Custom Photoshop Brush
by Simon E. Rozner

Didn't find the right brush for your project? Don't know how to make your own? Or the one you made just looks too boring? This little tutorial will show you what you can do to beef up your brushes.

Make your own brush tip shapes:

Create a new file with the following props: w=500px, h=500px, resolution=72px/inch, color mode=grayscale 8bit

This will create a nice large canvas. The idea is to have a larger pixel resolution for your initial brush until you convert your drawing into a brush tip. Now just go ahead and paint in your brush tip. Alternatively you can grab a grayscale image and paste it in there, scale and rotate as you wish.

I went ahead and paint my brush tip. Make sure you leave some 0% black space (ie. white). The white space will be your alpha channel. Meaning that where you have white the brush will never put down tones.

Now I crop my image to fit the brush in it perfectly. I try to keep the image dimensions intact; it makes the rendering engine of Photoshop faster when you use the brush. I afterwards then resize the image (Image->Image Size) and rescale it to a size of 256x256. Powers of 2^n will also make your brush run a tad faster, especially if it's a complicated one.

Now we turn the image into a brush. To do so navigate into Edit->Define Brush Preset. A popup will appear and now you give your brush a name and click OK.

Your brush now has been created. Select your brush tool and in your brush selector you can find your new brush at the bottom of the list. Now paint with it in a new document.

Customize your tip:

Now you might not like how your brush behaves just yet. Open your brush editor (Window->Brushes).

You can edit all the settings for your new brush in here. If you work with a tablet you might want to use under "Shape Dynamics" the function "Size Jitter" and set the control to pen pressure, same with under "Other Dynamics" the "Opacity Jitter".

Under the tab "Brush Tip Shape" you can adjust the basic properties of your brush. One setting you definitely want to look at is "Spacing". It defines how many "sprites" of your brush image is painted on the canvas per brush stroke. The higher the setting is the rougher your brush will be. I like to combine this setting with adjustments in the "Scattering" "Scatter" section to create some unique looking brushes. You can even take it as far as combining your brush with other brushes in the "Dual Brush" tab.

You might want to save your initial brush preset image so you can make more brushes from it. Photoshop will save your created presets.

And the best way to create brushes is just be creative and experiment.