Thursday, 13 November 2014

Digital manipulation/ Digital experiments 5. Making brushes

A fun thing to do in Photoshop is to make your image brushed. This is a lot easier than it sounds and you can make anything into a brush. To start I have made some marks by hand using India ink, you can use anything this is just an example. Once the image is on your computer then open it in Photoshop.  



The next step is to choose something which you think will work well as a brush. Ink splats and smudges are often a good choice. I chose a small smudge from the image and cropped it using the polygonal lasso tool on the left hand tool bar. After doing this I then clean up the image so only the part I want is showing. 


My selection still is not very clean. There is still a light grey background and the ink mark is not as dark as I would like it. To fix this I go into image, adjustments and the levels. The levels window allows you to change the intensity of a colour. After playing around with it I finally get rid of the grey background and darken the ink smudge. 



Now that I am happy with my smudge I can make it into a brush. To do this select what you want to use and then go to edit and then define brush preset. This opens a window which lets you name your brush. When you click OK your brush will be added to the bottom of the brush menu. At this point you can use it like any of the default ones.





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