Theme week alert! This week I would like to share some photoshop tips I find useful and image sheets of tags.

Today’s tip is how to make a (graphic) brush in photoshop. Open your image. Go to image, then image size. If your pixels (either width or length) is bigger than 2500, then set the highest number to 2500. If the file is not at 2500 pixels or smaller, you will not be able to make your image into a brush.

When you make your brush, all white areas of the image will appear as transparent in the brush. if you have an image with a black background, you may want to invert the image by going to image, adjustments, invert. I made some brushes using images of smoke that had black backgrounds. It would have been hard to erase the black areas of the image because of the transparency of the smoke, but I did not want the black areas to be solid when I made the brush. Inverting the image worked perfectly.

Now that your image is sized at 2500 pixels or lower, and you have your white/transparent areas of the image set, you are ready for the complicated process of creating a brush. You may want to take notes. Here we go:

Go to edit, then define brush preset. Type your brush name and get ready for the hard part. Select your brush tool, and then look in the brush menu, scroll to the bottom if necessary. I guess I should mention… here is your brush! That’s all there is to it.

If you would like to play around with brush settings go to the brushes palette and start playing. Try adjusting the color dynamics sliders for some fun effects!