How to Make and Save Custom Brushes in Photoshop

ByJordan Brown

As a digital artist or designer, you‘re likely no stranger to Adobe Photoshop. With over 90% of creative professionals using Photoshop, it‘s the industry-standard software for photo editing, digital painting, and graphic design. But are you utilizing its full potential by creating your own custom brushes?

Crafting unique brushes is one of the most powerful ways to personalize your artwork, speed up your workflow, and achieve looks that would be impossible with Photoshop‘s default brush set. In fact, a survey of digital artists found that 76% use custom brushes in their work, with 23% using them in every single piece.

In this ultimate guide, I‘ll walk you through multiple methods for designing your own brushes, break down the most important Brush Settings to know, and share pro tips on organizing and sharing your creations. By the end, you‘ll have the knowledge to make exactly the brush strokes you envision. Let‘s get started!

Why Use Custom Brushes?

Custom brushes are one of the best kept secrets of top digital creatives. While Photoshop comes with dozens of default brushes, they only scratch the surface of what‘s possible. Here are a few key benefits of making your own:

  • Efficiency: Custom brushes save you time by letting you instantly apply your favorite settings, textures, and shapes with a single stroke. No more fiddling with settings for each new project!
  • Style: Unique brushes help you develop a signature artistic look. Many famous digital painters are known for their distinct brush work.
  • Flexibility: From concept sketches to final polish, custom brushes are useful at every stage of the creative process. They can add backgrounds, textures, hair, fur, leaves, clouds, and so much more.
  • Fun: Experimenting with brush settings is a playful way to discover happy accidents and expand your creative repertoire. You never know what cool effects you might stumble upon!

Examples of different artistic styles created with custom Photoshop brushes

Brush Settings 101

To make the most of Photoshop‘s brush engine, you need to understand what each setting does. Here‘s a quick primer on the most important options, which you can access by clicking the folder icon in the Brush Options bar or hitting F5:
The Photoshop Brush Settings panel with labels

  • Brush Tip Shape: Choose a default brush tip and adjust its diameter, roundness, angle, spacing, and hardness. Harder brushes create crisp lines, while soft brushes are partially transparent.
  • Shape Dynamics: Add size, angle, and roundness variation (jitter) to emulate real-world brushes and pens. Great for organic strokes!
  • Scattering: Scatter brush tips along a stroke to create sprays of dots, leaves, strands, stars, and more. Adjust count, jitter, and count to fine-tune.
  • Texture: Overlay textures like paper grain, concrete, splatter, etc. on your brush tip. Change the scale, intensity, contrast, and pattern for different effects.
  • Dual Brush: Mix two brush tips together. Useful for adding highlight/shadow texture to your main brush shape in one stroke.
  • Color Dynamics: Automatically vary hue, saturation, and brightness between strokes based on your foreground/background colors. Can mimic natural media like watercolor, oil pastel, and more.
  • Transfer: Adjust opacity and flow settings to build up pigment over multiple strokes, just like using a real brush or marker. Pair with a drawing tablet for realistic pressure sensitivity.
  • Brush Pose: Tilt your brush tip with pen angle data from a drawing tablet.

Play around with these settings to dial in your own brush effects! When in doubt, less is usually more – subtle tweaks go a long way.

Making a Brush from Scratch

Now that you know your way around the Brush Settings panel, let‘s craft a custom brush step-by-step:

  1. With the Brush tool active, open the Brush Settings (F5).
  2. Pick a round brush tip to start. Under Brush Tip Shape, reduce the diameter to 35px, set hardness to 60%, and spacing to 25%. This creates a gritty pencil-like tip.
  3. Under Shape Dynamics, set Size Jitter and Angle Jitter to 20% for subtle stroke variation. Leave Control on Pen Pressure if using a tablet.
  4. Add a paper texture via the Texture panel. Scale it down to 25%, set depth to 30%, and change the blend mode to Multiply.
  5. Adjust the Transfer settings for a marker effect. Set Flow Jitter to 80% and Opacity Jitter to 25%.
  6. Click the Create New Brush icon at the bottom of the panel and name it "GrungePencil". Hit OK to save your preset.

See how just a few tweaks yield a completely customized pencil stroke you can use again and again? Try more setting combos to whip up your own painterly, chalk, ink, smudge, neon, and splatter brush effects.
Screenshots walking through the custom brush creation process

Crafting Stamp Brushes from Images

A second way to make brushes is by capturing your own photos, sketches, graphics, and more as stamps. With this technique, the options are truly endless!

  1. Open your image in Photoshop. Flatten the layers and desaturate it to grayscale.
  2. Increase the contrast so you have a clear black silhouette on a white background using Levels (Command/Control + L).
  3. Use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select the area you want to capture (up to 2500px square). Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset to save it.
  4. Your new brush will appear at the bottom of the Brush Preset Picker. Use the Brush Settings to customize it further!

Turning a tree sketch into a custom brush
Some fun ideas for image-based brushes include:

  • Scanned textures like lace, crumpled paper, or tree bark
  • Silhouettes and shapes like leaves, clouds, stars, or animal paw prints
  • Your own drawings, doodles, mandala designs, or handwritten phrases
  • A high-contrast photo of your face, hands, or body pose
  • Your signature or logo to sign digital artworks

If you can capture it in pixels, you can make a brush out of it. How cool is that?

Saving & Sharing Brushes

Don‘t let your hard work go to waste – be sure to save your custom brushes for later use! Photoshop makes it easy:

  1. With your desired brush settings active, click the Create New Brush icon at the bottom of the Preset Manager.
  2. Give your brush a descriptive name like "Speckled Watercolor Wash" or "Jen‘s Signature."
  3. Save related brushes as a set by clicking the folder icon and choosing "New Brush Group."

Creating and naming a new Photoshop brush preset
To export your brushes as an .ABR file to share with others or use on a different computer:

  1. Open the flyout menu on the Brush Preset Picker and choose "Export Selected Brushes."
  2. Give your file a clear name and save it somewhere easy to find, like a dedicated "Brushes" folder.
  3. Share the wealth by uploading your brush sets to creative communities like DeviantArt, Behance, or Gumroad.

Exporting Photoshop brushes as an .abr file
Exporting is also a great way to back up your custom brushes in case something happens to your Photoshop install. Trust me, you don‘t want to lose these digital gems you‘ve spent so much time on!

Advanced Brush Making Techniques

Once you‘ve got the basics down, take your brush skills to new heights with these advanced tips:

  • Use the Brush Creator tool (accessible under the gear icon in the Brush Preset Picker) to generate unique tips from your own strokes, then customize them in the familiar Brush Settings panel.
  • Sample colors directly from your artwork on the fly by holding Alt/Option and clicking with the Brush tool.
  • Explore Photoshop brush plugins like Brush Pilot, MegaPack, or Kyle‘s Brushes to expand your collection and find niche brush types.
  • Combine custom brushes with the Smudge and Mixer Brush tools for even more realistic painting effects.
  • Organize your custom brushes into categories like "Inking," "Foliage," "Textures," etc. using Brush Groups.
  • Streamline your brush workflow with tablet shortcuts, like setting your pen buttons to cycle through your favorite brush presets.

Screenshots of popular Photoshop brush plugins
Remember, there are no strict rules when it comes to making brushes. Experimentation is the name of the game! The more you play around and develop your own techniques, the more unique your work will become.

Brush On!

Photoshop‘s brush engine is a deep, powerful system just waiting to be explored. I hope this guide has demystified the process of creating your own custom brushes and inspired you to dive in!

Whether you‘re whipping up painterly portraits, inking stylized comics, or adding textures to product mock-ups, custom brushes will open up fresh possibilities and help you work faster. Plus, making your own brushes is honestly really fun – it‘s a great way to get your creative juices flowing before starting a new project.

So carve out an afternoon, queue up your favorite jams or a podcast, and go on a brush making spree. Don‘t put pressure on yourself to make perfect brushes right away – enjoy the journey and let yourself create some wild wacky ones along the way. You can always refine them and edit out the duds later.

If you‘re proud of your creations, share them with the world! There are tons of supportive online communities where digital artists trade free brush sets and offer helpful critique. You never know who you might inspire with your unique tools.

Ready to get brushing? You‘ve got this! Go make some Photoshop magic and transform your creative process one custom brush at a time. Feel free to drop any brush making questions in the comments. Now if you‘ll excuse me, I‘ve got some stipple brushes to perfect!

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