What we are looking for now is a high degree of contrast. With that in mind we will start by using an adjustment layer with the black and white adjustment layer. This also follows that any percentages of black will be percentages of the colour that you selected. If it is totally white then it will not paint anything at all. If a part of a brush is totally black then it will paint with 100% of the colour you have selected. Brushes in photoshop are based on gray scale. The first thing I do is to duplicate the layer and save it out as a native photoshop file so that I no matter what I do I have a copy of the original. Which can be found in the download at the beginning of the tutorial. Today we will start with a picture of a tree outside my house. For objects that are not shiny (like stucco which is useful in developing grunge brushes) using a flash to bring out more contrast can yield some amazing results. When taking thebpictures you want to make sure that you are getting as much detail as possible, so don’t be afraid to play with macro modes or different angles to get more contrast. Also see the bottom for the licensing.įor things that naturally exist I like to start with some source pictures so for wood I obviously took pictures of wooden objects around my house. If you want to add these brushes to an existing set see the end for an explanation of how to do that. It’s a big file with print quality brushes and fairly high rez photos.

You can download the source picture and all of the brushes I created from here. Today we will look at building some grunge brushes in Photoshop CS3. I had Photoshop crash on my part way through writing this and lost a bunch of work. The tree image I picked to work on yeilded better grunge brushes though so that is what we will look at today but stay tuned for some free wood grain brushes later this week.Īlso remember to save your work regularly. I started this tutorial with the intent of making some woodgrain brushes.

Square brush photoshop free download