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Making Custom Brushes

Lesson 23 from: Practical Adobe Photoshop Basics

Khara Plicanic

Making Custom Brushes

Lesson 23 from: Practical Adobe Photoshop Basics

Khara Plicanic

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Lesson Info

23. Making Custom Brushes

Next Lesson: Dodge And Burn

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

08:02
2

Tips for Success

05:53
3

How To Undo Mistakes

06:05
4

Adobe Workspace

16:01
5

Using The Brush Tool

03:33
6

Using The Zoom Tool

04:25
7

Adobe Preferences

02:27
8

Correcting Exposure

19:15

Lesson Info

Making Custom Brushes

next up, I'm going to show you how to create some custom brushes. So we'll take these loser kind of quick, thes quick little guys. So we've got this bird. And just like we defined that glitter pattern, we can define a brush pattern. So if I want to select this bird, I don't even have to try too hard. It's basically a silhouette of a bird on a blue sky. So I'm just gonna grab the magic wand tool. And with the tolerance of maybe 32 Ah, baseline is sort of 32. For those of you at home that are like, what, 32 tolerance for the magic wand is kind of like a good starting point. And then we'll just click and I select the bird super easy. So we have the bird selected, Then I'm gonna choose edit, define brush preset. And now we see. Oh, look at that. It gave this and made a bird brush, so we'll just call him that first brush. All right, now I'm done with that image and will go to this image, which is a lighthouse. And of course, we always make a new blank layer. And this bird is looking really ...

big, so I'll use my left bracket key to scale the size down to something like what I would want. And now what I want is to be able to just click and, like, make a stroke, make a line, and I want birds all over And I don't wanna have to, like, apply each bird. And I don't wanna have to rotate each bird to make it look realistic. So guess what? We already learned how to do that. So I've got this brush set to the bird. He'll show up here. By the way, when you create a custom brush, it just appears at the bottom of your, um, brush list. Seacon scroll down and click for it to get it. And now we'll just go into our settings and we'll start at the top of the salad bar with the shape. And I want to adjust the spacing. We don't want all the birds on top of each other, spread it out and let's turn on shape dynamics. I want some size deter happening, so I want the birds to be different sizes. I want an angle jitter happening, so they're not all in the same angle. So, you know, I don't Maybe I guess if you want some of them flying backwards, that could be cool. I don't know if I would like it, or if it would look, I don't know. Then you might get some. Maybe I'll just do it in the middle and see what happens round in this dinner. Now we can finally talk about what roundness deter means because it doesn't really. In some cases, it won't apply. But roundness is basically gonna turn. Whatever your brush tip shape is, it's gonna turn it like away from the camera. So instead of just spinning your bird like this way, we can also like, lay it back. So in real life, of course, the birds would be all over like different angles. So I'm gonna turn that up, maybe about 50% and then we'll go to our scattering choices, and I definitely want them to scatter. We'll leave the count alone, but I'll just have that scatter, and that's probably good again. We're kind of just guessing. So who knows? We'll see what this looks like. I'll press D to get my default colors, which are black and white. If you are ever just like I need black and white just press indeed. Default. OK, and now let's see what happens. I've got this. I really don't know how it'll turn out. We'll just see and I paint. That's pretty good, actually. So then, you know, if you're like, Well, I wish I had bigger birds or whatever, you could undo it. Make your brush bigger, and maybe you want to stamp a few in like specifically. Well, then you can, you know, instead of clicking and dragging, just stamp and you'll notice that every time after I stamp it, the cursor changes to a new bird so you can get a random look. But you can still have control over the policeman by by switching from painting to just stamping. I love that. I think that's so fun. So that's the bird for you. Here's another one where we could turn, um, these grapefruits, I guess, into a piece. So here's another example where you would use theological marquee, and I'm just going to select the grapefruit here. Is that grapefruit? I'm I don't know what that is to be, Anyway. I'm going to select this thing and I'll choose edit defined brush preset again, and we'll just call it stress. We can close that and we'll come. This is the drawback is now look at your brush cursor, so that's a little overwhelming. But we'll switch over here. I'll create a new blank layer. And for this brush, all I really care about is the color. So I'm gonna open my brush settings and I'll come up to I don't care about brush tip shape, shape dynamics. I'll change the angle so every instance of the brush doesn't have the seeds in the same place or whatever. So it'll row tape. And then what I really want to do is turn on color dynamics, and I want it to take the foreground and background. And I wanted to just jitter as much as it once and even actually, let's just have the huge it or be 100%. So that means beyond even just what my foreground and background colors are. The huge inter means like instead of just red and yellow. It could be like red and yellow and on either side of it, just all over the place, so I'll have the huge inter up to and then right now because I've got black. It's not going to do a whole lot because blacks not really a huge. So I need to choose, like, sort of a starting point for my my jittering. So I'll choose like Green, all right, and then I'm just going to stamp and I'm getting all kinds of. Maybe I should have adjusted. Now I'm thinking I should have adjusted the size, deter a little more and the colors kind of Oh, because I have white in the background. Let's undo that. See, this is a trial and error. You do it. You're like that does not look like what I want. So we'll just make a new layer, and it's because it's going from green toe white. That's why I'm getting all this light colored stuff. So I'll hold down command or control, and I'll click on a different like an actual color like born, and let's go back to our bar settings and change the sighs Geter. So we get some more variety. There we go. So this is like more what I had in mind. So maybe you're like designing some kind of peace for magazine or whatever. And you're like Citrus. I don't know. So you can do some fun, fun stuff that Could you tell me again from the elliptical marquee? Where's that you're started. How do How did I turn it into a brush? Yeah, yeah, let me go. I think I closed the file, so I'll get it back. So from the elliptical marquee, you just select whatever it is that you wanna make the brush and you just choose edit, defined brush preset, that's it. And then give it a name and that's it. And then once you tweak the settings, you know, once you make the scatter and all of those things the way you like, then you'd want to go back to your brush And, um, you know, capture those settings because otherwise it's just Citrus. It won't have the color settings and all the funky dynamics that we added to it. So we'd wanna do that too. Eso here is just like the straight up the brush that looks like a piece of Citrus. And here's the brush that looks like a piece of Citrus that has all these color attributes and things assigned to it. Yeah, so that is a look at brushes

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts
Photoshop Resource Guide
Practical Photoshop Basics (PS action file)
Word Art
Course Files

Ratings and Reviews

Kim Williams
 

I tuned into this class hoping to glean what I cold since it was free. I ended up purchasing the class because it is FILLED with so much great information in a fun and easy to understand format. Khara is an amazing instructor - I thoroughly enjoyed every minute. Worth EVERY penny. Thank you Creative Live for offering such great material, at even more amazing prices.

smurfy
 

What an unbelievable teacher Khara is. I have wanted to learn photoshop forever but was intimidated, overwhelmed, then I watched this course. OMG I learnt so much, more then I imagined. I am so excited now to start using Photoshop, I can't wait to try out everything she taught us. With the skills we learnt over these two days I think this course provides everything I need to know to feel and more. She was outstanding, the absolute perfect teacher for someone who has never ever used Photoshop. Also great moderation by Kenna. Thank you for this awesome, amazing, wonderful course. I am sure anyone who watches this course will agree it is incredible. I couldn't recommend it more. This course was just Smurfy!

Roz Fruchtman
 

I would highly recommend Khara Plicanic's Practical Adobe Photoshop Basics. The name of the class, implies that the class is for beginners, but that's not exactly true. Most of us learn Photoshop by the features we need to know at any given time. As many will agree, there are a number of ways to get to the same end. I can only speak for myself, but... I would bet that many of us don't know all the strategies that are taught in this class! Check it out, I doubt you'd be disappointed! Khara brings a fun and relatable approach to everything she does. She is very entertaining, while being a superb instructor. Last, but not least... This class brings with it a ton of useful bonuses. Warm Regards, Roz Fruchtman aka @RozSpirations

Student Work

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