How to make your own brush

Hello and welcome to our 9th tutorial on AREA 1!

Today we’ll be learning about how to make our own brush for Adobe Photoshop.

So let’s get to work!

Things you need to know before you make a brush:
- When defining a brush preset, Photoshop will automatically convert your selection to grayscale in to make the brush. So you can use color in your selection but it’s better to convert it into Black & White before defining the brush because you’ll have a better idea on how the brush will look like;
- White pixels will become transparent (which means you don’t have to erase the white/background pixels! Keep reading below for details), Black pixels will be opaque, and everything in between will be see-through black/gray;
- You can “play” with your image before you turn it into a brush. Go to Image > Adjustments and adjust Levels, Curves, Exposure, Shadows/Highlights, Brightness/Contrast until you think that your image is good enough to be a brush.

Let’s say that we have this image and we want to transform it into a brush.

Open your image in Adobe Photoshop. Then go to Image > Adjustments > Black & White. Use the things I said above if you need to tweak your image. Then go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Give the brush a name. That’s it!

Here’s my final result: Screenshot 1.

Hope you’ll enjoy this tutorial! Please leave a comment & thanks for the visit.

Author: Mihai Opariuc - E-mail

My name is Opariuc Mihai, I'm a graphic/web designer from Ploiesti, Romania and I'm the owner of AREA 1. I hope we can share a lot of information, tips&tricks and ideas through this website. Follow me on Twitter @area1.

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