Hello, I'm Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can paint with multicolor brushes in Photoshop.
Before we get started on this tutorial I just want to show you my new eBook which is available
on Amazon.com both as a printed book and also as a Kindle download.
It's a book on 57 Secrets for Working Smarter in Photoshop.
There are all sorts of secrets here for graphic designers and photographers that will help
you work smarter and more effectively in Photoshop so I encourage you to go and have a look at
the book.
And it's also available on iTunes as a download.
So now let's go and have a look at what we're going to do in this particular tutorial.
And in this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can create a brush that does like
this brush is doing and it paints in multiple colors in Photoshop.
So let's get started with this tutorial.
I'm going to add a brand new layer to this image and fill it with black because black
is my foreground color here and I do that by pressing Alt Backspace on the PC, Option
Delete on the Mac.
I'm just going to get rid of the painted layer.
I'm going to add a new layer that we can start painting on and I've got some bokeh brushes
that we've created.
Now I did these in an earlier tutorial so you may want to look at this tutorial if you
want to see how to create these bokeh brushes.
But I created a brand new one here for this particular tutorial.
So I'm just going to size it down and we're going to pick up our starter colors.
Now I want to paint with a sort of blue, a very palest sort of blue and a yellow.
So I'm going to set these as my colors.
Now you may think that it's not possible to paint in multiple colors in Photoshop but
that's not the case.
It is actually quite easy to do so.
So I've already selected my bokeh brush.
I'm going to click here to launch the brushes palette or I could click here and choose Window
and then Brush and that would show the palette.
Now this is my brush and at the moment it's painting like that which is not what we want.
So let's go to brush tip shape and I'm going to size it down a little bit and I'm going
to increase its spacing so that it paints a little bit more like that.
Let's undo that.
We're going into scattering to just set up the scattering on the brush.
I've got scattering on both axes so it's going to paint something like that which I think
is a pretty good effect although I do want it to have a size jitter.
Now size jitter is under shape dynamics so I'm going to add a size jitter and then a
minimum diameter.
And right now that's how my brush is painting.
So now multiple colors.
Multiple colors are achieved through color dynamics.
And here is the color dynamics dialog and I'm going to reset everything so we can see
what options we have here.
Now purity is reset at zero.
That's very, very important.
All the others reset at zero but zero is down the left of the screen here but with purity
zero is in the middle.
And the reason why purity at zero is important is that if you bring purity down to -100 it's
like a saturation.
So all the saturation in your brush is being removed.
So you will want to start with purity around zero percent so that your brush actually is
showing color even though right now it's only showing the foreground color.
Let's have a look at these with foreground/background jitter just set to zero percent.
You can see that we're painting with the foreground color.
Let's see what happens when we take it up to 100 percent.
Now we're jittering in color between the foreground and the background color.
So we've got variety of colors between blue and yellow.
We're sort of halfway to where we want to be.
With hue jitter -- I'm just going to set this down a little bit.
Let's go to hue jitter and see what happens.
Now with hue jitter instead of just jittering between the foreground and background colors
we're actually throwing in colors that do not appear between blue and yellow because
orange and pink don't appear between blue and yellow on the color wheel.
So that is going to give us some additional colors.
Let's just wind that back and see what happens when we choose saturation jitter and here
we're altering the saturation on the brush.
Right now we're jittering between the foreground and background color so we're between blue
and yellow.
We don't have any hue jitter turned on but we're getting more and less saturated dots
so we're getting a variety of saturation.
And if we combine that with hue jitter then we're going to get a variety of saturated
various colors.
So let's just wind these two back to zero for a minute and let's have a look at brightness.
Right now this is the standard brush that we've got jittering between foreground and
background color.
But let's see what happens when we take the brightness up to 100 percent, that jitter.
And what we're doing is we're jittering between very bright and not bright colors so we're
almost going to black here, between black and very bright.
So for our purposes in trying to get a sort of bokeh brush we probably wouldn't want a
brightness jitter of 100 percent but we might use it at for example 50 percent.
Let's just see what that gives us.
That might be a more interesting effect.
And as I said with purity we'll want to have purity at least at zero because we want to
see color.
If we take purity to -100 we're only going to paint in black and white and grayscale.
If we take purity to 100 then we're going to get some really, really bright colors.
So I'm just going to get rid of this layer.
Actually let's just trash this layer and let's create a brand new layer.
Let's just double check our brush settings.
I do want a foreground/background jitter.
I do want some pinks and other colors.
I will increase the saturation a little bit.
I'm going to increase the brightness jitter just a little bit.
I want purity set to about zero here.
I think I don't want a lot of variety there and I'm just going to click that dialog.
And now we can go ahead and paint on this bokeh effect.
Now having added those bokeh colors to that one layer I can then decrease the opacity
of the layer if I want to, add another layer, perhaps increase the size of the brush here.
I could decrease the flow or decrease the size of the brush here.
And now I'm going to paint using screen blend mode so I get again a little bit more of a
brighter effect.
And again I can dial down the opacity and keep adding to this effect using this brush.
So I'm Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more tutorials on this YouTube channel.
Visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom,
Illustrator, Photoshop Elements and a whole lot more.