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Written by Steve Patterson.
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to save your Photoshop brushes as custom brush presets using the new Brushes panel in Photoshop CC 2018! Along with the standard Brush Settings that Photoshop has always saved with presets, Photoshop CC 2018 now lets you save your Tool Settings from the Options Bar, as well as your brush color! And the new Brushes panel, which replaces the old Brush Presets panel from earlier versions of Photoshop, makes it easy to keep your brushes organized by saving them into folders. Let's see how it works! To follow along, you'll need Photoshop CC and you'll want to make sure that your copy is up to date.
Creating A Custom Photoshop Brush
Step 1: Select The Brush Tool
Let's begin by creating a custom Photoshop brush that we can save as a preset. We'll make a simple highlighter brush. Select the Brush Tool from the Toolbar:
Step 2: Choose A Brush Color
Still in the Toolbar, click the Foreground color swatch to choose a brush color:
Clicking the Foreground color swatch.
In the Color Picker, choose orange. We'll save this brush color as part of the preset, but well also learn how to quickly save presets for other colors as well. Click OK to close the Color Picker:
The brush color can now be saved as part of your custom preset.
Step 3: Set The Brush Tool Options In the Options Bar
In Photoshop CC 2018, we can now save the Tool Settings in the Options Bar as part of the brush preset. This includes the Mode (the blend mode of the brush), the Opacity and Flow settings, and the new Smoothing option. For our highlighter brush, change the Mode from Normal to Multiply. This will allow our brush strokes to interact with each other, making each successive pass over the same stroke darker. Then, lower the Opacity of the brush to 60%:
The Brush Tool options can also be saved as part of the preset.
Step 4: Change The Brush Settings
Go up to the Window menu in the Menu Bar and choose Brush Settings:
In the Brush Settings panel (formerly the Brush panel), set the Size of the brush to 100 px, then set the Angle to 77° and the Roundness to 20%. Increase the Hardness to 100%, and finally, lower the Spacing to 10%. A preview of the brush stroke appears along the bottom of the panel:
The Brush Settings.
I'll paint a couple of strokes inside my document so we can see what the highlighter brush looks like. The area where the two brush strokes overlap is darker than the rest thanks to the blend mode of the brush being set to Multiply:
How To Save A Custom Brush Preset
Step 1: Open The Brushes Panel
To save your brush as a custom preset, open the Brushes panel. If the Brush Settings panel is already open, you can switch to the Brushes panel by clicking its tab at the top:
Switching from the Brush Settings to the Brushes panel.
Another way to open the Brushes panel is by going up to the Window menu in the Menu Bar and choosing Brushes:
Step 2: Create A New Preset Group
By default, the Brushes panel includes four groups, one for each of the four new brush sets (General, Dry Media, Wet Media, and Special Effects) that ships with Photoshop CC 2018. Each group is represented by a folder.
When saving your own custom brushes, it's best to place them inside a group to keep them organized. But rather than adding them to one of these default groups, click the Create New Group icon at the bottom of the panel. If you've already created a group for your presets, skip to the next step:
Clicking the 'Create New Group' icon.
Give the new group a name. I'll name mine 'My Group'. Click OK when you're done to close the dialog box:
Step 3: Create A New Brush Preset
Back in the Brushes panel, the new group appears as a folder below the others. To save your custom brush inside the group, make sure the group is selected, and then click the Create New Brush icon:
Creating a new brush preset.
Step 4: Name The Brush Preset
Give your new brush preset a name. I'll name mine 'Highlighter - Orange':
Step 5: Choose Which Settings To Include In The Preset
Along with naming the brush, we can also choose which settings to include with the preset. Photoshop will automatically save your settings from the Brush Settings panel, but you can also save the current size of your brush by selecting Capture Brush Size in Preset. To include the Tool Settings from the Options Bar, select Include Tool Settings. And if you want to save the color of your brush as part of the preset, select Include Color. In my case, I'll select all three options:
Adding the brush size, tool settings and brush color to the preset.
Click OK to close the dialog box, and the new brush preset appears as a thumbnail inside the group. The tool icon in the upper right corner of the thumbnail tells us that the Tool Settings have been saved with the preset, while the color swatch means that the brush color is saved as well. If either of these icons is missing from a thumbnail, it means that the preset does not include the Tool Settings, the brush color, or both:
Look for the icons to know which options are included in the brush preset.
Creating More Brushes From An Existing Preset
Now that we've saved the orange highlighter brush as a preset, what if we want to save variations of it? In other words, what if we want to create another highlighter, but this time with the brush color set to green (or yellow, or blue, or any other color)? We can use our existing preset as a starting point.
Step 1. Select The Existing Brush Preset
Since everything other than the color of the two brushes will be the same, I'll start by selecting my 'Highlighter - Orange' brush in the Brushes panel:
Step 2: Change Your Settings
Then, in the Toolbar, I'll click the Foreground color swatch to choose a new brush color:
Choosing a new color for the new brush.
In the Color Picker, I'll choose green, and then I'll click OK:
Step 3: Save The Brush As A New Custom Preset
Back in the Brushes panel, I'll make sure I have the correct group selected ('My Group'), and then I'll click once again on the Create New Brush icon:
Creating a second brush preset.
I'll name this second brush 'Highlighter - Green', and I'll make sure I have the same options selected as before so that I'm including the brush size, the Tool Settings in the Options Bar, and the new brush color as part of the preset. To save a generic highlighter brush without the color, simply uncheck the 'Include Color' option:
I'll click OK to close the dialog box, and now in the Brushes panel, I have two custom highlighter brushes, one set to orange and the other set to green (as shown in the color swatches), ready to select any time I need them:
Same brush, two different colors.
I'll paint with the new brush so we can see that both highlighter brushes share the same settings, including the blend mode and opacity options in the Options Bar. The only difference is their color:
The second preset uses the same Brush and Tool Settings as the first.
And there we have it! That's how to easily save custom brush presets using the new Brushes panel in Photoshop CC 2018! Along with new brushes, Photoshop CC 2018 also includes the original brush sets from previous versions. See our Legacy Brushes tutorial to learn how to restore them. Visit our Photoshop Basics section for more Photoshop tutorials!
In this tutorial, we'll learn how easy it is to make our own custom Photoshop brushes! Photoshop ships with lots of great brushes for us to use, but it's way more fun and interesting to create our own, especially after Adobe completely revamped the brush engine in Photoshop 7, adding unprecedented painting ability to what was already the world's most powerful image editor.
Since the types of brushes we can create in Photoshop are limited only by our imagination, we'll design a very simple brush here just to see how quick and easy the whole process is. We'll also take a look at a couple of Photoshop's dynamic brush options in the Brushes panel to see how we can change the behavior of the brush after we create it.
Let's get started!
Step 1: Create A New Photoshop Document
Let's begin by creating a brand new Photoshop document which we'll use to design our brush. Again, the purpose of this tutorial is not to learn how to create this exact brush, but rather to see how the process works from beginning to end. I'm going to create a new 200 x 200 pixel document by going up to the File menu in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen and choosing New. Or, for a faster way to create a new document, press Ctrl+N (Win) / Command+N (Mac) on your keyboard:
This opens the New Document dialog box. Enter 200 for both the Width and Height options and make sure the measurement type is set to pixels. Also, make sure the Background Contents option is set to White since we need white to be the background color for the brush:
Create a new 200 x 200 pixel document with a white background.
Click OK when you're done to accept the settings and exit out of the dialog box. A new 200 x 200 pixel document, filled with white, will appear on your screen.
Choosing An Initial Size For Your Brush Photoshop allows us to create brushes as large as 2500 x 2500 pixels, but as they say, just because you can doesn't mean you should. At that size, you'd be painting with the virtual equivalent of a floor mop. Also, painting with very large brushes requires a lot more memory and horse power from your computer which can slow your system down considerably. For typical work, you'll want to create brushes much smaller.
The size at which you initially create the brush will become its default size, and it's important to note that brushes we create ourselves are pixel-based brushes, which means they're essentially images and behave exactly the same way as regular images when it comes to resizing them. Brushes will usually remain crisp and sharp when we make them smaller, but if you increase their size much beyond the default, they'll become soft and dull looking. The general idea, then, is to create your new brush just large enough to suit your needs, which may involve a little trial and error. The 200 x 200 pixel size I'm using here usually works well.
Step 2: Select The Brush Tool
Let's create our new brush using one of Photoshop's built-in brushes. First, select the Brush Tool from the Tools palette, or press the letter B on your keyboard to quickly select it with the shortcut:
Step 3: Select A Small Round Brush
With the Brush Tool selected, right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) anywhere inside the document window to display the Brush Preset picker, which is a miniature version of the full-blown Brushes panel that we'll look at a bit later (and we'll examine in much more detail in another tutorial). The Brush Preset picker allows us to choose from a list of preset brushes (which explains its name). To select a brush, simply click on its thumbnail. I'm going to click on the Hard Round 5 Pixels brush to select it. If you have Tool Tips enabled in Photoshop's Preferences, the name of each brush will appear as you hover over the thumbnails. Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) once you've chosen your brush to close out of the palette:
Select a small round brush from the Preset picker, then press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to close out of it.
Step 4: Make Sure The Foreground Color Is Set To Black
Back when we created our new document in Step 1, we made sure to set the background color of our document to white. The reason is that all brushes in Photoshop are Grayscale, meaning that a brush can contain only black, white, or shades of gray in between. Areas filled with white become transparent, so you won't see them when you're painting with the brush. Areas filled with black will be 100% visible, and if your brush includes various shades of gray, those areas will be partially visible depending on how close they are to black or white, with darker shades of gray being more visible than lighter shades.
If we were to turn our new document into a brush as it is right now, the entire brush would be transparent since it contains nothing but white. Painting with an invisible brush may make an interesting statement artistically, but for more practical purposes (like this tutorial), you'll most likely want a brush you can actually see, which means we'll need to add some areas of black to the document. The black areas will become the visible shape of the brush (known as the brush tip).
Photoshop paints using the current Foreground color, and as luck would have it, the default for the Foreground color is black, which means there's a very good chance yours is already set to black. You can see the current Foreground and Background colors by looking at their color swatches near the bottom of the Tools palette (the Foreground color is the swatch in the top left). If your Foreground color is set to something other than black, press the letter D on your keyboard to quickly reset both the Foreground and Background colors to their defaults:
The Foreground color is the color the brush will paint with.
Step 5: Paint A Series Of Horizontal Brush Strokes Inside The Document Window
With the small round brush selected and black as your Foreground color, click inside the document window and paint a series of short horizontal brush strokes. For added variety, alter the thickness of the strokes by changing the size of the brush using the handy keyboard shortcuts. Press the left bracket key ( [ ) to make the brush smaller or the right bracket key ( ] ) to make it larger. You'll find the bracket keys to the right of the letter P on most keyboards. When you're done, you should have a column of brush strokes that looks something like this:
Step 6: Create A New Brush From The Document
To create a new Photoshop brush from the document, simply go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Define Brush Preset from the list of options (depending on which version of Photoshop you're using, the option may be called simply Define Brush):
Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset.
Photoshop will pop open a dialog box asking you to give your new brush a name. I'm going to call mine 'My New Brush'. You'll probably want to choose a name that's a little more descriptive:
Click OK when you're done to close out of the dialog box, and that's all there is to it! We've successfully created a brand new custom brush in Photoshop that's ready and waiting to help us bring our creative vision to life. You can safely close out of the brush's document at this point.
To select the new brush any time you need it, first make sure you have the Brush Tool selected, then right-click (Win) / Control-click (Mac) anywhere inside your document to open the Brush Preset picker. Scroll down the list of available brushes until you see your brush thumbnail (newly created brushes will appear at the bottom of the list), then click on the thumbnail to select the brush. Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) once you've selected it to close out of the Brush Preset picker:
Select your new brush from the Brush Preset picker.
With the new brush selected, simply click and drag inside your document to paint a brush stroke:
It's a good start, but I think it's safe to say that at this stage, my new brush will be of limited use. Fortunately, now that we've created a brush tip, we can change and control how the brush behaves as we paint with it using Photoshop's Brush Dynamics, found in the main Brushes panel, which we'll take a quick look at next!
Step 7: Open The Brushes Panel
We've seen how to select a basic, ready-made brush using the Brush Preset picker, but if want more control over how our brush behaves, we need Photoshop's main Brushes panel, which gives us full access to some truly amazing options. We'll save our detailed look at the Brushes panel and all of its controls for another tutorial, but let's take a quick look at a few ways we can use it to alter the appearance of our brush strokes.
To open the Brushes panel, either go up to the Window menu at the top of the screen and choose Brushes from the list, or press the F5 key on your keyboard (press it again to close the panel), or click on the Brushes panel toggle icon in the Options Bar (click it again to close the panel):
The toggle icon in the Options Bar opens and closes the Brushes panel.
This opens the main Brushes panel, the big brother of the Brush Preset picker we saw earlier. By default when you first open the Brushes panel, the Brush Presets option is selected in the top left corner of the panel, which displays the same small brush icons along the right that we saw in the Brush Preset picker. To select a brush, simply click on its icon. Scroll down the list to your newly created brush and click on its icon to select it if it's not selected already. The very bottom of the Brushes panel displays a preview of what the brush stroke currently looks like. Since I haven't made any changes yet, the preview looks exactly the same as the brush stroke I painted a moment ago:
The main Brushes panel in Photoshop set to the Brush Presets option.
Step 8: Adjust The Brush Tip Spacing
Click on the words Brush Tip Shape directly below the Brush Presets option in the top left corner of the Brushes panel:
In the real world, if you were to paint with an actual brush, the brush would lay down a continuous coat of paint on the paper, but that's not how Photoshop works. Instead, Photoshop 'stamps' the document with your brush tip as you drag your mouse. If the stamps appear close enough together, it creates the illusion of a seamless brush stroke, but if the stamps are spaced too far apart from each other, the individual stamps become obvious and the brush stroke appears ridged. Depending on the effect you're going for (like creating a dotted line, for example), you may want a lot of spacing between the stamps, but in most cases, a seamless brush stroke is more desirable.
With the Brush Tip Shape option selected in the Brushes panel, we can control the spacing between the stamps with the appropriately-named Spacing option at the very bottom of the panel. Spacing is controlled as a percentage of the width of your brush tip, and by default, it's set to 25%, which means that if the width of your brush tip is 100 pixels, Photoshop will lay down a new stamp every 25 pixels as you drag your mouse:
The Spacing option controls how frequently Photoshop 'stamps' the brush tip as you paint.
For a smooth brush stroke, this default setting is usually too high. I'm going to lower mine down to around 13%. To lower the Spacing amount, either drag the slider towards the left or enter a specific value directly into the input box. You'll see the preview of the brush stroke updating to reflect the changes to the spacing:
Lower the Spacing amount for a smoother looking brush stroke.
Now, if I paint a stroke with my brush, it appears smoother because the individual stamps are closer together:
With the brush tip 'stamps' being closer together, the stroke appears smoother.
Step 9: Select The Shape Dynamics Option
Click directly on the words Shape Dynamics below the Brush Tip Shape option we selected a moment ago, which gives us options for dynamically controlling the size, angle and roundness of the brush tip as we paint. Make sure you click on the words themselves. Clicking inside the checkbox to the left of words will turn the options on but won't give us access to their controls:
Step 10: Set The Angle Control To 'Direction'
The main problem with the look of my brush stroke is that no matter which direction I paint in, those horizontal lines that make up my brush tip remain, well, horizontal. Let's fix that so the brush tip will follow the direction of my mouse cursor. With the Shape Dynamics option selected, change the Control option for the brush tip Angle to Direction. Again, you'll see the brush stroke preview at the bottom of the panel update to reflect the change:
Change the Control option for the Angle to 'Direction'.
I'll paint another stroke with my brush, and this time, things look much more natural. The brush tip is following the direction I'm painting in:
Step 11: Set The Size Control To 'Pen Pressure' (Requires Pen Tablet)
If you're using a pressure-sensitive pen tablet like I am, you can tell Photoshop that you want to control the size of the brush with your pen. With the Shape Dynamics options still selected, change the Control option for the brush tip Size to Pen Pressure:
Change the Control option for the Size of the brush to 'Pen Pressure' (if you have a pen tablet, that is).
With the Pen Pressure option selected, I can easily control the size of the brush stroke on the fly, giving my custom brush an even more natural look:
The size of the brush can now be controlled dynamically with pen pressure.
Where to go next...
Obviously, this is just a taste of the amount of control the Brushes panel gives us over the behavior of our brush, but in just a few short steps, we've managed to design and create a brand new custom Photoshop brush from scratch, and we've gotten a glimpse of how powerful the various dynamic brush controls in the Brushes panel really are. We'll cover the Brushes panel in much more detail in another tutorial.
And there we have it! Visit our Photoshop Basics section for more tutorials on the basics of Photoshop!
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