaller. Whatever it is, so one of the things you'll find in photo shop is there are quite a few presets. But the benefit of a preset most of the time, in my opinion, is just a starting point. So, for example, if I go to this one for this leaf, it's saying, OK, here's what God one has got a huge size jitter, and it's got a big angle jitter, and it's got all these things I can say. Well, I like that idea. But I wish it was more like this, and the angle was less so just because it starts that way doesn't have to leave it that way. You're gonna see how is that happening? So two things going on here, one of them is You can look at a brush setting and go, How are they doing that? And kind of look at it, reverse engineer. And you can say, Well, I like that. It's a little too much for my liking, So I'm gonna go back into some of these options and changed around so it doesn't scatter quite as much board scanners even more. Just remember recurring theme time again once you change something in Photoshop. It stays that way until you change it back again. So if you change this brush in some way, that will be its new settings until it's changed again. Which is why I keep reminding people if you make a major change that personally, I would make a new preset. So now I still have the original one and one that I've made that's building on that and looks a little bit different. Okay, now I showed you before this the preset manager. This is where we can kind of manage the order and what brushes air in here. But we can also take it a step further because one of the most fun parts of brushes is sharing sharing his carry. And I want When I, for example, was making the brushes that are the part of the little goodies giveaway, I want to that fairly easily. So I went in the preset manager and shows safe set, but then I wanted to be able to put that onto another machine that I have. So there's two options here. If you have creative cloud, there's an option called preset sink, which allows you to if you make a preset on your one machine and automatically shows up on your other if you've got that enabled. But if you don't or if you want to share with someone else, there's his option called Export Import Presets. And now I can go and find whatever kind of brushes I made. For example, there's my text brushes and say, Yes, I'd like to export that and my shape brushes. And then I choose to export them, and I'll export them into a folder or a thumb drive and give it to my buddy and say, Here's some brushes for you and again, platform independent. By the same token, if someone sends you brushes or you download them and you want to have more control over bringing them, you can also import them, and it will look and try and find any. You have to select where they are. I don't have one right now, but I select a folder full of brushes whatever you want. Now the other thing that again say theoretically happens automatically is when you upgrade your version of photo shop. What should happen is it should say, Would you like me to bring over your presets from previous versions. And by the way, this only started happening in Photoshop CS six. Before that, Hard to believe as it is, moving over presets was a manual process. And every time there's a new version of photo shop, I had to post the same tutorial on all the steps it was required to go through to manually move them. And I would never say bad things about Adobe. But I had a meeting with them once and I said, Can you please make a way where you congee just automatically import all your presets? And the guy was talking to said, You think people would like that? And I was like, I'm guessing they might as opposed to the 25 minute process it takes right now. So I was very happy a few versions ago where they're finally, when you launched the new version, it should come up and say, Would you like me to migrate your presets? And if you say yes, it will look for whatever versions that could find and bring them over. If for some reason that doesn't happen or you missed it and forgot to do it or weren't sure what it meant. You can also do that from this same subset of menus. Migrate presets means Would you like me to find presets from the following versions? And it will look on your hard drive to say I see you have these previous words the photo shop. Would you like me to bring over whatever presets you have? I always click. No, cause I want to be able to show what this looks like because otherwise wouldn't work anymore because I also know I have most of them already. But that's one of the ways. If you're wondering, why did I? My missing And in this case, presets means not only brushes and things like that, but also actions. And if you've created presets for adjustment, layer some things like that. This is outside the topic of just brushes for the moment. Want to mention this is for time about presets. If you're using things like, say, how Justin layers all the time and you've come up with a formula that looks really nice to you, Obviously I always use thes settings than you can use the pop up menu to say, save black and white preset so then you're creating a preset for your adjustment layer like it did with brushes gonna prompt you to save it into the black and white adjustment layer folder so you can name it appropriately. But what that means is the next time you're working on a project and you add, that's per second you add your black and white adjustment layer instead of trying to remember, you just go to your preset and say, This is the one that I want And again that's considered a preset. So when were even though we were specifically talking about brushes, you can manage your presets for all presets in the same way of saying I'm gonna export these out into a place that I've saved them safely away and or migrate them in. And if you as many people to start building up, let's just put it this way. The more brushes you have that you start to accumulate, the more important I would say it is to start building up some kind of brush management system that makes sense for you. I keep holding out hope that there is going to become some brush preset, pre viewer kind of gizmo that there used to be a couple of people that built their own. It was only for Windows was called like preset fewer. I think somewhere Brush Viewer was really cool because you could look inside a dot a br file and actually look at them fairly large to remind yourself this is what's in there. But I don't even know they still make it anymore because of versions. But I keep when Adobe asked for wish lists items. One of the ones for me is I would love it if in, for example, Bridge. I could look inside, click on a brush file and see little icons of all the brush that be awesome. But don't get too excited cause that's not on their radar. I don't think it all so sort of summarize brushes. Anything can be a brush, But you have to think of it in the way that if you take, for example, this photograph so I'm gonna make that a brush. You have to think, what would that photograph look like if it was black and white? Because that's the way the brush is gonna initially operate, so I usually do very quickly do black and white, and that tells me, Okay, so that kind of gives me an idea of what results I'm gonna get, and that might be perfectly fine. Or it might make you think I need to do some tweaking before I make the brush. So I don't want anyone to walk away from the segment thinking it only works if it's pure black and pure white because it doesn't. As we saw with that dancer brush, that was kind of cool. And that was just shades of gray, cause that makes sense. Based on that photograph you could do with people's faces. And I mean, gosh, the possibilities are endless. But all follows this same kind of principle. And I really suggest you fairly early on in the game, start coming up with a naming system and management. They don't end up with just this overwhelmingly large set of brushes. You even know what they are anymore.