Open the Window menu and select the Brush Settings option. We need to change some of the Brush Settings to add some much-needed randomness and variation to its appearance. However, if you try to paint with it now, you’ll notice it doesn’t look or feel like a natural texture at all. You can name the brush, and then you’ll find it within the list of available brushes in Photoshop. Open the Edit menu and select Define Brush Preset near the middle of the list. Now that our texture is ready, it’s time to convert it into a brush. Creating a Brush & Adjusting Brush Settings We’re working with a fairly high-resolution image as our example, so we resized to 1500 pixels wide to make a little easier to process. This will give the brush a more amorphous, organic feel once we start painting with it.ĭepending on the size of the image you’re working with, it may be helpful to resize it if it’s large. Then use the Brush Tool to remove some of the texture by painting with white along the edges. Create another Levels Adjustment to increase the contrast even further. This is looking a lot more like a texture that we can use to create a brush. Since we want the opposite effect, simply click on the image layer and hit CTRL or CMD + I to invert the image. Right now, we have a mostly-black texture that would result in a muddy, low-detail brush.įortunately, this is simple to fix. We’re getting close! For a Brush Preset, you generally want the the texture areas to appear black on top of a pure white background. This will remove color from the image, leaving us with only grayscale light and dark information.

Open the Image menu, select Adjustments, and then select Desaturate. This will increase the overall contrast of the image, pushing the middle tones to either light or dark.

Move both the highlight and shadows sliders inward. Hit CTRL or CMD + L to open the Levels dialog. We’ll need to make several adjustments to increase contrast, remove color, and convert the texture into elements that are only pure white or pure black.

To start, we’ll need a photograph of the texture that we want to convert to a custom brush. Let’s see how it’s done! Preparing a Photographed Texture In this tutorial, we’re going to focus specifically on creating grunge and vintage effects using brushes made from real, photographed textures. Whether you want to make rain, snow, fog, or even hair, custom brushes are both powerful and versatile. Some of the best effects you can create in Photoshop come from making your own custom brushes.

Paint brush texture photoshop