Top Photoshop Brush Downloads

Finding good Photoshop brush downloads can sometimes be more taxing than one might think. It is difficult to find artists with the style and feel that you personally are going for in your photoshop work. We all need different types of brushes to make our Photoshopped images as refined and personal as we like. To help you on your path to finding or maybe even just sparking an idea in your mind to create a new Photoshop brush, below is a collection of some of the most popular Photoshop brush downloads out there.

How Are Photoshop Brushes Made?

All of the above images show pictures of Photoshop brushes that were designed by a third party person. These brushes can each be duplicated by following the process as outlined below. You can design your own style of Photoshop brush as well using the same method. Designing a photoshop brush is easy and fun. Then you can put it on the web for others to download. Here’s how you make them:

1. Set up your file
2. Adjust your image
3. Define your brush

That’s it!! Just three easy steps to creating your very own Photoshop brush to be downloaded! Okay Okay. So there IS a little bit more to it than that. Let’s dive a little deeper.

You most likely know that you can make a Photoshop brush out of just about anything, so setting up your file correctly is very important. Whether you are using a scanned image, a photograph, or anything else, you need to set up your Photoshop file in a way that will give you the best results for your Photoshop brush.

It may be temping to have a file open and see something that you want to make a brush out of and do it on-the-fly within that file, but in order to make a brush knowing it is sized right, it’s always a good idea to make a separate file to make your brush.

Setting Up The File:

You may not need a high resolution brush, but what if you need the same brush to be larger 6 months down the road? It’s always a good idea to make your brush as large as possible in order to use it for other projects later. If you are in CS2 or 3, You can make your file 2500 X 2500px. If you are running a previous version of Photoshop, you will most likely be limited to 999px, if not less.

You can utilize a color image to define a brush, however you may find it more simple to convert your document to Grayscale so that you get a better idea of what to anticipate. When determining a brush preset, Photoshop will naturally convert the selection to grayscale to make the brush. White pixels automatically convert to transparent (this means you don’t have to erase the white/background pixels!), Black pixels are opaque, and everything in between will be transparent black/gray.

Adjust The Image

You may find that your image needs some tweaking before it is ready. Some adjustments you can make are:

• levels
• curves
• shadows/hightlights
• exposure
• brightness/contrast

Define The Brush

Once you’ve obtained the proper degree of contrast and black/white in your image, you are now ready to make a brush. Make positive you have the correct layer selected and “select all.” Now go to Edit > define Brush Preset. After you give your Photoshop brush a name you are finished! The Photoshop brush will now show up in your palette and you can use it up! Boo ya!