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“Loading new brushes In Photoshop and creating new ones” is part of my Photoshop book “Learn Photoshop CC With Pictures”, which is more revised and covers more concepts than the online tutorials, feel free to check out the book by visiting my Learn Photoshop CC With Pictures Book Page.
This is the 3rd and last lesson of Photoshop brush tool in this series, after finishing this article, you will have a strong background on how to use the brush tool more effectively.
One of the most powerful features of the brush tool is that you could change the brush you are using. And choose among various brushes available in Photoshop. You could also download more brushes online and even create your own. Making your brushy world unlimited in space and capabilities.
To change the brush you are using, just right click anywhere on the canvas, and then select one of the brush you would like to use. You could also do that by opening the brushes preset panel by selecting Window > Brush Presets.
Play around with the various brushes to see how many things can be done with them. Here are 6 examples of some of the brushes that come with Photoshop:-
Loading new brushes in Photoshop from presets.
Photoshop comes with more brushes it displays in the brushes option dialog or the brush preset panel. But you have to tell it to load them for you.
- Click on the triangle at the corner of the brushes option dialog or the brushes preset panel. You see a various set of brush presets you could load.
- Select the preset you want to load, I selected the M Brushes preset just now
- Photoshop asks you if you want to replace the current loaded presets with the one you are loading. If you choose “OK”, Photoshop will unload all the brushes you have and only keep the preset you are currently loading. Which is not what we want to do. So select “Append” to load the new reset to the brushes panel. And keep the ones we already loaded.
Et Voilà, the brushes will be there in the brushes dialog or the brushes panel. Ready for you to use~
Loading new brushes in Photoshop after downloading them from the web
The online world is full of brushes you could use. Usually for free. There are many sites specialised in brushes where you can download tons of them. For this part of the tutorial
we are going to download and add the Starfields Brushes from MyPhotoshopBrushes.com
- Go to the following URL, which is where I found the StartField brushes:- http://myphotoshopbrushes.com/brushes/id/3390/
- Click on the download brush bottom. Marked by the blue rectangle in the following picture
- Unpack the zip file you downloaded
- On my computer, simply clicking on the resulting file adds the brushes to Photoshop. But just in case, I will explain how to add the brushes to Photoshop manually
- Click on the triangle at the corner of the brushes option dialog or the brushes preset panel. You see a various set of brush presets you could load.
- Select Load Brushes from the menu, which will open the Open dialog
- Locate the brushes you downloaded in the file system, then press ok.
- And we are done, the brush(s) will be available to you just like any other brushes, ready for you to use them.
Here are some sites where you could download more brushes:-
About downloading brushes online and copyrights issues
The person who created the brushes is the one who choose how the copyright terms goes. He can give it away or sell it for a certain amount of money. While in most cases you are going to use these brushes for personal things. Chances is that you will use them for commercial things.
The terms are different based on the site you got the brushes from.Some are free to use for non-commercial purposes. But you will have to pay for them to use them cmmercially. Some requires you to give attribution to the author when you use them.
Creating your own brushes in Photoshop
One of the best things about brushes in Photoshop is the ability it gives you to create your own brushes. Giving you an unlimited range of abilities. Right now, we are going create a double brush, brush that simply create two parallel strokes instead of one.
- Create a new Photoshop document (select File > New from the main menu)
- Select the brush tool.
- Add two strokes that are side by side, like what you see here:-
- Select the two strokes using the Rectangular Marque Tool
- Select Edit > Define Brush Preset from the main menu
- A dialog appears asking you to name the brush, let’s call it “Double Brush”
- Click OK And we are done, and the new brush will be available in the brushes dialog or the Brushes Presets Panel
- Now let’s try the new brush, as you can see, it creates two parallel strokes instead of one :D
Playing with various brushes
Creating a space using the star field brushes, I did two example, one that’s simple that represents a simple and tranquil space. And the other which represents a glamorous one.
For those learning Photoshop to create signatures and banners. I created this simple banner using few brushes that represent plants. And also used some butterflies brush. If you looked carefully, you will notice that I applied the colour dodge at the middle of the border to make it a bit lighter. More tweaking of the banner, plus applying a bit more of other Photoshop tools, can make this banner look even better :D
Grasses Owl:- With the grass brush, I hid this cute owl behind some grasses, the contrast between the colours in this brush is what I like about it
In this seemingly complex example, I added a new grass on the sides of the road, I played with the fill of the brush tool, and I applied the hard colour blending mode frequently.
To give the grasses a more natural look, I drew simple shades using black. And again, with small fill value of the brush. I also applied a little white using the soft light blending mode to brighten the picture a little bit.
And now we are done with the brush tool. While I didn’t cover everything related to this powerful tool. I taught you enough to do tons of things as a good start.
In the next lesson, we will start to explore some of the other tools provided by Photoshop. The tool I am covering in the next two lessons are probably the most two important ones.
Would you like to learn Photoshop?
Check my Photoshop book Learn Photoshop CC With Pictures which contains a full course on how to use Photoshop in the simplest way possible.
