Here it is: “Glowing tutorial”. In few really simple steps you can learn how to make almost everything glow and how I use this effect on glow brushes

To view this tutorial just click the image below. It’ll take you to deviantART site where all you need to do is to click the image

How to make things glow?? by ~hawksmont on deviantART

You can find hawksmont glow brushes to practice here:
Free Photoshop Brushes: Glow Part I
Free Photoshop Brushes: Glow Part II
Free Photoshop Brushes: Glow EXTRA!
Free Photoshop Brushes: Valentine Glow Hearts

have fun!

I know I sometimes catch myself thinking: “why do I have to type this website address on each image?” or “I need more leaves in that picture”. Sometimes you may need a crack on a brand new vase or watercolor brushes. In those and many other cases you look for brushes that are nowhere to be found. The best solution is to create Photoshop brushes on your own. It’s really simple

This tutorial is created for Photoshop 7.0, but some tips can be useful in higher and lover verions I’ve devided this issue into four parts, because some steps may be not interesting for you.

How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part I – Image preparation I
How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part II – Image preparation II
How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part III – Saving a single brush
How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part IV – Saving a set of brushes

I hope this tutorial is easy to understand and I’ll see your brushes somewhere soon

I suggest you to choose your image wisely, because Photoshop brush is something you create when you’d like to use the image many times.

IMPORTANT NOTES:
1. Objects that suppose to be brushes cannot be bigger than 2500×2500 px
2. Black color in your image will give you 100% opacity of your brush color.
It means if you don’t want your object or signature look like ghost – it should be black.
3. White color in your image will disappear in your brush.
So the best background for your object would be white.
4. Colors appears in brushes as grey values.
It means that every color other than black or white will be seen as a grey color and it will have lower opacity in your brush.

TIP:
If you want to see your brush before you’ll actually define it, create Hue/Saturation adjustment layer above your image layer and drag the saturation slider to the left end (-100).

This is how your brush will look (if you define it now without editing) if you use it with black paint on white background.

You think your image looks OK?
Then skip the rest of this part and go to How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part III – Saving a single brush

OBJECTS WITH “WHITE” BACKGROUND

This part is mainly about images with light (not white) background. You can check your background color with an Eyedropper tool. If your image background is really white, you can skip it and go

Those are my scanned signatures. I wrote them on a white paper, but it looks like rather light green than white here

WHY THE WHITE BACKGROUND IS SO IMPORTANT?

I desaturated the image. So this is the preview of my signature brush:

It looks OK, but…:)

I personally don’t like brushes with unplanned borders so Levels Adjustment is a must (Ctrl+L). Move sliders to get a white background and a nice contrasted or black object. Spots and dust can be removed with a soft white brush tip. You can also clear edges of your obejct if they are not smooth enough

Now check the background color:

If you have an image like that…

…you’ll have a brush like that:

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Explore Free Photoshop brushes created by hawksmont

READ MORE ABOUT MAKING PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES

How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part II – Image preparation II
How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part III – Saving a single brush
How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part IV – Saving a set of brushes

READ FROM THE START

How to make Photoshop Brushes?

Let’s say you found a perfect object for your design: a flower or a beautiful crack in the wall or a splatter…You really want to use it! But hey, it often goes with a wall or clouds in background or with a bunch of leaves. You don’t really need that extra stuff in your brush, do you? And you really don’t want to use a rectangle brush, belive me

In short: Throw out the background and replace it with white! Or at least erase edges of the picture if you want to have a clean brush

There are many ways of removing background. I’m giving you three of them:

TIP:
It may be helpful if you create a white layer under your image layer

1. Removing the background with a big soft brush

You can use an eraser tool or a brush tool with a round, soft tip shape (I used 100 px diameter)

2. You can cut your object out using pen tool

Read the Tricolor Posterization tutorial
Posterization looks good on brushes too

3. You can extract your object from the image using filters

Choose Filter>Extract (or Alt+Ctrl+X). It opens a new window with your active layer. Use the Highlighter tool to cover the edges of your object and then fill the space inside the edges using Fill tool

Now you’ve got your object extracted

WHAT’S NEXT?

In some ways this could be the end. You’ve got your object on a white background and you can proceed with defining your brush, but do you remember the first tip (above)? You can check how your will look like without defining.

Create Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and desaturate your object. Do you like the effect?

Well, my flower looks quite nice on solid white background, but remember – it is grey, and grey means transparent, so I guess it won’t look good on patterned backgrounds.

You can try to adjust levels of your object layer (Ctrl+L):

Leave your Hue/Saturation adjustment layer visible, this way you’ll see your object as a brush. In levels adjustment turn the dark grey into black and increase contrast you can also lighten up your light grey.

Maybe you’d think that this last adjustment is not necessary, because both flower look fine, but see what happens when those brushes are used on patterned background (in fact any other background then solid one):

Brush on the right is that one without adjustment. It looks almost like a big dark stain Well, if you really want to have a big black stain, you can always lower the opacity of the brush on the left side

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Explore Free Photoshop brushes created by hawksmont

READ MORE ABOUT MAKING PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES:

How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part I – Image preparation I

How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part III – Saving a single brush
How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part IV – Saving a set of brushes

READ FROM THE START:

How to make Photoshop Brushes?

If you have your images prepared, all you have to do is to define brush. go to Edit menu and choose Define Brush. Then you just have to name your brush and use it

TIP:
Brush is defined from the whole image or visible layers. But if you have a part of your image selected, and choose Define Brush, your brush will be created only from your selection.

For example, when I was making Snowflakes brushes, I bundles all snowflakes in one image and just selected one after another:

WHERE IS MY BRUSH?

You can see your brush in Brushes Pallette (upper right corner of the window)

If it is not opened, you can choose Brushes in Window menu.

You can also find your brush in Brush tool and then click on the down-arrow to open the Brush Preset picker

.

TIP:
I strongly advise you saving brushes after you define them, because when you’ll reset your brushes or decide to replace them with another set, you’ll lost the unsaved ones.

To save your brushes choose Brush tool and go to Brush Preset picker

you can also save your brushes from Brushes Palette, Just make sure you’ve chosen Brush Presets, not Brush Tip Shape

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Explore Free Photoshop brushes created by hawksmont

READ MORE ABOUT MAKING PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES

How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part I – Image preparation I
How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part II – Image preparation II

How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part IV – Saving a set of brushes

READ FROM THE START

How to make Photoshop Brushes?

TIP:
The Save Brushes command saves all the brushes that you currently have in your Brushes Palette, so if you want to create a set you need to delete the unwanted brushes from the palette

To delete a brush choose a Brush tool and then open the Brush Preset picker (options bar) or go to Brushes Palette. After right click over the unwanted brush choose Delete Brush

Faster way of removing brushes is Alt+left click on the brush, but then Photoshop will delete the brush without confirming.

SO HOW DO YOU SAVE THOSE SETS?

Make sure you’ve gathered all Photoshop brushes you want to bundle in the set

To save the set go to Brushes Palette, click on small right arrow and choose Save Brushes from the menu. Name your set and save it in your chosen location. Photoshop brushes files have .abr extension

You can also save your brushes in options bar after choosing Brush tool

HAWKSMONT PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES

Because I create many brushes and often bundle them in sets I’ve invented myself a little strategy Oh, yes I’ll share all my secrets

First of all delete all brushes in your palette except one (for example round soft 60 px tip) and save this brush. I named that file 1.abr (my creativity kills me )

I’ve created that file for faster removal of unwanted brushes from the palette When I want to create another Photoshop brushes set I just replace my current palette with that one brush, so I’ve got only one to delete

I make a new set of Photoshop brushes only when all images are prepared. Then I clear the Brushes Palette, Open my images with Photoshop, define images as brushes and save completed set. Actually making brushes itself takes approximately 10 min of my precious time

THE END

This is actually the end of my tutorial. You can read it again, if you want to I hope it will be helpful.

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Explore Free Photoshop brushes created by hawksmont

READ MORE ABOUT MAKING PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES

How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part I – Image preparation I
How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part II – Image preparation II
How to make Photoshop Brushes: Part III – Saving a single brush