How to Make Brushes in Photoshop CS2

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Zach Katagiri, freelance graphic designer in New York City, and today, we are talking about Photoshop. In this video, I'm going to show you how to add a custom brush to the presets that come default with Photoshop. Let's say, for example, that you wanted to make a custom brush in the shape of a guitar. You would first open up the image of the guitar, and I'm going to select all of it using Ctrl A. I'm going to copy it and when you copy something and create a new document, the new document default is to be the same size as what has been copied. So I'm going to select new, and I'm going to leave the width and the height the same. And I'll change the name to New Brush. And I'm actually going to change the color mode to greyscale because when Photoshop makes a new brush, it automatically transforms it into greyscale, so by making the document greyscale, I'll have a better idea for what the brush will look like when I'm done. Click okay, and I've got a new document. Ctrl V, paste the image in, this time, as greyscale. Now, something like this could probably be left as is and be a pretty decent preset, but you can also go into Image and Adjustments, and there are a lot of different parameters you can tweak. I'm going to use Curves just to add a little bit of contrast. And I'm just going to make a little bit of an S curve to bring out some of the contrast in the guitar. And click okay. And then when I'm ready, I'm going to go into Edit and Define Brush Preset. And I can name this...I'll just name it Gibson Les Paul, click okay, and it's now just been added into my list of brushes. So now, if I wanted to open up a new document, I could, and name it Test. I'll make it a bit bigger. Okay. And now, I can use my brush to brush on a line of guitars."