Photoshop brushes have evolved over the years
and designers now use them as a fast and easy way
to place clipart and shapes into their artwork.
There are thousands of free Photoshop brush sets
and more every day.
Watch this video and learn how to install Photoshop brushes
and get the best results with advance colorizing techniques.
How are Photoshop brushes used today?
The default brushes that come with Photoshop work like paint brushes.
They work great for paintings
and are extremely good at simulating brushes, pencils, and other media.
However, most Photoshop brushes have evolved into stamp-style brushes.
Instead of simulating artistic media,
they’re used like stamps to quickly place shapes and pictures into their artwork.
By using these stamp brushes,
designers can create everything from simple shapes to photorealistic splatters
and lighting effects without drawing anything.
Installing Photoshop brushes
There are a few ways to install Photoshop brushes.
The most convenient way is to go into the brush preset picker palette menu.
To do this, select the brush tool
then bring up the brush preset picker.
You can find this in the options bar
or by right-clicking anywhere in your document.
Next, click on the palette menu and select Load Brushes.
Browse for the brushes then click OK.
The brushes will now appear at the bottom of your brush preset picker.
If you want to save or delete brushes,
you can do this easier in the Preset Manager.
The Preset Manager can be accessed by going to Edit > Presets > Preset Manager.
Here, you can select multiple brushes at a time and save or delete them.
Want to have the brushes show up in the panel menu of your brush preset picker?
You can do this by placing them in your Photoshop brush presets folder.
To do this, look in the video description for the folder locations that matches your operating system,
copy and paste the file into the folder, then restart Photoshop.
Avoid copying any brushes with a large file size because they can severely slow down Photoshop’s loading time.
Using Picture Brushes
Solid shape brushes are the easiest ones to use.
Just pick the color you like and click anywhere to place it.
Things become more complicated when it comes to picture brushes.
Most people who use these brushes find that they lack depth.
This is because they need to be colorized using a different technique which we will show you in a bit.
But first, let’s understand how Photoshop brushes work.
All Photoshop brushes are black and white.
Picture brushes use varying opacity to create different tones.
So something that appears gray is actually black with some transparency to make it look gray.
What you end up with is a picture with more transparency in the brighter areas and less in the darker.
Because of this, you always paint picture brushes with black on a white background to get the full tonal range.
Use any other colors and it will look flat.
To use picture brushes, create a new layer and fill it with white.
Set your foreground color to black.
You can do this quickly by pressing D on your keyboard to reset your foreground and background colors.
Select the Brush tool then right-click anywhere in your document to bring up the Brush preset picker.
Select the brush you want to use and adjust the size.
You can change your brush size using hot keys by pressing the left bracket key to decrease and right bracket key to increase.
Click anywhere to place the brush into your layer.
Some brushes are inverted meaning that they’re designed to be painted with white.
If you are using inverted brushes, such as these bokeh brushes,
you’ll need to fill the layer with black and paint with white.
Colorizing your brushes - The Easy Way
Now that we have the image placed, we can start adding color to it.
There are several ways to do this.
The quickest way is to use the Hue/Saturation tool.
To do this, go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation.
Checkmark the colorize option then adjust the settings.
Here’s how to do it.
If you want the most vivid colors, start off by setting your Saturation to 100 and lightness to 50.
Adjust the hue setting to the color you like.
Alter the saturation and lightness to get your desired color then click OK.
Colorizing using Gradient Maps
For some brushes, such as these explosion brushes by SparkleStock,
you'll need to use a gradient map to get the best results.
Gradient maps take more time, but the difference is day and night.
Here's a comparison of the difference between colorizing with the Hue/Saturation tool and colorizing with the Gradient Maps.
As you can see, the one with the gradient map looks a lot better.
Create a new Gradient Map adjustment layer by going to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map.
Click on the gradient to bring up the Gradient Editor.
Select the black to white gradient.
If you don't see this, click on the panel menu and select Reset Gradients.
Click anywhere below the gradient to add a stop
In the locations field, enter 50%.
Click on the color then pick the color you'd like to use.
Add another stop by clicking anywhere below the gradient.
Photoshop should add the same color that you used before.
Set the position to 75%
Click on the color then pick the color you'd like to use.
Add another color stop and change the position to 25%.
Click on the color then pick the color you'd like to use.
There you have it!
These explosion brushes now look photorealistic.
Colorizing by hand
There's also one more way to add color to your brushes.
This method should be used when you want to manually paint in the colors and can be used to create abstract results.
We'll show you this using these Smoke brushes.
Start by creating a new layer.
Position this layer above the layer with the brush then change the blending mode to color
Hold the Alt key then click between the current layer and the layer below.
This will clip your current layer to the layer below so that the color we add to this layer only affects the smoke layer.
Select the brush tool, set the brush to the default round brush, and start painting with any color you like.
I'm going to stick with the colors cyan, magenta, and yellow to make these smoke look abstract.
You can quickly access these colors in the Swatches palette by going to Window > Swatches.
Click on the panel menu and select any one of the Pantone CMYK presets.
The colors will appear as the first four color.
To paint, I will use the default brush with a hardness of 0.
Start painting to add some colors.
You can adjust the opacity in the options bar at any time to adjust the strength.
We're done!
We just made some abstract smoke art by combining the smoke Photoshop brushes with an abstract coloring technique.
It's that easy.
There are many ways to color Photoshop brushes.
Give it a try and let us know which one you like!
How to blend Photoshop brushes into your artwork
You just learnt the most advance techniques to colorizing your Photoshop brushes.
Now you need to learn how to blend these brushes with your artwork.
Start by converting the layers to a Smart Object.
To do this, select all the layers that are involved with your brush.
Right-click and select "Convert to Smart Object".
If your brush has a white background, set the blending mode to Multiply or Linear Burn.
If your brush has a black background, set the blending mode to Screen or Linear Dodge.
If blending modes aren't doing the trick for you, right-click on the layer then select "Blending Options".
Set the blending mode back to normal then go to the Blend If options near the bottom of the window.
If your brush has a white background, you'll need to adjust the white input slider.
If your brush has a black background, adjust the black input slider instead.
Hold down the Alt and drag the input slider towards the other side.
The slider should split in half and you'll see the background disappear as you move it towards the other side.
You can also drag the other half of the input slider to make the edges blend harder.
We’re done!
Speed up Photoshop by deleting unused brushes
Some brushes are so big that they can bog down Photoshop by taking up disk space and increasing the loading time.
If this happens, you can try fixing this by deleting any large presets in the presets folder.
See the video description to find the location of your folders.
You can also reset Photoshop by holding down Alt, Ctrl, and Shift
or Command, Option, Shift on Macs while starting up Photoshop.
Photoshop will ask if you want to delete your preferences file.
Click yes.
Note that this will delete all of your Photoshop preferences including all the brushes, patterns, and other presets you've loaded.
Thank you for watching this tutorial.
Check out the video description for a list of our favorite websites to download Photoshop brushes from.
Download some Photoshop brushes and give them a try!
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