10 Brush Tips in 10 Minutes in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 10 Photoshop Brush tips in 10 minutes - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, 10 brush tips in 10 minutes in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're quite simply looking at 10 Photoshop brush tips in 10 minutes or less and these are suitable for beginner to intermediate Photoshop users. There's plenty of variety here from creating your own brushes to painting in circles, in color, and painting with texture. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class so that you can help other students to determine that this is a class that they too might like to take. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now, without further ado, let's have a look at 10 Photoshop brush tips in 10 minutes or less. 2. 10 Photoshop Brush Tips: Before we start with our 10 tips, I just want to recap some of the basics of brushes, just to make sure that we're on the same page. You can get to the brushes in Photoshop, clicking the brushes option here. Click the down pointing arrow next to the brush and you can select any of the brushes that are currently installed. Some of these brushes will paint more like paint brushes, and others are stamp like brushes such as this leaf here. When you click on a brush you can adjust its size, and if it has a hardness setting you can adjust hardness as well, and then you'll just click to paint with that brush. There are other brushes shipped with Photoshop that you can install via this dialog. Click the Gear icon and you can attach any of these shipped with Photoshop brushes. I'm going to add the square brushes and I'm going to append them, because I don't want to lose the existing brushes, I just want to add them at the end. If you download and install brushes into Photoshop, then you can load these brushes. Here I have a panel of a number of brushes that I have downloaded. I'm going to select this, click "Load", and they're loaded into Photoshop and I can now use them. They happen to be stamp brushes, so I can just click to brush them into my document. I'm assuming that you're familiar at least with that level of use of brushes in Photoshop. Tip number 1, make your own brushes from anything. You can make brushes from just about anything in Photoshop. They're going to be black and white. Anywhere where there's black or gray, the brush is going to paint, anywhere there's pure white, it will be transparent. I've isolated this car and turned it into black and white. I'm going to choose, Select All, Edit, Define Brush Preset. I'm just going to make it red car, and I'll press "Okay". To use your brush, because it's now added to your brushes palette, you'll just go to the brushes tool. In later versions of Photoshop it will be automatically selected, in earlier versions you'll find it at the bottom of the panel here. It can be sized like any other brush, and all you'll do is just click in your document to paint with it. If you're creating more brush type of brushes, then you would obviously paint with longer strokes. There are physical limits to the size of brushes that you can use in Photoshop, and here they are. If you try and make a brush that is too big for your version of Photoshop, the option will be grayed out, you won't get a warning. You just need to understand that's probably what the problem is, resize your document, and try again. Tip number 2, signature and copyright brushes. It's an easy Photoshop task to create a copyright brush like this. You'll just want to make sure that all the content is on a separate layer, so that you can isolate it from the background. To create this as a brush, just select all the content and create it as a brush preset. In a similar way you could scan a signature, isolate the signature from the background, and make that into a brush. I have an image that I'm going to use here. I have my brush already selected but in earlier versions of Photoshop, you can pick it up from the very end of your brushes panel, and all I need to do is to click to add my copyright to a photograph or another document. Tip 3, save brushes to an external file. While the brushes that you create in Photoshop are going to stay in Photoshop, there are some circumstances in which you could lose them. If you're forced to open Photoshop and lose your preferences file, they will disappear. Two, will they disappear if when you select to add some brushes to Photoshop, you don't choose the Append option? If you choose Replace, then you'll lose any of these brushes. If you want to save them permanently so you can't lose them, you'll save them to an external file by choosing Edit, and then Presets, Preset Manager. From the Preset Type drop-down list, select "Brushes", and then go and select the brushes that you want to save. Click "Save Set", type a name for your brushes file and click "Save". Click "Done". Your brushes are now saved to an external.abr file. This is the file that not only can you reload the brushes into Photoshop, but you can also share it with others. Tip number 4, the myth of the 100 percent hard brush. I have a brush selected here and it looks like it has really hard edges. When I paint on it, you'll see that there's some anti-aliasing. The edges are softened. Now the same thing happens when I choose a circular brush and make sure the hardness is set to 100 percent. It again is going to have some anti-aliasing along the edges to soften the edges. When you need a very, very hard edge brush, then the brush tool isn't the tool to use. Swing over instead to the pencil tool, and when you choose a brush with the pencil tool, you'll find that it paints with very, very hard edges. Even the circular brushes with 100 percent hardness, now take on very hard edges. If you're doing things like creating pixel art, then the pencil tool is a much better tool to use than a brush is. Tip 5, paint with multi-colored brushes. It's possible to paint with multicolored brushes. In Photoshop, I have some foreground and background colors selected. The brush I'm using is the leaf brush that shipped with Photoshop. I'm going to open the brushes panel, which you can also get to by choosing Window and then Brushes. We're going to Color Dynamics. Now, the foreground to background jitter that allows you to change from painting with the foreground color to painting with a mix of the two. You can adjust this to whatever value you like, to get some mix between the foreground and background colors. Hue jitter allows you to adjust the hues that you're using, so at the very high level, you're effectively throwing out the colors that you started off with, and just using practically any color in the spectrum. With saturation jitter, you are going to vary the saturation of your brush as you paint, and somewhere between the two is probably a happy medium. For brightness jitter, you can adjust the brightness of the brushstrokes as you go. Jitter obviously means that it's going to be adjusted independently for each brush, so you're going to get a variety. For purity, you'll probably want something like 100 percent purity because, minus 100 percent purity just removes the color entirely. Tip 6, brush in a straight line. I've got a snowflake brush here that I'm painting with, and in the brushes panel, I went to Brush Tip Shape, and I've increased the size of it, but also increase the spacing so that these are going to brush as individual snowflakes. To brush in a straight line, I'm going to click where I want the first brushstroke to be, and then I'm going to shift click where I want the line to end. To continue this, I'm going to add my first brush stroke by clicking and then shift click to create the end one. Click, shift click, click, shift click. When I'm done, I'm just going to turn off my guidelines. Tip 7, brush along a path. I have a simple path created here in Photoshop and I'm going to select a brush. I'm going to my brushes tool, I'm going to select my snowflake brushes that I've been using. Just double check on its settings here, so I'm going to increase the spacing a little bit for this brush. Once I have the brush set up and the color selected, I'm going to the Paths palette. With the Work Path selected, I can click here, to stroke the path with my brush. You can also do this with a circle, you just may need to experiment as you're seeing here, with the spacing of the brush or the sizing of the brush, to get perfect alignment around your circle. Tip 8, texture a brush as you paint. I'm opening up the brushes panel here, I've got just a regular circular brush selected, but I've increased the spacing. It's just going to paint like this without any additions, but I want to texture it, so I'm going to click on texture. From the drop-down list, I can select a texture that's included in Photoshop, or a pattern, and I can also get to additional textures by selecting them here. Now, you'll probably see very little happening with your brush at this stage until you change the mode. I'm switching this to Multiply. You can see now that the texture is starting to be applied to the brush, and it really is just a case of now going through this adjustment sliders and just saying what they do. Scale is going to enlarge my texture. I hope my depth is at 100 percent, because I don't particularly like the effect at lower values. You can see we're seeing more of the original brush, I like my texture to eat away at my brush. There are other options here such as contrast and brightness, which will also help you create interesting effects, and these texture options can be applied to pretty much any brush in Photoshop. Tip 9, save brush setups using Presets. If I've gone to quite a bit of trouble to create this brush, I may want to save it as a preset, so I can get back to it at anytime. With the brush all setup and selected, I'm going here to the Fly-out panel on the brushes palette, I'm going to choose New brush preset. I'll call this round textured brush, and click "Okay". In future I can get to this brush from the Presets panel. Now I created some brushes earlier, and these are saved as Presets. I can select any one of these, go to the brush and then just paint on the document, because everything including the brush size has been saved with the preset. These are going to be available anytime I come and open up Photoshop. Tip 10, auto fading brush strokes. I have a brush selected here and when I draw it, it looks pretty much like this. There are some options in Photoshop, in Shape Dynamics that let you fade out the brush. What you're going to do is set the control here to fade, and then put a value in here. The value determines how much the brush gets painted before it fades out. A smaller value, it's going to fade out more quickly size-wise. There's also an option called Transfer, it might be called Other Dynamics in your version of Photoshop. If you set this control to fade, then the end of the brush is going to fade out as well. Again, this has a value that is going to determine how much you need to paint before it will fade out. Your class project is to create an awesome brush in Photoshop and to provide an image of your brush at work. This is a brush that I created. Now, I just want to show you something briefly with this, because it's got a fade on it, both a size fade and an opacity fade. You can see that because I'm using Color Dynamics, it's drawing each circle a different color. Now, if I disable the Apply Per Tip coloring in the Color Dynamics area, I'm going to get it painting true color. This is one brush that you could create, it's an awesome brush blend. I'm going to leave it up to you to create a brush of your choice. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about working with brushes in Photoshop. As you are watching this class, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.