Creating your own custom brushes
Creating your own brushes in Photoshop is simpler than you might think, and once you have created them they can always remain in your Photoshop arsenal ready to use at any time, ready to share with your fellow designers!
Photoshop comes with a great range of brushes, but sometimes you may need a particular brush that you cant find in the standard sets. You can also use your own custom brushes to create unique works of art, instead of using multiple layers. If you combine your brushes with the dynamics available in the brush palette you can really create some wonderful effects very easily!
Brush creation is a simple process, but you should try to follow the simple guidelines below to ensure you create high quality, flexible brushes that you can use in the future.
Before you start I must outline a couple of simple principles like dpi and image resolution. Brushes are created from an image made up of pixels (more on that below) and just like any other image, if you resize your brush larger than its original size the quality will be reduced. DPI is not really relevant in brush creation, there size is expressed purely in pixel terms. I usually create my brushes at 1000 pixels on its longest dimension (either width or height). I dont usually need brushes bigger than this. It is sometimes a good idea to create this large version of the brush and a smaller version of the same brush (more on that later!).
Brushes are stored in sets, if you click the arrow at the top right of the brushes palette you will see all of the brush sets available. These sets can contain pretty much (never seen a limit on this) any number of different brushes, each with their own shape and characteristics as set in the brush palette. For instance, your first brush in a set may be of a simple star, your next brush could be using the first brushes shape, but have a whole host of colour, opacity and shape dynamics applied to it - this acts as a separate brush once saved. Also you can resize any existing brush, and save this as a new preset, so you can take your very large 1000 pixel brush, resize it to a smaller size (using the shortcuts [ and ]). With the brush sets it is probably best to start off a new, blank set. Do this by deleting all the brushes out of your current set and then saving this with a unique name.
As mentioned above, brushes are simply made out of images - single channel greyscale images to be precise. If you are familiar with alpha channels the next point will be second nature, apart from the colours are switched around! The way a brushes transparency is defined is by the level of black - so white is completely transparent and black is completely solid. Any level of grey in-between defines a semi-transparent area - the lighter the grey is the more transparent the area is. So if you draw a black rectangle and Gausian Blur the image to soften the edge, you would end up creating a brush that is square with a soft edge. As you might of now realised, because the brush is actually made up of an image, it means you can create brushes from any image, even photographic type images (in greyscale) - cool!
So, once you have got your greyscale image prepared and just go to Edit>Define Brush Preset. You are then given the opportunity to give your brush a name. When you click ok your new basic brush will appear in your brushes palette ready to use! Remember to save your brush set, by clicking on the little arrow at the top right of the brushes palette because if Photoshop crashes in the future you may loose your new brush set. You can now also share your new brush collection with all your fellow Photoshop Ninjas!