How to Turn any Image into a Custom Photoshop Brush

In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to create a custom brush from your photos in Photoshop. Let the fun begins.

We're going to work with a picture of a cloud. You can use any photo that you like. The important thing is to get a cloud that looks a little puffy, circular, not too long. Open your image in Photoshop. The first thing is to isolate the cloud that you want to use from anything else. You may have a photo that contains buildings, trees, power lines, and things like that. You don't want to include those in the brush. To isolate the cloud, you can use a tool such as the Lasso Tool and click-and-drag to make a selection around the cloud that you want to use for your brush. With clouds selected, 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. Desaturate the image to make the process easier, at least easier in your mind. Click on the layer thumbnail, and 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, or you can go into Image - Adjustment - Desaturate. 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. If the white is transparent, then we need to make the background white, and the black is what we keep so we want to make the cloud black. 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. We need to make the clouds black. To do so, you can simply press Ctrl + I to Invert. All we have to do is simply make the sky as close to white as possible to make it transparent. We can to that by going into Image - Adjustment - Levels. In the levels panel, we can control luminosity by sliding the right-side handle to the left. The right-side handle tells Photoshop what pixels are white, by dragging the white points to the left, more pixels become white. But you don't want to push it too far or you'll start getting hard edges. Try and find some balance.

Next, we can use the Dodge and Burn Tool. With the dodge tool, you can make things brighter, and with the burn tool, you can make things darker. First, select the dodge tool, and on the range make sure that you have Highlights selected because we want to make highlights brighter. Set the Exposure to 13 percent, and start painting. You can notice how you are only affecting the bright pixels in the image. Go around the entire area, just make sure that the edges are completely white, therefore transparent. 

You don't need to make the clouds any darker, because different levels of gray will give you different levels of transparency. Once you are happy with how your cloud looks like, go to Edit - Define - Bruch Preset, and you'll be able to see a preview of the cloud right in the window, you can give it whatever name that you want. There's our brush.

Now when your brush is done we can go into the Brush settings and change some adjustments so that your brush looks even better. All adjustments that you make you can see into the preview window, you can change the Spacing between the brush strokes. The Shape Dynamic, which controls the size and angle of the brush. You can bump the Size of Jitter all the way to the top, which means that the brush stroke is going to have different sizes. You can adjust the Angle Jitter so that they're all facing a different way. So it's going to look completely random.

Then you can adjust the Scattering, which allows you to control how scattered the clouds are. You can adjust the Count by moving the slider to the right or left and you can decide if you want to have a lot of clouds or not so much.

In the Transfer, you can adjust the different levels of transparency by dragging the Opacity Jitter to about 15. When you click and drag you can see how all of the clouds have different levels of luminosity.

How do we use this on an actual photo? We can use it in a lot of different ways. For example, we can create a new layer, and with the eyedropper tool select the bright color, and paint over the image. This could be used as fog, mist, smoke. Also, you can create special effects. If we select the darker color, create a new layer, and paint smoke that is coming from the distance. One of the great things about working on the separate layer is that you can click icon Lock Transparent Pixels to lock the pixels. That means that now we can only paint on the pixels that are opaque. We can no longer paint on the transparent pixels. Choose the brighter color that you smoke is and you can paint right on that smoke, without affecting anything else. If the color is too bright, remember that you always have the Edit - Fade Command, which fades the last tool you used, in this case, the brush tool. When you selected it, you will get the pop-up window where you can change the blending mode or reduce the opacity.

That's how you create a custom brush in Photoshop. Thanks for reading the article I hope you liked it, and we’ll read on in the next one. 😀😀