Custom Photoshop Brushes

A friend recently sent me a link to a website with some gorgeous brushes. After playing with them a little bit, I realized I could also make some lovely brushes in Photoshop. This technique works for any recent versions of Photoshop. It's really simple. For the sample attached, I found a pretty, scripty font. Grunge fonts would also be great. Generally you want to stick to black on white for a cleaner look.

Type your phrase.

Now use one of your selection tools and loosely frame the graphic. In this case I used a rectangular marquee tool, but the lasso tool would work, too.

Go to the Edit drop down menu and go slightly over halfway down to "Define Brush Preset."

Give your new brush a name. Voila! You have created your brush.

Let your imagination be your guide. Try some photo textures (convert your color space to bitmap so you have just black and white), or import clip art. I have many books of lovely Victorian clip art that are perfect for this kind of thing. Also, some of those "dingbat" fonts will work, too.

Busy Photo, Be Gone!

This beautiful egret posed so gracefully in a eucalyptus tree, but there was a big problem: branches in the way. The solution: the Spot Healing Brush in Photoshop CS5, with the Content Aware box in the options bar checked. I learned a few tricks in the process. First, of course, work SLOOOOWLY. Keep the brush size small. Sometimes this brush will do strange blurring at edges between light and dark. My solution was to use the clone tool (again, kept very small) at these critical junctures and then finish up (the rest of a branch, for example) much more quickly with the brush. Sometimes it would be necessary to go over the same area several times. I didn't want to take out ALL the branches, or the poor bird wouldn't have a roost.