PIXEL ART in Photoshop (Tutorial)

in this video we'll learn how to create pixel art in Photoshop we'll have a look at what tools to use and how to best configure Photoshop to suit your pixel needs special thanks to Han soft tune Zhu diamond and our Minoru C for their support on patreon and with that let's get painting so first we want to set up a canvas and configure it for pixel art to create a new canvas we'll go file new we'll give it a name say pixel art we'll change the unit to pixels and of course this is going to depend on the dimensions of what you want to make but remember we can always change this later I'm just gonna set mine to 45 40 let's set the resolution to 72 and we can leave all the other settings as is let's hit create and we now have a new although fairly tiny canvas to zoom in on it let's hold down alt and scroll there we go our canvas is of course completely empty that's fine but we don't have any indication of where we can paint pixels that's why we want to set up a grid first we want to go to view show then select grid and you might see some grid lines here but chances that they are way too big so change this will go edit preferences I will select guides grid and slices here under the grid section we can configure the lines first you want a grid line every one and then instead of inches that select pixels and you can see it already updating in the background you also see that each pixel is currently subdivided by 4 we really don't need that information so let's go to subdivisions and change that to 1 then you can set any color that you'd like here I like the light gray you can even go in and change the line type when we're happy with this we want to go under general and here we see a setting called image interpolation by default this is set to bicubic automatic this might sound pretty scary but really all this does is choose the technique that we want to use when scaling an image and by default this is set to try and smooth out lines but when working with pixel art we always want hard edges so let's go and change this technique to nearest neighbor and weensy it also says preserve hard edges so now when we scale up our pixel art it won't become weird and blurred let's select ok and that's pretty much all of the settings that we need to configure for our canvas now we can go to the bottom right and create a new layer I'm just going to rename this layer to character and now we're actually ready to start painting and this is where a lot of Photoshop users often go wrong because normally in Photoshop you paint with the brush tool that's the over here you can also press B in order to quick select it but notice what happens if I try and paint with this we get this very smooth and blurred outline of course sometimes this is the effect that you're going for but again most of the time we want to paint with hard edges so let's undo this by pressing ctrl Z let's go to our brush tool and hold down this time you will now notice another tool here called the pencil tool now if we use this to draw the same line you can see that we get this very hard edge awesome just like with the brush tool we can always right click to change the size of our brush and to make it quicker to switch between sizes we can go and click on the tiny cog here and select basic brushes it's then going to ask you if you want to replace the current brushes with the basic brushes here we want to select ok you can now see that we can quickly click on the size that we want to use I mostly paint one pixel at a time so I'm gonna select the first one now we're gonna start placing pixels however a common thing to do before painting is choosing a cold color palette for this we'll use the color window at the top here we can double click on the top color in order to choose a color that we like and that's really two ways that we can save this one way is to hit add to swatches we then give it a name and press ok if we then go to the swatches palette and scroll to the bottom we can see or a new color but personally I like to have it within my canvas so I normally just paint the pixel in the color that I'd like a really good place to find cool color schemes is by going to color Adobe comm you can choose a primary color and it will then automatically generate colors to go with it we can switch between the way that it generates these colors over here or we could just rely on what other people have done before us to do that we're going to explore and you can see a bunch of different color schemes that you can choose from you can save these to your creative cloud account now I really like this sunset camping one I can press download and log in with my Adobe ID or I can just press the title and we now hover over each color to see the color code for my project I just want to use three symbol colors red black and white of course I can actually see the white right now to change that I'll go to my background layer I'll double click it to unlock it and give it a name I'm just gonna call it BG I'll then go to the left here and hold down on the gradient tool instead I want to get the paint bucket tool you can also just press G then we can select the color that we want our background to be I'm just gonna choose some kind of gray let's press in the middle of our canvas so now we have a more suitable background color and at this point I'll just select my character level speed to choose my pencil tool and I can start painting away to choose one of my colors I'll simply hold down alt and click on it if you make a mistake along the way and you want to erase it we simply need to use the eraser tool that's that one over here or we can simply press E if you then right-click we can of course change the size to 1 but you can see if I start to erase here it does so gradually that's because just like our brush and pencil our eraser has two modes if you go to the top we can change the mode from brush to pencil and now we can erase the parts that we don't want so I'm just gonna fill in some more colors here alright so he's starting to come together but I still need to fill in these blank spaces with white to do that I'll hold down alt and press on my white color I'll then switched to the paint bucket tool by pressing G you can see if I try and fill out this hole now that our white will bleed on to surrounding pixels that's definitely not something we want of course it does this to try and avoid pixelation and ragged lines but in pixel art that's all we want so we'll go up to the top here and disable anti-alias now you can see that I can fill out all the spaces without it bleeding on to the surroundings you might also notice that the grid lines are suddenly very sharp that's because if we go to view show you can see that we have our grid enabled but the pixel grid is also enabled this grid enables whenever you soo-min close enough to an image and I personally don't like this so I'm just gonna disable it of course we can also disable our normal grid if you want to see your artwork without it I think that looks pretty good I'm not so sure that I like the red color though luckily just like with a normal image we can apply adjustments to our pixel art so I can simply go into the hue and saturation here and bump up the saturation I think that looks a lot better I mean then select this layer hold down shift and select our character as well let's then right click and hit merge layers to apply those changes when working on pixel art you often want to zoom in really far and it can be easy to lose track of your overall image therefore I like to go to window arrange and select new window for it pixel art this creates a second window showing our canvas right now it's hidden up here but if we click and drag we can place it anywhere in our interface I'm just gonna take mine here and place it over here and we now control the zoom level on this canvas individually and we now see changes in both windows as they occur finally when you're done with artwork we can press control 1 this will preview the canvas at a one-to-one pixel ratio of course for pixel art this makes it really really small that's fine if you want to export it to a game engine you want the images to be as small as possible because you don't want to use up any extra space but if you want to share this online or send it to your friends we probably want to make it a bit bigger first let's zoom in with a grid enable we'll press C in order to bring up the crop tool and we can now crop our canvas to fit our artwork when you're happy with the crop simply press Enter we now disable our gridlines again if you want you can disable the background to make it transparent I'm just gonna leave it on then to size up our image we'll go image image size here we can choose the new dimensions I'm gonna select pixels and a width and height of about 256 you will notice that this blows out our image quite a bit that's because Photoshop once again is trying to mess with us on the resembling we want to change it from automatic to that's right nearest neighbour and voila it's super crisp let's hit OK and our image is now really large again we can press ctrl 1 to view it in one-to-one that's a lot easier to see if we now want to export our image we can go file save as I'm gonna put mine on my desktop you can either save it as a Photoshop file if you want to keep the layers we can save it as a JPEG for a standard image that we can easily share do note that JPEG doesn't include transparent backgrounds if you want transparency you need to select PNG I'm just gonna choose jpg hit save set the quality to maximum and hit OK and now on my desktop we can see this pixel art JPEG image yay at this point it's all up to you to get creative and have fun that's pretty much it for this video I hope you found it useful most of the videos on this channel are focused around game development if you want to try making your own games I suggest starting here on that thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video thanks of the awesome patreon supporters who donated in October and a special thanks to Judy Minh Armen hence off-tune Kookaburra Superman the great James P Thomas Polly Sybok mommy Jason the Tito Derek hem skirt faithful Murphy Manolis Nick Lang Aaron Robert Bund and Peter Locke you guys Rock

Channel: Brackeys

Views: 1,773,091

Keywords: brackeys, unity, unity3d, models, beginner, easy, how, to, learn, tutorial, tutorials, tip, development, develop, games, programming, coding, basic, basics, game, Photoshop, Pixel, Art, PixelArt, Adobe, creative, fun, funny, pixel art, animation, draw, drawing, intro, introduction

Id: rLdA4Amea7Y

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2017