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. And, that's how you create a custom brush
in Photoshop. Let me know down in the comments below what
other types of photos you've used to create custom brushes. And, by the way, if you want to learn more
about compositing and blending images together in Photoshop, then check out this free one-hour
presentation on YouTube. I cover a ton in compositing, and I highly
recommend it. So, I'll place a link right below in the description
if you want to check that out. But, anyway, I hope that you enjoyed this
tutorial. If you're new to The Photoshop Training Channel,
then don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification buttons. Leave your questions down in the comments
below, and I will see you at the next tutorial.
