Hello, I'm Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I'll show you how to create a bokeh background brush in Photoshop.
As usual before looking at how we're actually going to tackle this process let's have a
look at the result.
This is a bokeh background that I've created using a brush in Photoshop and I'm going to
show you not only how to create the brush but also create this effect.
We're going to start with a new file and it doesn't really matter too much about it.
But I've got a standard 1,800 by 1,800 image, 300 resolution, transparent background and
it's an RGB color.
Now I'm going to select the Ellipse tool here because I want to create a circle.
Now before I get going any further I'm going to make sure that I'm working with a shape
layer.
I want a fill which is a sort of light to medium gray so I'm thinking something like
this.
And I want an edge which is fairly dark but not totally dark so this one is going to be
a little bit more contrasty of a brush than the one I showed you earlier.
I'm going to set the border here, the stroke weight at about 6 pixels and I'm going to
hold the Shift key as I drag out a circle.
Now if I need to move it I'm just going to add the Spacebar until I move it into position
and then let go.
This looks like a pretty good brush to me.
I'm fairly happy with that.
So having created my ellipse I'm going to right click it and I'm going to just rasterize
this layer by choosing Rasterize Layer.
Now I want to go and select the shape so I'm going to Ctrl click on the layer so that just
selects the shape itself.
And I want to create this as a brush.
So I'm going to choose Edit, Define Brush Preset and I'm going to call this bokeh.
And you could create multiple bokeh brushes if you want to.
So I'm just going to close this.
I don't need it any longer.
Now let's create a new file for our background effect.
Again, I'm going to choose the same 1,800 by 1,800 pixel image and I'm going to fill
the background with black so I have black as my foreground color.
I'm going to press Alt Backspace or Option Delete on the Mac to fill the background layer.
I'm going to click to add a new layer and I'm going to choose a color for my bokeh effect.
So I'm going to start with sort of a brightest yellow.
So I'll click Ok.
Now I'm going to select my brush tool and I want to go and make sure that I have my
brush.
And it's this brush that I want here.
This is the bokeh brush that I just created so I'm going to make sure I have it targeted.
Now at the moment this is what it's painting.
And that's not quite the effect that I want so I'm just going to undo that.
And let's bring in the brushes panel and we get to that by choosing Window and then Brush.
The brushes panel allows us to make changes to the brush and for a start this one is way
too big so I'm just going to size it down quite a bit smaller.
But I also want to increase its spacing so that it spaces itself out so when I draw with
it it's spaced out not overlapping.
So let's just undo that.
I think I could go up a little bit in size.
Now I'm going to shape dynamics because this is where we start getting a little bit more
excitement out of the brush.
At the moment it's just painting same size objects.
So now I'm going to increase the size jitter and that will mean that the brush is going
to paint at different sizes so I'm going to get something a bit different in the brush
painting.
Now I can increase the minimum diameter so that I get a larger small size brush so it's
a little larger than it was.
Angle jitter is not going to help us anywhere here because we've got a circular shape and
I don't really want to change the roundness jitter because I don't want ovals since I
took so much effort making a circle in the first place.
But Scattering I do want.
I want to scatter and at the moment scattering is set on, I want the brush to paint a little
bit more like this where we get lots of brush shapes in various locations.
So in actual fact the brush is doing the work for me and I don't have to do it myself.
So I've set scatter to both axes and I'm just going to set that to some sort of value there.
Now with count jitter we can create how much of this scattering effect we get.
And I think that we want to have a count of probably 3 or 4 here because that will give
us again a bit better value out of our brush.
So let's just wind that back.
Pretty much that's all I need for this brush so I'm just going to hide the brushes panel
there.
And now let's just go and start working on the background.
So I've created a little bit of a painted bokeh effect here and I can just decrease
the opacity of that and add another layer and perhaps create a different color bokeh
effect here.
Again, I'm just painting once or twice with this brush because that's all I need to do,
again, decrease the opacity and let's go for perhaps another color in the bokeh effect,
a sort of blue.
Now we could do this with different brushes.
We could create a variety of bokeh brushes with different thicknesses for example or
less variation between the stroke and the fill but you can see how this might work for
you.
But one thing I do like to do is to come in here and on these topmost layers change the
layer blend mode to screen because I find that the blending of these two layers together
actually works better when you're using a screen blend mode because everything then
just gets lighter.
And it seems to get a little bit brighter where it overlaps so I get a nicer effect.
And let's again go into screen blend mode and let's get our brush and a color and let's
go for a sort of pale green this time.
And let's finish off with one more layer of brush strokes.
And there's a way of achieving a bokeh background effect in Photoshop just using a handmade
brush.
I'm Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more tutorials on this YouTube channel.
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And visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop,
Illustrator, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements and a whole lot more.