Some of the best visual effects that can be applied to an image in Photoshop are made from brushes. Luckily for us, making Custom Brushes doesn’t require you to be an advanced user. This tutorial will show you how to create your own custom brushes in Adobe Photoshop Step by Step.

Step 1

First, you have to find an image you would like to turn into a brush and open it in Photoshop. This can be any image of your choosing. Below you can see that I scanned a piece of paper that I crumpled up and burned holes into. (Word of Advice: Burn paper outside!!)

Step 2

Now that you have your image in photoshop you can crop it anyway you like to get the look you were going for by using the Marquee Selection tool on the toolbar:

Click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool

Select the part of the image you want to keep:

Then go to Image> Crop

 

This is the image after I cropped it:

Step 3

By now I’m assuming you have your soon to be brush the way you want it. So it’s time to actually create the brush. With the image I’m using I want the whole thing to be a brush so I’m going to select all of the image.

Go to Select> All (Ctrl+A)

 

 

Now your entire image is selected. (if you choose not to use the entire image you may also use the different marquee tools or the magic want tool to make your selection.)

After you have the part(s) of the image selected that you want to turn into a brush do the following:

Go to Edit> Define Brush

The following dialog box should now appear:

 

Just replace the file name with whatever you want to name your brush.

Press OK

Step 4

Here’s how you use your newly created brush.

First select your Brush Tool by clicking on it in the toolbar:

At the top of the screen the brush properties should appear. Click the little arrow by the brush selection. (It’s circled in red below)

Now you should see all the brushes available in that catagory. Scroll all the way to bottom of the list and your newly created brush will be at the bottom. In this case I named mine “Burnt Paper”.

That’s all there is to it. Now you can create as many brushes as you want for use on any style of image. A neat effect is turning someone’s picture into a brush.. Experiment, there’s tons of different looks you can achieve by using brushes!!