How to Create Your Own Brushes in Photoshop CS5

This is my most recent tutorial. Thankfully, a few minutes, shorter than I usually record them in.

I cover step-by step instructions on creating brushes in Photoshop CS5. Hope you find it informative.  And if you are not already a subscriber on my Youtube channel, I encourage you to do so.  (Of course, that’s if you find the information I share helpful.)

Photoshop CS5: Secrets and Photoshop Tool Tips (Part 2)

And not to be outdone, here is the second part of my latest Photoshop tutorial!

This video tutorial is the second part of  a summary and overview of  Adobe Photoshop CS5 photo editing tools for beginning and intermediate Photoshop users. The idea was to provide some additional tips and tricks that you don’t often get in typical Photoshop tutorials.  This tutorial has been divided into two approximately 15 minute sessions.

TRANSCRIPT:

00:00:00–00:02:55

..of things that you can do.  Mobile Devices, Printing, TV, Movies that kind of thing.  You’ll have to know how to use these dimensions.  Anyway here we have the different sizes, we have NTSC. These…let’s see, one, two, three, four, five and six examples or options. I stumble here because there are actually so many choices that there are with film and video, but Photoshop starts you off with several options so that you won’t have to always type what in as far as the film size or the video size. Sometimes you may not be using the full screen, just a little portion of the screen for your videos, your graphics, your animation and your videos in the whole picture.

So, anyway, there are six of them.  This is for NTSC.  NTSC is the American code for television, that’s the format that they use.  Now you’ll see PAL, that’s the format for European countries and they have a slightly different format than the United States.  In fact, they are not interchangeable.  You can’t play a PAL movie on American TV and you can’t play the opposite. If they are PAL and you want to play it on American TV, you won’t be able to.  It has to be converted or initially designed for either or.  Then you have the other formats, you have digital pro and then you have the HD and you have the other formats.

00:02:56–00:04:24

So, all in all, you got a pretty good start here and it’s not that these represent everything that there is out there, but it does give you a start.  And I think there was one more…Okay, I think we’ll go back to Custom.  If you are making a custom size, which most often people are because somebody [client] will say, “Hey, I need a four-color printed process, for example… an ad.  I need it 5″ x 7″ and it’s going to be printed in a full color magazine, it has to be high-gloss, (so on and so forth). Okay, so what do you do?  Change this to inches, since your client gave you the dimensions.  So what did I say?…Oh, yes, 7″ by 5″ , 7″ width and 5” height.  Okay, so it’s going to be that tall.

Okay, now, how much resolution do you need for print? Okay, so I would say you need a lot.  In fact, I would say 300 dpi (that’s dots per inch) for anything that is printed.  We’ll get into why later.

00:04:25–00:05:58

So, we will put the 300 in there and then we’ll change this to CMYK and why?  Because this is for video and this for print.  And for the background, that is totally up to you, you can have a white background, a particular color background or a transparent background.  I usually like to work with white because it’s what the paper is made out of, for example.  Usually, printers start out with white paper and use the colors it turns out to be. Okay, white.  So then will name it, let’s say “Timely Ad”  I say that facetiously because they always expect ads to be timely.  Okay, so let’s check to see if we have this thing right.  We have the image size, it’s  7″ by 5″, we have 300 and it’s okay.

00:05:59–00:08:08

Let’s say the client wants it reduced.  So let’s go back to our pre-chosen image and you can reduce it from here. You can reduce it by percent.  It start out at 100, obviously, anything below that is going to make it smaller, anything above that is going to make it larger.  One interesting thing about enlarging a low resolution (72 dpi), this image is pretty low at 72 dpi.  A low resolution can not be made larger or add more resolution.

Now, resolution means more dots per inch and when it has more, it clearer and just is a better looking image.  It’s got more information in there.  You can’t make something that starts out small into something that is sharp and clean and that has a lot of dots per inch.  It’s just not possible.  There are ways to trick the program but it is not always used.  It’s not really a good recommendation. You have to start off with a high resolution image.  This “Rev It Up Studios” image was designed in a high resolution, then I reduced it down to this size so that I could send it to the client to look at.  There is a higher resolution in the file that is going to be used for printing. So this image is basically for transmitting over email and then sending it the client for viewing and approval.

00:08:09–00:11:29

So, that’s what we have there. Now we are going to try to change the size.  We are going to actually go here and reduce it by 50%.  And if you’ll notice, that the bottom number changed too.  That’s because I have this box checked off, “Constrain Proportions”.  So, when I did that, that caused it to constrain the size so that both sides would be equal when it is reduced.  It will come down 50 percent in both the hieght and the width.  So, I am going to cancel that and go back to our image again and reduce it down without the options I had chosen. I’ll take this off and then reduce this down by 50 percent.  There it is, it didn’t automatically constrain the proportions. One side 100 percent and the other had 50 percent and as you can see distortion took place.

Okay, so you go up to “Edit” and “Undo” and you’re back to where you started from.  Okay, I’m going to stop for now and we’ll come back real quick.  Hopefully next week, and we’ll talk some more about some very interesting things.  We are going to talk about the tools on the left hand side, we are going to talk a lot about what’s behind all these File Menu drop-down menus.  You know, what’s in there?  What can you do with them?  These are things that are very important, you know you will have several options up here.

Depending on whatever it is you are using in Photoshop, whether it is the old version or the new version, you will see this or you won’t see it at all.  And then, what can you use on the right hand side to have it always available.  That’s these things here so that you could always go to it.  You know that they are useful things that you use all the time.  You know you are going to decide for yourself. You are not necessarily going to do what I do.  You are going to decide for yourself what’s important to have on the right-hand side as helpful quick reference and quick access to tools.

The ones on the left, they can be removed but you don’t want to do that because you are going to be always using them and need access to them.  I think they were created this small and this obscure so that they are out of the way but Photoshop knows you are going to be using it so that they are there.  So, anyway, I have done enough talking for today.  I’m going to stop for now.  We’ll come back and deal with tools and menus.  Thank you for joining and see you next time. Bye.

Related Post:

Photoshop CS5: Secrets and Photoshop Tool Tips (Part 1)