Photoshop Stuff

You could be a matte painter, animation background designer, concept artist, or digital illustrator... either way, having the right resources to arm your Photoshop software with an abundance of weapons is always a good thing.


A list of the best download sites for Photoshop Brushes:

PS Brushes - Your Number one source for Photoshop Brushes


Deviant Art - A large assortment of Photoshop Brushes


QBrushes - Free Quality Photoshop Brushes


NaldzGraphics - Photoshop Resources & Tutorials


GetBrushes - 150+ High Quality Free Photoshop Brushes



Miss M - Photoshop Brushes & Graphic Resources


In Obscuro - Free Adobe Photoshop Brushes


BittBox - Photoshop Brushes


Design Reviver - 350+ Brushes, Textures, and Fonts


Brusheezy - Free Photoshop Brushes


My Photoshop Brushes - Free Photoshop Brushes




How to install Custom Photoshop Brushes:

Working from your PC:

STEP 1 - Put the .abr file you've downloaded onto the DESKTOP. If they are in a ZIP file, open the zip file and drag the .abr files on to your DESKTOP.


STEP 2 - Then open your Adobe Photoshop, select the Brush tool, go to option palette and click on to open the brush preset picker.


Then click on little triangle in the right upper corner.
Next on the list you choose 'Load Brushes'




In the dialog box, click on DESKTOP, and choose the .abr file you want to load and your new brushes appear in the Brush palette and are just ready to go. If there's mulitple Brush files to choose from, you may have to repeat the process to load them all one at a time.

Working from your home computer, you can organize your brushes too:

[On a Mac] Put the .abr file you've downloaded into this folder: Users/{username}/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Presets/Brushes
[on Windows] C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop\Presets\Brushes.

Then follow STEP 2 shown above.


Creating your own Photoshop brushes is a very simple and valuable skill to learn, here's a quick tutorial.


We will start off with this image found it on the internet, the more high resolution the image is, the better. Find your own graphic or photo online (Google Images Search is a good place to start), find an image of something with a white background similar to this.

Now the aim here is to create a black and white image, with the correct contrast to make a successful brush. First, goto Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. This will remove all color from the image:

Next, goto Image > Adjustments > Levels, and adjust the slider to get rid of the colored background. We can still leave all the small details like the small cracks.

Next, press Ctrl+A or goto Select > All, then goto Edit > Define Brush Preset. This will bring up a box for us to name the brush:

Give it a name and PhotoShop will add the brush to the currently selected brush set. So if you choose the brush tool, and then goto the different brushes by clicking on the drop-down menu at the top, you should see the brush we just added at the bottom of the list.

We will have to make sure we save this brush set if we want to keep our custom brush, because if we do not, our custom brush will be lost when we change brush sets.

To save the brush set, we click on the small arrow () at the top-right of the brushes drop-down, and then choose Save Brushes. We will then be prompted for a filename. Once saved, you can load the brush set in the same way as you would any other - from this menu.

Now to use our brush we simply select it from the list and paint on our canvas !

Now as an alternative:

DOWNLOAD this tutorial - it shows another way of using the magic wand tool to select specific areas of a photo texture in order to create a custom textured brush.

Find free textures at locations like these:

http://textures.forrest.cz

http://www.texturewarehouse.com

http://www.noctua-graphics.de/english/freetex_e.htm

Having trouble choosing nice color combinations?

Go here:

Color Scheme Designer

Kuler Color Themes

Aviary Color Editor