How to Make Texture Brushes for Adobe Photoshop 7
In addition to its photo-editing capabilities, Adobe Photoshop gives the digital artist powerful painting tools. Creating custom Photoshop brushes gives you the flexibility to build up layers of color and depth that you just cannot achieve with the default brushes alone. Make your own texture brushes to achieve truly unique painting styles. Water, sand, concrete, and grass all make interesting textures, but let your imagination run wild and discover what you can create.
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Instructions
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Find a high-resolution image that contains a texture suitable for your needs. Take photographs yourself, purchase them from a stock photography website, or run a search for free high resolution photos or textures. Open your source image in Photoshop.
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Create a new blank document by going to File>New. You will create your new texture brush in this new file. While you could define your new brush from within the original photo file, doing so from a new file will allow you complete control over the size and detail of your brush.
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Set the size your new document to 999 by 999 pixels (the maximum brush size in Photoshop 7). Whether or not you need a giant brush for your current project, always create custom brushes at maximum size in case you need it in the future. Photoshop will easily shrink your giant brushes, but if you create a small brush and try to upsize it, you'll end up with a jagged mess of pixels.
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Set the document color mode to grayscale and the contents to white. Although the texture comes from a color image, Photoshop automatically converts it to grayscale when rendering the brush. The black pixels represent the paint color while the white pixels represent the transparent background of the brush. Anything gray shows up as semi-opaque color when you paint with your brush. By defining your brush within a grayscale document, you see ahead of time how Photoshop will render your texture.
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Arrange the open document windows so that you can see both the source image and the new document at the same time. Use the rectangle marquee tool to select the area in the source image you want to use to make your texture brush. Hold down the shift key while making your selection to constrain the selection to a square shape.
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Use the move tool (black arrow) to drag-and-drop the selection into the new document. The image will automatically convert to grayscale. If the selection exceeds the size of your canvas, use the black arrow tool and resize to fit the document. Hold the shift key while resizing to constrain the image's proportions.
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Make any necessary adjustments to your image. Go to Image>Adjustments to access the different adjustment menus. Perhaps the most useful tool, adjust the levels to make some of the image solid black and white. See the "Resources" section for more information on levels.
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Select the entire document by pressing Control+A or going to Select>All. Then go to Edit>Define Brush. Access your new texture brush in the brush menu which appears at the top of the screen when you select the brush tool.
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Tips & Warnings
Go to Window>Brushes to open the Brush palette where you can play with different brush settings to create unique effects.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit water splash - bottle and water in a moment image by Stasys Eidiejus from Fotolia.com
