The first thing to do is to decide what sorts of brushes you may want to make.I have always wanted to make a coffee stain brush for grunging up images when we have photo aging contests. I don't like using other people's artwork for this, so have finally taken the bull by the horns and made my own.Please note that in the photography section at Worth, you should not be using brushes that are not native to photoshop, such as coffee stain brushes found on the net, as they are made with photographs... Most contests do not permit the merging of more than one photograph, and definitely not the use of photographs that are not your own work. So this tutorial is aimed at allowing you to enhance your non-Worth work, or to provide for jazzing up images for contests where merging multiple images is allowed.So, on with the show!First thing to do was to make some real messy coffee stains. You can use textured or coloured paper for this, but to make it more generic, I decided to use plain white paper. That way I can make a separate coffee stain brush, and a crumpled or textured paper brush, and use them together or independently later. I have a feeling a more absorbent paper may have made better blotches, but I don't have any plain newspaper around the house, so this ended up having to be good enough. Play around with textures and experiment for effect.I sploshed around with my coffee mug, making a mess, and making rings, till I got a few shapes and arrangements that I was happy with. Then, I did a bad thing since I was working in a hurry, and dried the page with the hair dryer. I should have been able to predict that it would make the paper ripple, more than just a bit. So, when I scanned it, the ripples all made unsightly shadows and marks that interfered with my lovely splashes and coffee messes.I then had to resort to photographing the page under more direct light, which achieved a slightly better digital result. So this is what I got in the end:
It makes no real difference how you get your desired grungy image into a digital file.You can create all sorts of shapes. Do some tearing and crumpling, some scribbles, writing or doodles. Hey, even use your signature! Use hair, sticky tape, feathers, leaves, dust and fluff, and anything else you can think of. Scan stuff, photograph stuff or even draw it. Get that grungy image into your computer!The next, and probably the hardest thing to do, is to select the parts of the image you want to include in your brush. Use whichever selection methods you are most comfortable with, and there are many. I used the Magic Wand tool to select the coffee-coloured parts of my image.Make sure that the magic wand settings are suitable for your image. Play around with them till they work for you. You may need to toggle between the Add and Subtract Selection options.You may need to turn the Contiguous check box on or off so that the extent of your magic wand selection can be controlled.You may need to lower or increase the tolerance so that the magic wand includes or excludes sufficient amounts of your image.
An alternative way to customize your selection is to use Quick Mask mode. Switch to Quick Mask mode with the little option button at the bottom of your toolbar.
In Quick Mask mode, you use the brush tool to define the bits that are to be selected, instead of using the more unwieldy selection tools. The bits marked in red are those that are unselected and those in any lighter shade than red or white are partly selected or not selected at all. Use black and white brushes to further refine your selection to subtract or add red and thereby subtract from or add to your selection respectively.
When you are done, use the alternative button next to the Quick Mask button to switch back to Standard Mode. At this point, I identified only a part of the image that I decided I wanted to have in my brush.I set the selection tool to subtract from my overall selection and basically unselected all the bits I didn't want in it anymore. All I was left with were the two coffee rings that I wanted in one brush.
As you probably know, I could have done this in the previous step, or through not selecting all the other blotches in the first place, but I wanted a full selection of all the coffee stains so that I could save all of them as separate and different brushes. I repeated this step above by doing Step Backward to get back to my full selection and then choosing different parts of the coffee stain patterns for different brushesNow is the easy bit that makes it all sweet. From the Edit menu, pick Define Brush (PS7) or Define Brush Preset (CS2). This will bring up a dialogue to allow you to name your brush.
And once you OK that, your brush is pretty much done and ready to use! You can find it in your brushes listing as per any of your other brushes.Well done!You can use any selection to create a brush in this way. There does seem to be a restriction on the size of it though, so if there are too many pixels in it, fugeddaboudit! I am pretty sure it's excessive length or breadth of the selection that prohibits it from being able to be a brush, but an overly complicated selection may do the same thing. I am sure someone will probably come in here and tell us all about it...BUT!! And here comes the very tricky part. You need to save the brush or brushes that you have created so that you can find them again if they ever get removed from your brushes list. So you use that Edit menu again to access the Preset Manager.Your preset type should come up with 'Brushes' in the first little box, but if it's not, then change it to show 'Brushes'.Scroll down through the brushes listed till you get to the end. If you have made multiple brushes and they are all pretty similar to each other, you can save them as a set.Select all the brushes that you have just made and that you want to group together and once selected, you should see the Save Set button become active.
This will let you save your set of brushes anywhere you want to. I would recommend putting them wherever all your other presets or brushes are, and on my Windows system, that's in my Program Files/Adobe/Photoshop-whatever/Presets/Brushes. Give the set a name and save it away and it will be there for you to load into your brushes whenever you want it.
When you come to use your brushes, I suggest always doing it on a new transparent layer above your other image elements. That way you can play with your brushes and their effects as much as you like without affecting the rest of your image layers.
In the Brushes list, I can see my new brush at the end. It looks all kinda squished and out of shape, but don't worry, it won't look like that in real life.
If I select and use that brush on my empty layer, I can change the colour of the paint I use, and I can also use the brush repeatedly to make the stamp as dark as I want it to be.I can use all the power of layer styles to give my brush strokes some oomph. Now they can become like thick paint on the image, or float above it with a drop shadow. Leaving the blending options off, and using the brush lightly and sparingly makes it more like the coffee stain it started out as.
Now, I am no artist, so I don't pretend that what I have created is any kind of masterpiece, but I slapped together the following collage using only brushes I created in exactly the same way.A crumpled piece of paper, another torn one, my signature, some doodles and those coffee stains. Just a hodge-podge really, but you get the message.
The nice part about using brushes rather than using images in layers with different blending modes is that you have control over the degree of their transparency. They can all overlap each other to varying degrees, and can each be seen through each other where they overlap. You can use them and reuse them as often as you like.I would recommend caution though, because as with everything, less is much more and there's no substitute for subtlety. OK, I made that last bit up, but I stand by itOf course, there are several ways to do just about everything in Photoshop, and this is just one way. I am sure there could be plenty of follow-up tutorials to this one to explain other ways to achieve the same thing.If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them here!And that's it in a nutshell. Have fun!
And LadyMin added:
I want to add one thing: If it's about photo aging, I had a similar problem with the paper crumbling as it dried. What I did was lay the whole scan as a layer above my "old photo", and setting to multiply or overlay (always play around with layer blending modes).The crumbles also translate to the photo then, too, but if you want to make an old photo, it is a nice effect you might want to achieve.:)