Advanced' Photo Effects Tutorials

Defining your own brush presets is a very powerful but often overlooked feature of Photoshop. Not only is it very useful in graphic design work, you can use it in your chops as well!

When trying to add little air bubbles to the water in which my Neural Operator was living, time was pressing and I couldn't find the perfect source image to blend into my chop. Defining a custom brush saved me: I could draw my own bubbles!

In this tutorial I will show you how I made these bubbles:



The tutorial is geared towards Adobe Photoshop. I will be showing you how to use the powerful brush interface that was introduced in Photoshop 7. Let's get rolling...

If we want to define a new custom brush, we need to start with a Brush Tip Shape. The shape that we draw should be in grey scale (black on white): we use black where our brush should apply colour opaquely, and white where it should not apply colour at all. Everything in between will be partly transparent, depending on the grey value.

Since we want a Bubble Brush in this example, we will draw a bubble. However, we'll probably use our brush with light colours on dark backgrounds, so we will draw in white on black instead of the other way around. That way we have a better idea of what our brush will look like eventually.

Use a soft white brush to draw a bubbly shape on a black background. I gave it a little blurry look because I didn't want my bubbles to look too crisp. When you are satisfied, Invert the picture (Ctrl-I).



Now select the shape with the Rectangular Marquee tool. You can safely leave some white space around the edges. Use "Define Brush Preset" in the "Edit" menu to save your brush tip.



We made our Brush Tip Shape, now let's start using it!

It's time to locate your "Brushes" panel. It usually lives on the top right of your screen. Select the Brush Tool to use it; the panel might be disabled otherwise.

Click on "Brush Tip Shape" and find the shape we just saved. You will probably want to adjust the Diameter of your brush tip (my brush was 40 pixels wide). Because it affects the size of the preview as well, I will leave it alone for now. We can always come back later and change it.



That's it, we made a custom brush!

As you can see in the preview, it isn't yet very spectacular or particularly useful. Let's do something about that.

Our bubbles won't float in a straight line. To simulate that effect, click on "Scattering" in the Brushes panel. Play with the settings a little and see what they do. I wanted quite a bit of scattering, on both axes. I left the count at 1, because I didn't want an overkill of bubbles.



It's beginning to look a lot more like it!

Next, we want to do something about the uniform size of the bubbles. Click on "Shape Dynamics" in the Brushes panel. This is where most of the fun stuff happens.

I set the "Size Jitter" all the way to 100% and "Minimum Diameter" to 1%, since I wanted both very tiny and larger bubbles. If you have a tablet that is pressure sensitive you will be very pleased with the "Pen Pressure" option in the Control drop-down box. We will have some extra control over our brush: the harder we press on our tablet, the larger the bubbles will become.

We would still have pretty uniform bubbles if we didn't enable the "Angle Jitter" and "Roundness Jitter" options. A tiny bit of angle jitter will give the impression of the bubbles moving in a non-uniform direction. Set it too high and the bubbles will be rotated so much that the lighting will look ridiculous. The roundness jitter will make for slightly different shapes, but be sure to enable the "Minimum Diameter" to ensure that our bubbles won't be as flat as a paper.



Looks better already, doesn't it? Still there is one more setting to adjust!

The "Other Dynamics" might just as well have been called Opacity Dynamics, because that's all that it contains. We will set a high amount of "Opacity Jitter" to simulate some variety in depth. At the same time we set our "Flow Jitter" and use the "Pen Pressure" control once again to make the bubbles more opaque as we make them larger (closer to the viewer) with our tablet. Flow is similar to opacity in that it controls transparency. The difference is that flow will keep adding colour if the brush is held on the same spot, while opacity will not.



That's it, our brush is done! As you can see there are more dynamics and options we can set, but this is all we need for our bubbles.

Can't wait to see them in action?

Our brush is ready to use! Select a light colour on a dark blue, watery background. On a new layer with a "Color Dodge" blending mode, paint some air bubbles with our new Bubble Brush. See how our water comes to life! Fiddle with the blending mode, transparency and the amount of bubbles to get the look you want.



Works well? Let's save it for future use! Nothing worse than making the perfect brush preset but forgetting to save it.

Click the tiny little arrow in the Brushes panel to bring up the Brushes menu. Select "New Brush Preset" to save the current Brush settings to a brush preset which you can use later. You can use the same Brush Tip Shape for multiple Brush Presets, just hit "New Brush Preset" each time you want to save your settings.



Once saved, you can export your brush to share it with others. In the Brushes menu, hit "Save Brushes" to save your current set of Brush Presets. Keep in mind that brushes saved with Photoshop CS and CS2 aren't backwards compatible with Photoshop 7.

You can use custom brushes for more than just bubbles. How about making one for:

- weather effects (snow, rain, ...)
- soap bubbles
- distant foliage or grass
- subtle lens flare effects
- distant flocks of birds

Or something entirely different... Have fun!