Photoshop has many great default brushes for painting. However, you might want to know how to create your own brush in Photoshop. Check out this article to learn how to create custom brushes, and where you can download free sets of brushes for painting!

What is Photoshop?

Just a quick introduction for anyone who just starts to learn about digital media. Photoshop is a raster graphic software developed by Adobe. It’s one of the most popular tools used among graphic designer for photo editing and designing graphic images.

Briefly saying, If you want to be successful in graphic design, that’s the tool you should know!

About Photoshop Brushes

Photoshop brushes allow you to create beautiful worlds full of magic. However, did you know that you can also add your own brushes using different types of graphics?
All brushes in Photoshop are in grayscale, where the brush is darker, the greater the opacity, and where the brighter opacity is smaller. This means that you can create very detailed brushes by converting the image to a grayscale.

What is a digital brush

Digital brushes are tools used in graphics software (such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, Gimp and Krita)
The purpose of this tool is to imitate the traditional brushes and other tools – pencil, pen, markers, pastels charcoal, oils (and much more) to allow the graphic designers/digital painters to achieve the visual effect/texture of traditional artworks.

Most of the graphics software already have a set of default brushes but you can import other brushes and create your own.

How to create  a custom brush in Photoshop

Creating your own brush: step 1

We start by creating a new document. Although to create your own brush, the new document can be much smaller,  I choose a document about 1000 pixels per 1000 pixels – in order to maintain the highest quality of my brush – regardless of the brush size needed in the future.

Also, remember to choose white background.

Creating your own brush: step 2

Okay, we’ve got a new document. Now we create our brush. Remember that the key is to use black color! Everything that is black will be visible as our brush.

Creating your own brush: step 3

What we have to do now is to save our picture as a brush. That’s why we choose the options Edit -> Define the brush preset…

We give it a name and press “OK”

Creating your own brush: step 4

Your brush is saved, you can find it in the brushes window option (it will be probably placed as last brush). Choose it, now you can tweak the brush settings: Window -> Brush Presets

I usually change the spacing to 1% and roundness of my brush.

Creating Photoshop Brushes from Photos

You can create your own brushes using just photos – and creating custom brushes in Adobe Photoshop is as easy as finding the right photo.

Below is an instruction step by step on how to create photoshop brushes using photos

1. Open the file in Photoshop and select Image> Adjustments> Hue/Saturation. Decrease the saturation to -100 to get a black and white photo.

2. To get more details from the photo, select Image> Adjustments> Curves, move down the curve of the RGB channel to highlight the details.

3. Use a rectangular selection tool to select the photo, and then choose Edit> Define Brush Preset and name your new brushes

Everything is a brush. Your brush can be of any color, it’s worth trying. If you have experience with channels, you can also use them to create brushes.

How to install a brush in Photoshop

In addition to the ability to use the basic sets of brushes, shapes, designs or other accessories, you can also install your own brushes, or downloaded from the Internet.

You can load new brushes in Photoshop simply go to Window -> Brush Presets-> open more settings in the Brush Presets window -> Load Brushes. Select the ABR file with the brushes.

How to create a square brush in Photoshop?

Photoshop already has a set of square brushes. To use them you just need to load them into your brush palette.

To load them, follow the steps below.

1. Open the brush palette and click the gear icon
2. A list with brushes will appear. Select “Square brushes“
3.  A window will appear. Click “OK” if you want to replace your current brushes, or “Append” if you want to add them to your existing set of brushes.

Remember that once prepared brush will serve us a long time. Have fun creating your own painting brushes!