hawksmont Universe :)

PHOTOS & IMAGES WITH BACKGROUND

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?