Lessons

Lesson Info

Using Adobe Brush CC

So let's continue our discussion of brushes. I touch briefly on just the basic idea of how to make a brush. We're gonna talk about that a bit more. And then what? Weaken how we can change the behavior of brushes and also very importantly, how we can manage our brushes. Because at a certain point, we could have this enormous collection of brushes and it could get very difficult to kind of figure out what that is going on with with all of our brushes. Um, so, uh, let's kind of revisit the idea here. So here's one of things that I had taken a photograph of was that sheet of paper with a bunch of those little weird things that I decided. I want this to be a brush so in here in camera raw because I can I would look at and say, Well, let's try to make the blacks is black as possible in the white ist widest possible to remember our recurring theme of brushes as black as our brush white, his transparent. So I could make my life easier by even bringing in this way. And all I'm doing is I'm focu...

sing my attention on this one element. Obviously, when I open this, I can eventually turn each of these into a brush. If I want, I'm still gonna open as an object so that after I do a test run of defining a brush, if it's not quite right, I can go back and make further adjustments to it back in camera raw. So let's take a closer look here. You can see some of them are looking like little spots, and some of them I deliberately use that kind of dry brush edge to really come out. So I This actually looks, Let's go back to this one. So all in to do is make some selection. Doesn't matter what selection tool I use. I frankly used the lasso tool probably more than he else, because I want to make sure I don't grab another part of our brush by mistake. I went to do the marquee tool. I think I might have been getting a little bit of that other brush, so at this point, I'm going to do it before defined brush preset. But two things happen when I do this that grabbed my attention. The 1st 1 is it says to 19. That means the biggest this brush is gonna look decent is a 219 pixels. Is that enough? Probably. But I'd like it to be a little bigger. The second problem. I don't know how well you can see it on the screen here. And you see, there's just a slight. It looks like a little bit of gray around this. So that tells me that white background wasn't as white as I thought it was. So before you go too far, you might like in this case, I'm gonna cancel and make a couple of tweaks to it because a I wanted a little bigger. And, b, I want to make sure it really is white because I was just in camera going there. That looks whiter to me. But this is telling me it's not quite the case and that what would happen if actually did define a brush like this when I went to use it. You see just a tiny little ghostie circle on there that may or may not be visible, but I want to just not even worry about that. So let's cancel that double click to go back to camera raw. And this is why cause last Time was in camera had resize it smaller. And one of the recurring themes that air is both good and bad about Adobe is that most of their programs have long memories. So back a tile while ago when I change this to 1500 pixels by 2000 seemed like a good idea at the time. The doubt meant every documents coming in that size, So I'm gonna turn that off to say, Let's make this bigger. So now right away I'm seeing everything is a lot bigger so that's a really good start here. So now So here's what's happened. Just so you know, cause this because I didn't start with this thought process, I'll walk you through What just happened when you open up a document? A smart object. It says. I was 1500 pixels by 2000 pixels. I've just said make it bigger on camera. But as far as Photoshopped concern, the document size is still 1500 by 2000 so hidden in you can't see is the rest of the document. So if that ever happens to you, where you decide to resize it up, and then why am I not seeing the rest of the document? What you have to do is go. The image, menu and shoes reveal all that will make the canvas as big as it needs to to show the rest of your document. So now I can see. There we go. So that's what I was looking for. So that's the first thing the second thing is, and earlier on, someone asked the question. If you're using camera raw as a smart object, would you still use an adjustment layer? This would be a case where I would because rather than in camera raw trying to guess, I think that looks black, and I think that looks white here. I would now use either levels or curves and use the eye droppers to say I need this to be black and I need to make sure this is white and that way. Now, instead of being guesswork, I know this is how I needed to be l for a lasso tool. Make the selection about where I want the brush to be and make sure I click back on the original photo now and I do my define brush preset. It's already bigger. And I don't see that little ghostie thing around. So right, way right away That suggests it's gonna give me a better brush. And I'm not dealing with this issue right now, since I'm just demonstrating. But I do want to remind you that it's not a bad theory to start some naming system going up all these brushes called sampled, brushing after kind of figure out which one is which, Even if I mean, on the brushes that I'm giving away, I think it just says, like paint splatter. One paints black two or something, but it gives you an idea of what it is that supposed to sample brush. I'm not gonna worry about it. I'm gonna add a name here, too. So you can see this is the one that I just doing here Now. If I wanted Teoh, I could go through and Fi each one of you say, Now, make this a brush. Now, make this a brush. I'm just going to do the one. But you see, that was the process I would go through, would just be going through and saying, you know, select that. Make that a brush. Whatever you want now is we'll see. Making it a brush is just part of the process. What you do with the brush and how it is applied can be quite different, so we'll get to that shortly. But I also want to talk about something that has usually comes up in the conversation. People talking about brushes is I'm gonna make some of these brushes are for what I would call painting, like painting a border or painting an edge or something. The other use of a brushes mawr as a stamp, like with that copyright brush we made earlier. I wouldn't paint with that. I mean, I wouldn't drag with it because it would make this really weird brush. I would just click once is like a stamp. So if you think of anything that you would like to have built into photo shop, that is one click. Apply Ah, logo copyright notice your signature. Anything that you want to be able to add. That's the other benefit of finding a brushes by Nature is then built into Photoshopped. So, for example, I have a photo I took of my signature and at first everything I want to add a signature. I go searching for ago. Where the heck did I say that? And open it up and try and find it. And so you know what? I should just make that into a brush because then it's built in the photo shop. So in this case, I used a blue, um pen, which is okay, But if we think about our theory of brushes, if I just defined a brush right now and don't do anything else, I would not get the best brush in the world for a couple of reasons. First of all, blue is not black. Blue is very dark gray. So right away my brush could never be anything other than partially see through. And also, is that background really white? Or is it maybe off white or have some texture because of the paper? I don't really know. I kind of do because I've tried this before. But if I zoom a little closer, you can see that actually has some texture. And I don't really don't want that because I wanted just to be pure white. So the first thing I would try his go back to levels and do the same thing I did a moment ago. Click on the black eye dropper and say, this needs to be black. And when I do that, now the texture comes out of the paper, even Mawr and take the white eye dropper and see if I can't click in somewhere to make that texture. That was a good one a minute ago, Uh, somewhere in here I had one that was Try that again, and sometimes it is just kind of luck of the draw. I actually clicked on a good one, but then kept going. So let's go back and do black my caps. Lock key is on, by the way, that's why you're seeing the eyedropper look like that little target, which is actually better for me when I'm trying to be really accurate and then take the white eye dropper and click somewhere like that. So that's looking better to me. And here's another example where normally, when I have a signature, it's relatively small. But I took the photograph so this brush is actually will be quite big to begin with, because again, I'd like to have a bigger and be able to scale it down rather the other way around. Um, I think I mentioned it in passing for, but I'll say it again. Sometimes I find when I'm looking at something and trying to determine is it look OK? Is that black and white? They're gonna be in okay, brush one of the tricks that I'll do to kind of look at it differently, because I find if I stare at it too long this way, I just can't really tell anymore. So if you temporarily add another adjustment air called invert so it goes white on black. Sometimes you can see I don't if you can see there, but there's still I can still see little bits of texture in there, so that's telling me it still needs some work. So that my eyes I didn't really see that before, So that's I don't want to keep it this way because of my brush would be the wrong way around, but temporarily to do another check to see. Does this still need work or not? You can see there's definitely some errors near where it does need some work. So once I've done that, I can throw that layer away cause I know where the problems exist. Let's look a little closer at this brush before we go too far. When I use that levels, most of it turned black, but there's still some areas that are later. But that's okay, because I signed this with a ballpoint pen, and the nature of my signature means there are some areas where you don't see it as well. So I wanted to look like my signature. I was showing someone that's the other day and she said, Why wouldn't you take your walking pen and sign it like just sign it in photo shop? Because no matter how good and with his pen, it doesn't end up looking the same as using an actual pen. And I wanted to simulate if I signed something with a pen on paper, this would look like so there is still this one issue remaining where there are some texture in there. So what I need to do is I need to make sure that I'm really getting black on white. So I have two different approaches I would take and they're two different things. You can try, and I'm not gonna recommend one over the other because this is great. Big. It depends. You have to try it and see. Even though I said earlier, there's really no need to take things on separate layers and make selections and do transparency. In this case, it might be better to do this. I'm gonna try and see what happens here. If I go to select color range, then Aiken click on the black to say this is what I want and see if I can White Matt. So I'm just moving this, trying to get as much of this as I can, but not too much of the background, and then duplicate that onto its own layer and hide and then take a look at it. See? Does that look OK? I think it looks all right. There are gonna be pieces missing, but that's the nature of my signature. So it probably will look okay, um, as an added little trick, if you ever do something like this or like I wish I could fill in those areas just a little bit more quite often. If you just duplicate it, see how it just filled in a bit more. So I duplicated again. Now it's filled in just a bit more. The only danger and doing that as if they're still a few little tiny specks of background. It might intensify those as well. OK, but at this point that to me looks pretty good, so I could now do that. Define brush preset, but let's go back for a second. Let's get rid of these three layers se back at this step. If I just felt like I was seeing a bit of that texture, I could also try this. And this is I'm showing you two methods because sometimes they'll work better than others. So it's good to have two options. And remember, what we're dealing with here is boy, it's much more noticeable in this. My should look over here. I could see it much more easily on the projector. So if I take my paintbrush B for brush and I'm gonna go back and get just a more regular old brush like this with a bit of softness, probably not quite so big, I could, in theory, if I had a lot of time on my hands, zoom in really close and just try and paint with white and not not touch any of the black, but that would be the really lengthy I'm getting paid by the hour way to do it, so you don't want to do that. So there's a wonderful trick that someone came up with. I wish I knew who it was, so I could thank them over and over again. That changes the way the brush works. And it's perfect for situations like this, because basically what I want to do is any things that air tiny little light gray that I want to turn white. But I don't want to touch the black If I took the brush normally, what would happen is, of course, it's getting into that texture, but it would paint right over my signature as well. So instead I take the blend mode of the brush and I change it. To overlay on overlay is like this magical mode that says I will not change the color of anything that's black. Go back one step here, do one other thing for this to work properly. This would be an example of a case where you'll see a rare example where I would do this merge. Visible ideas actually wanted to be black and not the blue thing I was doing with levels. Okay, this will be easier for you see, So now what's happening is when I'm painting with the white in overlay mode, it's going getting rid of all that little weird texture. But for the most part, it's not really affecting the black parts and going to see a few Pittsy here and there are being affected. But the main thing that's happening is getting rid of all that texture. And I'm okay with it, doing what it's doing there where it looks kind of bluish because we'll fix that in a second, because I'm trying to get rid of all that texture. So if I switch to black in overlay mode, it works the same way. When you're in overlay mode, black can't paint on top of white, but it can paint on areas that are already some other kind of a shade like this. So two different possibilities. It will depend a lot on what you're starting with when your signature looks like sometimes just is easy to make a selection using color range and then pop it onto its own layer to just remove any other background information course. The other way to look at is if when I did this I had used a better Sharpie on a piece of pure white paper, not my relatively poor quality laser writer paper. Then I would have had to deal with all this and probably the photography in the way was lit has something to do with it. But I deliberately was trying to show you even we're starting with something That's OK then. At this point, once again, I could define brush preset. So this is telling me my signature is 1464 pixels wide, which is a pretty decent amount, because that way now, when I open some photograph skin back here, um, matter of let's use this one and I want to add my signature I had a new layer. There's my brush. In this case, this is one of the things you have to be careful because remember, Photoshopped remembers. So what's still in overlay mode? If I tried to use it right now, you would think, Why is nothing happening? To go back to normal opacity? 100 pick the color. I wanted my kids gonna be white and I just do a single click. They put my signature there, and then when we look at it and see if it really worked out well, because now that little bits of the missing signature. When I go like this with a pen, it looks more realistic that way. And because on a separate layer I do it that way so that I can either move it to a different position. If I decide to and or decides a little too big so I can scale it down a bit and or this idea pass, it'll too much. Let's make it 70% opacity or whatever you want. Okay, the one thing you haven't really sort of touched on a little bit. But I want to make sure it's clear is when you define a brush. I'll use my favorite photo shop word. Theoretically, it's there. From now on, there should be no reason for it to disappear. And I say it that way because it's not incredibly uncommon. If someone says, I defined a brush or two and then when I went back the next day, they weren't there. It's very unusual, but it can happen, so we'll talk a bit about How do you deal with that? But the idea of this and the reason why I'm OK with investing a bit of time to make sure it's really black and really white. It's once you do it once, it's then built into photo shop. From now on this I'm going looking. Where did I save that file with my signature that I want to bring in and add somehow it's now built in there. Okay, the Onley catch to this, and it's a big one. It's important, we understand, is the way that a brush works is We define the brush by saying, you know, whatever's black is my brush. Whatever's white is transparent. When you go to apply the brush, it says, whatever your foreground color is, I will apply your brush in that one color. So the thing that catches people's oh, actually make a brush out of my logo, but their logo is two colors, like red and black. We need to find as a brush. You're gonna have a brush that's 100% opaque and not 100% opaque. It's not gonna be red and black when you pick the foreground color of red. It's gonna be two shades of red, so you cannot use a brush to say I'm gonna build in my to color logo or my two colored text or whatever. You can't do that because a brush uses your one foreground color. And that's important to remember, because I've had people that thought this was a good solution to say, Oh, I'll be able to add my three color logo. Not this way. You won't because it would be. I mean, you might luck out and find your logo looks really good in three shades of the same color. But for most people, that's probably not as much the case where it relies on color toe work. OK, so recognize that difference that a brushes like a one color stamp and effect of whatever you've captured okay, now where it gets kind of interesting with brushes, as I mentioned before, anything can be a brush and I mean anything. So let's look at this. There's an interesting little stock photo of a dancer. So what if I just like that, don't do anything else and just say defined brush preset? What would that do personally have to actually click on it can't just say it out loud. You have to actually click on Define brush preset and then it says, Okay, we'll make a brush that looks like that's That's 3100 and 20 pixels big. Okay, good enough. Well, let's see what that does. So this was a color photograph. I did not convert it to black and white versus you don't need to. When I suggested earlier, adding a black and white adjustment layer, it was just to help you visualize what the brushwood look like. It's not a necessary step because it will do that automatically. So now I have what amounts to a grayscale photo version of her as a brush. So if I have got a new layer, I pressed beef or brush. As I said before, it automatically remembers, Here's the brush you just made. So let's start off by using black as a color and see what happens. All right, so there we go. So there's our brush. I just I mean black. So I click once and I've got basically what looks almost like a gray scale photo where you can start to then have fun with this is to say, what if I pick some other color and put that on there, too? And all of a sudden we're getting just more of an artistic kind of effect. Or And the whenever I say Or today you just assume it means and or because it always does I could on a separate layer, add that color and then convert that to a smart object and choose motion blur. Get some perceptible to close for you to see. And I honestly here, I don't have a plan. This is these are not can demonstration Goal. I know that's gonna look really good because I'm just showing you this is playing around. But this is where the possibility start to become interesting because once you have that, you can say, What can I do with that? Look, how can I use that as we'll see in a bit, you can use brushes like this on a mask, not just on a layer. So that's going to completely change the way that that influences how things work beyond that as well. Also, see, you can change the properties of how this brush works. Right now I'm just using it as a single stamp because the nature of what it is, but you'll see you can do lots of other things with it. So let's look at a couple of their examples of what we might be able to do. So let's take a challenging one first. My dad used to collect antique maps, so I now have a couple of them, and I just like That's kind of cool text because it has, like, this old old English, she Latin type text. I thought that might make a cool brush to just put us an overlay on top of a photograph, but right now it's just. If I made that as a brush, it would be not very good. Why? Because it's not on a white background. It's also just where I took the photo. Their stuff kind of cut off here and there. So I really want just this text. So this is the part that I really want to work with so you can do this in various ways. I like to do it something like this where just say, Let's just take the main part I want I want copy, make a new document and then paste it in there. So least I'm only working with that part because all that other part is just kind of a distraction. Now, having said that, I know if you noticed their cup other really interesting things on that map, like a little weird little drawing of an animal or something like my eyes going, that would be pretty cool, too. So this is I'm just showing you this from a text perspective. So what you'll see me do almost always is I want to be thinking black on white. So I want to convert this as best I can to black text on a white background, which again, for me means dry using levels and see if I can't click on the black on the text to make it black. Let's get a little closer. So leisure see and then white on the background. Now, what's likely to happen is something like that where overall, it's not bad, but this right hand side is a little bit off. So we need to fix that up. Um, so now I'm gonna have some people. I should warn you Now, if you're not sitting down, sit down right now. You're gonna hear me say words that I rarely say. But this is for this purpose on Lee, because I know that's pretty gonna want to continue. I might actually merge these layers together. I know. I know. People like what he just said Merge. Here's why. Because my whole reason for always advocating work non destructively is in case you want to change your mind and go back. In this case, I know my whole purpose here is to make a black and white brush, so I'm not gonna go back in this particular case. I just know that. So that's why I'm OK with emerging in this rare example. Then I go back to my paintbrush and once again I just want a regular old brush. And why is my It's too big. That's why I want my brush to be smaller than that so I can actually work with it. Here we go. And again use that overlay mode because remember that this will be easier to see. I wanted change this kind of great texture toe white but not affect the black text. But make sure your Texas white before much is white. You can see now I can pretty quickly do that. That and I'm okay if it obliterates little part, the text is the whole point of this is gonna be this kind of stated out over latex that no one can actually read. Anyway, I don't want people to go and say, What does that actually say? Because it's actually about a map coordinates, not a love poem or something. Like, I want people to think it is. So at this point now, the only remaining part is I don't want these lines in here. So I'm gonna do is a quick little work with, like, my spot healing as best I can and try and get rid of these areas. And you know this in a real example, I would be more careful here and zoom in more closely. You also notice again, Shockingly, I'm not doing this on a separate layer because once again, I don't feel like I'm gonna need to edit this once. It's looking the way that I want. So that was my very fast version of what I would normally take a little bit longer and zoom in and be a little more accurate. But just make the point Thea thing, I would say is I already know that this was the example, like grab really quickly and it's lower resolution. I would like it to be bigger. So just have to use our imaginations that when I first captured this photograph, it was already a bigger size. And then course, the last step is the fine brush preset. And then once we have it in there, now weaken at our new layer. Let's just hide this one for a moment. B for Brush normally said in photos. I've You don't really want to scale things up In this case, it's OK because it's already kind of partially missing type that you're not supposed to be able to read anyway. So I'm okay with putting that on there and then lower in the capacity. So you're just like, Oh, look, there's a love poem in there that no one really knows. It's actually talking about when the map was graded in 18 27 but it looks like interesting old text. So that's what I was referring to before I said, When you're walking on, you see anything like that's kind of neat, that old writing or that you know, on the site of Ah, building, where there's used to be a sign, it's faded out over time. All those things to me are like that has potential there. Um, here is a similar one. This was actually a stock photo that I found that just has really interesting handwriting. Same mighty. I won't gather going replication the same idea. But the concept is still the same in this case, just to show you the difference. If I want to imagine what it looked like, I can convert it to black and white and then sometimes using the sliders and hear. See how that's helping getting rid of some of that bit of shaded color that's in there. So sometimes there's more than one way toe Get to an end result. That's a better start already. And then I would. Here's one thing that you have. Remember once you define a brush that's now your brush. So when you see now I've got were text sitting on top of weird text me that so again, looking at it the right way, K, that looks pretty good now so that I could give her this last little part and defined as a brush so that I'm not gonna keep doing the same thing over. But just trying kind of the approach of how you look at things and brushes can be up to, depending on your version again, they can be now quite large. Used to be there was a restriction. So if you ever defined a brush and it didn't work properly, it's because the brush was too big. Now the limitation, I think, in C. C 2014 is even bigger. But let's say used 5000 for now is a number. I think you could even go a little larger than that. So here's another example. I saw this stock photo. I just thought that's so close to black and white already. That could be a really cool brush, because then I could just have this as an overlay. Textures on this case. It should be relatively quick, I would think and hope to go and say, Let's make this white and make sure this is black. Push it even further and then take that whole thing. And so here's a good example, so it's a little too big because it's great out, So that's is great out because it's a little too big. Let's see how big it is. I see it's just a hair too big. So let's make it that now we can make it a brush. So now I've got a really nice big brush. So we got lots of documents open here. Let's close some of these guys. Uh, this one. They're already standing in a forest. So what the heck, What if we added our own forest Bangu? Okay, that's a little unusual, but you get the idea and of course, that's just getting it on there. Then I could change the blend mode and the color in the opacity and everything else and mask it if I didn't want it showing in a particular spot. Let's actually do that just so you can see what I'm talking about, that we can do something. This where you say OK, well, now we've got that layer on there, But let's go back again to a regular brush. Black is our four run color. We want to get off of overlay mode. Just say I don't really want the brushes to be on top of them, so let's do a quick, very, very quick and dirty mask idea to show you that we're still making them more visible. But, you know, And then we could say maybe you don't want to be black. We wanted to be white or whatever it might be changing around the way my brain starts working. I'm constantly thinking, while that looks weird, but it has potential. And now I look as a Some of these branches almost look like lightning bolts, don't they? That wasn't my intention at all, But that's the beauty of playing, experimenting as you try something you're thinking. That's not at all what I imagine. But it might still have possibility, you know? So my thought would be to take this thing with the mask included, convert to a smart object. So now I could see what happens if I did some kind of ah blur effect. So it didn't look quite so obvious. That was tree branches, but just kind of a blurry pattern overlay thing. I don't know. That might work. I should've said right in the beginning. There is no guarantee that all things are gonna show. You're gonna look fantastic because I deliberately didn't plan and say, Oh, that's gonna look fantastic. Let me follow these exact things. I literally had not tried putting this brush on this photos. I want to see what happened. So I want you to see live the thought process of what happens if and there. You may go down a path ago. Yeah, you know, that's not working at all. Never mind. But the way I look at it is on this photograph. It didn't work, but that once I've tried it now, I planted that thought in my head that for some other photograph down the road it might work really well. So that's kind of why I'm OK with spending three minutes to go down a little path of trying something to see if it works, not because it will still have the potential for me to try something else later on. So the other thing that you can do now this one I actually use Illustrator for, but it's not necessary. The only reason I did is because Bill share has this really cool tool that I wish was in photo. Some I would be so happy. Wasn't goes up because it's amazing. I like text. That's not perfect. I mean? I mean, rephrase that. I like text. That's perfect for the right circumstance. In fact, I'm a stickler for turning and stuff, which we'll talk about later on. But sometimes when you're using type where it already is a thought that's supposed to be a little more unusual. Like look at this one here says happily ever after. This typeface does not come with the letter l on a slight tilt like that. I did that an illustrator, and I'll show you what it looks like and I'm apologize. And if you don't have illustrator, we will do this. But show you what looks like So this is just taxed. It's a font that I got from Think it's daft want if you're not familiar with data font Awesome place to get free typefaces, Daph on d a fo nt all different categories And this is a free version of a thing called sketch block, which was kind of a cool looking piece of text. But we'll show you what I did with this text in This is just one small part. But it's uh huh was calling and sketch something, I think. Okay, let's make it bigger. Okay, so you can see there is a very slight little tilt between letters. But there's this tool in Illustrator, which was introduced a couple of versions ago, which is I just love this thing. It's called the touch type tool. I have no idea how this works, nor do I care because one of those things were slightly awesome. It what it allows you to do is to click on any single letter and just play with it and say, I'm gonna like rotated, see as you rotate. See, I was affecting all the other letters and you could just move it down and click on this one and basically pulling letters around. But they're still life type, so you're not actually heavy to convert it. To do this in photo shop, you'd have to convert the type and Rast arises and then do everything you still couldn't edit Here. It's still completely edibles. I think that's awesome. So happy that showed up in Force shop one day. I'd like a happy dance. So again, I don't want to spend too much time on that because it's not a necessary part. But what I did here in photo shop is I just made. I want to make a bunch of brushes and you'll see this. These are part of the brushes that I created was I took these pieces of text from illustrator again black on white and then just shows defined brush preset to make a bunch of these brushes so almost anything can be Well, I should say that anything could be turned to a brush. Some of them just look better than others. But look at it that something like this this I like because it just again some of the type in there. But it would still take some work to make this into a reasonable brush. Because if I just right now, said defined brush, you already know it's not look great because this isn't white in this really isn't is darker side want, so that recurring theme always have to be thinking about. Do you want it to be a more opaque brush? That means you need at least aimed for black and white. You might end up with shades of gray, but the biggest thing is I really would not want tohave this box around the outside, cause then it makes the brush square with a bit of a ghost thing, as opposed to cut to that interesting shape. So it's really anything can be a brush, but you have to look at it in the right set of eyes. That is gonna be an easy thing or is gonna take a lot of effort toe turn into, you know, a brush that's actually usable.