How to Use the Brush Tool in Photoshop | Day 9

gotta hook them in alright move that's how we do it welcome to 30 days of Photoshop today we're showing you the amazing power of the brush hey there welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE you can find me on phlearn dot-com where we make learning fun and I'm so excited about this episode as a part of our 30 days of Photoshop we're gonna show you the brush tool which is one of my favorite tools in Photoshop and I think it gets a little bit like unnoticed most of the time because it's like the brush tool it's pretty simple but there are some amazing things that you can do with this tool in this video we're going to show you how to use the brush tool to dodge and burn your photos sculpting light and making your images more interesting we're also going to show you how to take a regular picture of a cloud and turn that into a custom brush and use that to paint fog into the background of our image we've got an awesome tutorial for you let's jump into Photoshop so starting off with our sample images you can actually download these on phlearn comm just follow the link right down below so up until now I've been using a standard Mouse for editing in Photoshop but when it comes to using the brush tool I highly recommend using a pressure-sensitive tablet you can use this with other tools as well you don't have to buy one of these just for the brush tool basically this works a lot like a pen on a piece of paper so the harder you press the more of effect you're going to have in Photoshop so not only is it very much like actually drawing but I can press harder and softer to have more or less brush or more or less paint digital paint in this case on my canvas so we've have a lot of wonderful free tutorials on setting up and using the Wacom tablet we'll link to one right up here if you want to learn more about that but for now let's go ahead and show you the benefits of using one of these and show you the brush tool in Photoshop by the way all this stuff you can totally do with a mouse as well so let's go ahead and start off with our first image here we're gonna hit f4 fullscreen and go ahead and zoom in a little bit now my goal here is just to basically take the highlights of this image and enhance them a little bit more so what we're gonna do is hit B for the brush tool I'm gonna right click and just go to a regular soft round brush okay this is the brush that's included in shop so let's make a new layer and instead of making a regular layer we're gonna make a curves adjustment layer because we want to brighten up those highlights so let's go to our adjustment layers we're gonna go to curves and I'm going to click here and brighten that up a little bit now as of now this is visible everywhere we don't want that I want to just paint in the areas where I wanted to be visible so let's hit ctrl a command I to invert our layer mask making it black okay now it's time for a couple of keyboard shortcuts that are really gonna help you with your brush so the first one hold ctrl and option and then click and drag from the left to the right and that's gonna make your brush larger and smaller up and down is gonna make your brush harder and softer and the PC keyboard shortcuts are on your screen now so control option click and drag left to the right you can see my brush gets smaller and larger and up and down to go harder and softer so we're just gonna basically be painting with a soft edge brush now before we get into painting I want to show you guys the difference between flow and opacity with your brush because it's incredibly important so let's go ahead and start off with just a bright red color here I'm gonna click on my color picker there we go in a bright red color we're gonna start with a flow and opacity of a hundred percent there we go obviously that we we all expected that now let's go I didn't bring our opacity down I'm gonna bring our opacity down to 20% and take a look at what happens when I paint over my image now I'm actually going over the same place over and over again you can see this but it doesn't continue to do any type of a build up effect okay what I have to do is release my cursor or my trackpad or my pen whatever have you and then paint again and we get another 20% and then you can see I can paint again and I get another 20% on top of that and then paint again and another 20% on that now the problem being is that this is not exactly a very like smooth transition I just I'm like stacking 20% on top of each other but you can still see the border from like you know this 20% to this 20% especially for instance if I were to just put like a white there we go like a white layer under that see how eat like very obvious that is that's just like 20% over here and then a little bit more and more and more that's where they overlap now this is a little bit of an unnatural way of painting because it this basically like nothing in real life would actually work like that like if you had a marker in your hand and you're painting on a piece of paper if you paint over an area more and more and more it's gonna like get darker and darker and have a build up effect so opacity doesn't allow you have the build-up effect that's where flow comes in so let's go ahead and create a new layer appear I'm gonna bring my brush opacity 100% and we're gonna bring our flow down to about 10% now I'm gonna go ahead and paint on my image and you can see if I decide to go over an area more and more and more we get a very natural buildup I'm not seeing like edges this is just a very very nice smooth gradient and if I use an even lower flow let's say I use a flow of like five percent there we go you can see how beautifully is smoothly I'm able to integrate this with in this case my painting red on a white background but imagine I was trying to paint something on a photograph you can see I'm able to create this beautiful transition simply with one brushstroke it's incredibly helpful so I recommend using flow / opacity in fact I've almost never used brush opacity I pretty much have my opacity at a hundred percent all the time I'm mostly using flow so let's go ahead and show you how to do it now here in our curves adjustment layer remember this curves adjustment layer we just made things brighter I have a black layer mask on here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and start painting white on my layer mask using a really low flow using a flow of about 5% okay now to change your flow you can simply just type in opacity or type in your flow you can click on these words and drag them to the left on the right okay you can click up there and just type in 5 and hit enter or you can use 1 through 0 on the copy or keyboard if you're with your brush tool that's gonna change your opacity like if I hit the number for you can see it changes my opacity to 40 C arrow is back to 100 and if you hold shift you can click on 1 through 0 like if I hit shift 8 my flow goes to 80% if I hit shift 0 5 quickly I flow will go to 5% ok so very very helpful to know how to change your flow of your bra's show again I just use I hold down shift and I click on my numbers at the top so we talked about our keyboard shortcut for making your brush larger and smaller that's control option click and drag ok now you can also use the open and closed brackets on your keyboard to make your brush larger and smaller as well it goes by smaller increments so it can be kind of helpful for instance I want to basically highlight some of these areas right here in my image so I want my brush to be about the same size as the areas that I highlight ok so as I go for a little bit of a smaller area I'm gonna make my brush a little bit smaller if I go for a larger area I'm gonna make my brush a little bit larger there we go now I'm not really using much of the pressure sensitivity built in to this tablet at the moment you can actually have pressure control things like your flow or your opacity or even your brush size and that's why I use it primarily is because I get a lot more control over what I'm doing but right now to keep things simple I'm just going with a very simple application here there we go so if you're following along with a trackpad or a mouse you're basically gonna get the same exact result that I am cuz I'm not really working much with pressure sensitivity ok so I'm finding all the areas that have some highlight that I want to you know like make a little bit brighter to make them stand out and I'm just enhancing them a little bit more fantastic so let's go ahead and take a look at the before and after I'll just turn this off and on and we can see what I was able to paint in and see how natural that looks it's because we used a low flow that we're able to get a very nice natural effect so this is a with the brush tool like I realized we're combining this with a curves adjustment layer but literally I'm just painting with a brush tool on my curves adjustment layer so let's hold alt or option and take a look at the layer mask that's what the layer mask looks like right now that's where I painted white to make it visible now let's go ahead and do the same thing with black so we'll create another curves adjustment layer make it a little bit further down okay well invert our layer mask again and now I want to darken some places there we go so we're darkening these areas again just using a very low flow 5% here and if I paint over an area over and over again I'm gonna have a build up effect so I can choose how much I'd like an area to be either lighter or darker with dodging and burning there we go fantastic and this helps me to make the landscape you can do this with people by the way as well it helps you to make anything in an image look a little bit more 3-dimensional it carves out your highlights and shadows there we go look at that beautiful that's looking fantastic so let's go ahead and turn that off and on as well so I just took the existing shadows that were there and I painted them a little bit darker so let's turn them both off there's our before and the after look how much more rich the landscape looks how much like it looks like light is kind of like shimmering off the surface and literally we're just kind of painting with light here in Photoshop so all of that was just using a regular soft round brush but what happens when we start adding shapes into the brush itself so for this next portion of the tutorial we're actually gonna make a brush out of a cloud and then we're gonna paint clouds or fog back into our image really really cool so we're gonna go ahead pull up our brush tool cloud image there we go now first thing I need to do is kind of prep this a little bit to actually work well as a brush as shape of a brush because I don't need everything to be soft round all the time I can have the cloud be the shape so what we're gonna do is double click here on our background just convert this to a regular layer and now I want to use my level so I'm gonna hit ctrl + command L for our levels and we're gonna make our blacks just way darker there we go something like that works pretty well and we'll hit OK because really what I want is just a completely white background with a black cloud on it so now we're gonna desaturate this we're gonna go to image down to adjustments and down to desaturate ok and then I'm gonna get go to image down to adjustments and to invert because again what I'm looking for is a black cloud or a dark cloud on a perfectly white background now if you're not sure whether your background is perfectly white you can actually right click out here and go down to select custom color and just choose white and it'll change your background color so now this is perfectly white and I can see obviously that my background of the cloud is not perfectly white so let's take a controller command L for this and I'm just gonna take my white point and make this a bit brighter until the background is perfectly white cool that looks good now we're actually just about ready to make this into a cloud well it's already cloud but we're ready to make it into a brush I need to make it a little smaller because it's huge right now and that just is gonna really slow down photoshop if we make a brush that's this large so we'll go to image and down to image size ok and we'll just make this 1500 pixels wide so let's hit OK there alright and we can just put the background as light gray so we can see what we're actually working with so now let's go ahead and turn this into a selection ctrl or command a to make this a selection we're gonna go to edit and down to define brush preset and I'm just gonna call this cloud there we go now I'll deselect and then go back to my original image so let's go back to original image create a new layer and hit B for the brush tool and you can see I'm gonna paint with a cloud so I'm here just painting with a cloud red is my foreground color so I'm literally just painting red clouds were where I go you know of course you can follow along you've got all the sample images but we're also going to include the final brush here so you'll just be able to load that so obviously we don't want to paint with red we want to paint with you know this like fog color in the background and I need to make it look a little bit different than you know just that I want to add some variability into it so we're gonna go to window and down to brush settings there we are and I'm gonna start turning some things on that allow me a little bit more of a organic natural shape so we're gonna go to shape dynamics and I'm going to turn on size jitter which just makes some of these larger and some of them smaller we're gonna turn on our angle jitter and you can see already it's like oh wow yeah it's something very different we're gonna turn on or scattering just a bit there we go we're gonna turn and transfer on and I'm going to go up and bring up our opacity jitter so some of these are more visible and some of these are less visible so you can see all of these different things that I'm adding in here they change how each one of these is laid down and of course I can still change the color we just hit undo a couple times or clear that like this is just a regular brush I'm just changing the shape of it you know so I could make it blue if I wanted to all right there we go so let's go ahead and clear that now and I think we're actually looking pretty good let's go ahead and space this apart just a little bit all right and sample this color fantastic so let's go ahead and save this out we're gonna go to our little menu item here I'm gonna go to new brush preset and we're gonna call this phlearn cloud if I can spell it there we go and hit OK now by the way if you want to load this into Photoshop because it'll be included in your download just hit B for your brush tool right click and then go to your little gear icon and go to import brushes and then click on the AVR file okay so click on the ABR file that's included with your download and then if you right-click with your brush tool it'll just show up here at the very bottom phlearn cloud okay so now what we're gonna do is I'm gonna use this cloud I can make my brush larger and smaller just like anything else I'm going to use this to paint like actual like cloud detail in the background there okay and instead of just using a soft round brush because again a soft round brush that would just give you you know you might be able to make this area lighter but it wouldn't give you any additional texture see what I'm doing in here is actually like adding this fog in but it's adding the texture of a cloud too so it makes it the overall effect look a lot more realistic because we actually have the texture of all this rolling in as well and there we have it look at this we can just turn this off and on I can you can add fog to any image you want now see I can put it in the foreground here if I want to it's incredibly easy to do you have a fog brush now at your disposal and you know how to create it let's just go ahead and undo that because I mostly just want the fog there in the background maybe a tiny bit over here as well all right yeah you know what I just like it in the background I think that makes it look the best so there we have look at all those amazing things we were literally able to do just with our brush tool so let's go ahead and turn these off there's our before and the after all of that with the brush tool and you get this cloud brush as a bonus download for this episode just click on the link right down below thank you so much for watching I hope you're enjoying this 30 days of Photoshop series if you haven't already done so be sure to join the series you can do that by clicking the link right down below we'll send you a calendar with a list of episodes so you can follow along of course you get all of the sample images and the downloadable assets as well as special bonuses that are only included with this series thank you so much I'll see you tomorrow bye everyone

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 146,198

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, Adobe Photoshop, Class, Course, Learn Photoshop, brush tool, cloud brush, dodge and burn, dodging and burning, 30 days, day 9, photoshop brush tool, how to use the brush tool

Id: NJWPdicD1pI

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020