Make a Photoshop Brush

This is a tutorial to show you how to turn a photo into a creepy/grungy brush.

  into a brush that looks like  

Start by downloading the photo here.

Open your photo in Photoshop. I’m using Photoshop CS3 for this tutorial.

On the left toolbar choose the quick selection tool.

quick selection

Use the Quick Selection Tool to select the entire doorway.

select only doorway

Then go to Edit > Copy. When you copy something, Photoshop automatically takes the size of what’s on your clipboard to make your new image. So go to File > New and click OK. Then paste by going to Edit > Paste. When you paste, it will paste into a transparent layer on top of a white background. If your background isn’t white, simply delete the background layer.

doorway alone

Make sure you foreground is White (FFFFFF) and your background is Black (000000). Then go to Filter > Sketch > Conte Crayon. The settings for this should be: Foreground: 11; Background: 7; Texture: Canvas; Scaling 100%; Relief: 4; Light: top. When you’re done it will look like..

conte crayon

Next go to Filter > Sketch > Torn Edges. The settings for this should be: Image Balance: 37; Smoothness: 12; Contrast 14.

finished product

Once you’ve got the image you’ll need to create the brush. Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Give your brush a name and it will be automatically added to the current list. Make sure that once you’re done making all your brushes you save them to a set so you don’t lose them. (set tutorial coming soon)

It had been a while since I made any brushes, so I want to thank Swimchick for her tutorial to get me back into it.