Hi.
Welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com, I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to create custom brushes from your photos in Photoshop.
Okay, let's get started.
We're going to work with this document, and it contains a cloud.
And, you can just use any photo that you like.
You can just go outside and take a photo of a cloud with your cell phone.
The important thing is to get a cloud that looks sort of like this, a little puffy, circular,
not too long, and just open it up in Photoshop.
The first step is to isolate the cloud that you want to use from anything else.
So, you may have a photo that contains buildings, trees, power lines, and things like that,
so you don't want to include those in the brush.
So, to isolate the cloud, you can use a tool such as the lasso tool and click-and-drag,
and make a selection around the cloud that you want to use for your brush.
In this case, it's not really necessary, but I wanted to give you that option in case you
need it in your photo.
With the cloud selected, you can then click on the layer mask icon to create a layer mask
and hide everything else.
Brushes in Photoshop work only with luminance values.
So, there's no color.
So, you can desaturate the image to make the process easier, at least easier in your mind.
So, click on the layer thumbnail, notice the white focus is now on the layer thumbnail,
not the layer mask, and then you can desaturate the image, which means that we're going to
remove all the color.
To do so, you can simply use a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl Shift U on Windows, that's Command Shift
U on the Mac, or you can go into image, adjustments, and desaturate.
You will notice the keyboard shortcut here.
When you're working with brushes, remember that
black is what we keep and white becomes transparent.
So, we want to keep the transparent background and make the sky transparent.
So, if white is transparent, then we need to make the background white, and black is
what we keep so we want to make the clouds black.
So, it's sort of the opposite as a layer mask.
With a layer mask, we keep white and we hide black.
With a brush, we keep black and we hide white.
So, we need to make the clouds black.
To do so, you can simply press Ctrl I, Command I on the Mac, to invert.
So, anything that is white will become black and anything that is black will become white.
All we have to do now is simply make the sky as close to white as possible to make it transparent.
So, I'm gonna go into image, adjustment, and levels, and then I'm going to use these handles
here to control the luminosity of the layer.
This is the white point.
This tells Photoshop what pixels are white.
So, if I click and drag the white point to the left, notice that more pixels become white.
So, basically, this shade of gray or brighter will be white, and that's what I want.
And, you can see where the information starts.
So, this is the level of gray that controls the sky, so I'm gonna drag it further to the
left to make the background white.
You don't want to push it too far or you'll start getting hard edges, so I'm just gonna
scale that back a little bit, and you can then press okay.
You can then use the dodge and burn tools.
With the dodge tool you can make things brighter, and with the burn tool, you can make things
darker.
So, I'm going to select the dodge tool, and on the range make sure that you have highlight
selected because we want to make these highlights better.
Exposure is how strong the tool is, 13 percent will work for now, and I can just start painting,
and notice how I'm only affecting the brighter pixels in the image.
And, I'm just gonna go around the entire area, just to make sure that the edges are completely
white, therefore transparent.
I really don't need to make the clouds any darker, because different levels of gray will
give you different levels of transparency.
So, the clouds will be somewhat transparent, and that's what I want.
Once you have this, you can simply go into Edit, Define, Brush Preset, and you'll be
able to see a preview of the cloud right in this window here, and it looks great.
And you can give it whatever name that you want, I'll just call it "cloud," and press
OK.
And, there's my brush.
I'm going to disable this layer, create a new layer, fill it with white.
White is currently our background color.
So I'm going to press Ctrl Backspace, that's Command Delete on the Mac.
And I'll create one more layer, and this is where we're going to test our brush.
And, by the way, currently we have the dash tool selected, so that's where the brush was activated.
I'm going to click on the brush tool and make sure that I select that brush, which is right
here "cloud."
And, there it is.
So, when I paint, you can see that that doesn't really look very good.
But, we can change that by first decreasing the size of the brush.
So, I'm going to tap on the left bracket key on the keyboard to make it smaller, and I'll
show you what we have.
Not very good.
But, we can click on this icon here to bring up the brush settings, and we can adjust the
brush.
Keep an eye on this preview window.
When we make an adjustment to the settings, you can see how they're updated on the preview
window.
For example, if I click and drag the spacing slider to the right, you can see now how we
space out the brush strokes.
See that?
We can then start working with shape dynamics, which controls the size and angle of the brush.
So, I'm gonna bump the size jitter all the way to the top, that just simply means that
the brush stroke is going to have different sizes.
They will not all be the same size.
See that?
How some are smaller, and some are larger?
And, I'm going to adjust the angler jitter so that they're all facing a different way.
So, it's going to look completely random.
Much better.
Then, I'm going to adjust the scattering, which allows me to control how scattered the
clouds are.
So, I'll scatter them just a bit.
Much better.
And, I can adjust the count, so how many clouds that we have.
We can have a lot of clouds or not so many.
The choice is up to you.
I think that maybe a count jitter of about 20% should work in this case.
And, I also want my clouds to have different levels of transparency, so I'm going to click
on transfer and adjust the opacity jitter.
I can probably leave it at about 50%, and I think that may do a good job.
So we'll leave that at 50% and have the minimum at 20, and when I click-and-drag, you'll see
now how all the clouds have different levels of luminosity.
And, actually, 50% might be too much, so I'll bring it down to 25, and I'll try again.
I'll just collapse this and just go down so that you can see.
And, yeah, that looks much better, I think.
So, what I'll do now is I'll just create a new layer and show you what we have.
So, that's a new layer, and I'll make the brush a little larger by tapping on the right
bracket key on the keyboard and paint.
And, that's what we have.
And, actually, now that I'm looking at it a little larger, I think that we do need to
change the transfer and bring it even lower.
So, maybe 15%.
And, let's see what that gives us.
Yeah, I think this will work much better.
So, how do we use this on an actual photo?
Well, I'm going to open up this tab, and it has an image.
We can use it in a lot of different ways.
For example, we can create a new layer, and with the eyedropper tool select this bright
color in the sky, and I'll just make a large brush, and this could be used as fog.
So, you can see, we can add just a nice layer of fog, mist, smoke.
Also, you can create special effects.
For example, we can select a really dark color from the image.
Like maybe one of these dark reds, almost black, and we can paint smoke, maybe there's
some smoke coming out of one of these windows or streets.
And, the smoke is not looking very realistic because we need to decrease the spacing, so
let me undo that.
Click on this icon and go back into the brush tip shape and reduce the spacing.
So, maybe something like that.
And now, when I paint, we should get more realistic smoke.
So, maybe there was some sort of accident, some sort of fire, and we're just creating
smoke here.
And, one of the great things about working on separate layers is that you can click on
this icon here to lock transparency.
That means that now we can only paint on pixels that are opaque.
We can no longer paint on transparent pixels.
So, I can hold Alt, Option on the Mac, to switch to the eyedropper tool.
So, you don't have to click on the eyedropper tool.
When you're working with the brush tool, hold Alt, Option on the Mac, and it temporarily
switches over into the eyedropper tool, and you can select the color.
So, maybe I can select that color there, and with layer number two selected I can paint
right on that smoke without affecting anything else.
If a color is too bright, remember that you always have the edit, fade command, which
fades the last tool that you used, in this case, the brush tool.
So, when I select it, I get this window here, I can change the blending mode, and I can
reduce the opacity.
So, I'll reduce the opacity.
See that?
How I'm reducing the opacity on that smoke?
So, now we're adding depth to it, we're adding color, to help it look more realistic.
in Photoshop, then check out this free one-hour presentation on YouTube.
I cover a ton in compositing, and I highly recommend it.