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Well ladies hang in here with me as the discussion and the ability to learn how to make grunge brushes in PSP is intense, confusing and so easy and rewarding once you understand it. The confusion comes from the fact that there is no one definite way to do this, replacing one step with another gives a totally different look and feel. A good thing to know right up front is this; When you are making a brush, you are taking your original image and turning it in to a basic black and white image with shades of gray. This means that any part of your image that is black will retain the ability to show the color you selected, everything that is shades of gray will be a some what transparent shade of your color and white will be totally transparent and show no color on your image when you apply the brush.
A good place to start is to find a stock image photograph or a scanned image of anything that is scratched, marked or messy (but please do not put anything wet-messy into your scanner)! Images that have a lot of definite lines, cracks, holes and character and color differences are nice. Remember we are going to need to be working with at least a 300 to 400ppi image so that if we want a larger zoomed section of the image to get interesting texture for our brush tip, we have the option to increase the size without getting a pixilated brush.
Note: I am assuming that if you want to learn how to make custom grunge brushes in PSP you are already familiar that they can only be 500x500pixels. So for the sake of typing whenever I mention making a selection that you know enough to keep it within that size. ļ We are going to get around this limitation one way or another and the Deform/Pick Tool is what we need! For that too work, we need to keep our image at least 300ppi!!
I selected this photo from imageafter.com: ImageAfter has three different sizes of images, once you find the image you want click on that image and it will take you to the next size image. Right click and choose ¡§Save Picture As¡¨ this will give you an image that is 300ppi.
(DO NOT COPY & PASTE as this will give you only a 72ppi image to work with)
Open this image in your PSP, then using Windows Menu>Duplicate (shift+D) to make a duplicate image to work from and close your original, Promote Background Layer making it a raster layer.
Adjust>Sharpness>Sharpen More, to get your image to pop, also try the other items in the menu, High Pass Sharpen or Unsharp Mask. This will vary depending on the image you choose and how you want it to look.
We are going to use our Adjust Menu>Hue Saturation/Adjust Hue & Saturation (Shift+H). Make sure that you click the Colorize box and that the other three boxes are set to ¡§0¡¨ click OK.
Now there are two ways this can be done¡Kthere is no written rule for exactly how to do this, it is totally up to you!
1) This way will give you shades of gray with softer edges.
Adjust Menu>Brightness and Contrast >Brightness/Contrast to bring up the brightness of the grays and lower the contrast of the blacks. I choose the setting Brightness 145 and Contrast of ¡V5 Click OK.
2) This will really POP your black and white areas.
Adjust Menu>Brightness and Contrast>Threshold, my setting is set at 232 for this image, click OK.
Look at your image and decide which area of it looks the most interesting for a brush. 1) Using your crop tool set your crop area to 500x500, uncheck both the Specify print size and Maintain aspect ratio and apply.
Wow that is not a very big piece of this image is it?
 
Now you can use this and make a brush tip from it or here is the way I found to get around the limited 500x500 brush tip. Instead of cropping this image, create a new image 500x500 300ppi, and drag your full size image onto this new canvas. Hang in here with me¡Know maximize that new image so you can see the gray area (like in my screen capture below)
Use your Deform/Pick Tool to get your handles, you will see that they hang way off the edges of your 500x500 layer, move these handles so that the area of the image you want to save is showing. I sized mine so that the white on the left and the black on the right is removed from my canvas. Now you can see how we get more of the original image to fit onto a smaller canvas!! Notice my rulers in the image it went from almost 7 inches to about 2 inches.
But now we have to cut off those edges or the next step will not work. Again select your crop tool with setting 500x500, like before and crop this to get rid of the extra pixels hanging off the edges.
To soften your edges;
1) Selections Menu>Select All (Ctrl++A)
2) Selections Menu>Modify>Inside/Outside Feather Selection and set to Inside 30.
3) Selections Menu>Invert (Ctrl+shift+I)
4) Edit>Cut (Ctrl+X)
These steps will also vary depending on how you want your brush to look, however if you leave a hard edge it will be hard to blend in later. Here is my image now after these steps.
(This particular image will make about 4 good edge grunge brushes, which usually have a solid edge (black) and the other edge will be shades of gray fading to white.)
Notice now how the edges are feathered to transparent inside my rows of double marching ants
Here are a few samples of the brushes I made from this image using the selection tool with feather set to about 20-30, then copies and pasted as new images, I did this four times by selecting 4 different areas of the original image.
I zoomed in on one because I didn¡¦t like the extra texture on the right so I am going to take another brush tip, set to white, turn the hardness, opacity down and paint over this area as I know this will show up as a noticeable edge over there.
 
The more brushes you make or collect the easier it is to modify the new brushes you are going to make. Either by adding additional brush strokes or by erasing with another brush tip, parts of the new brush. Remember this is not a perfect science¡Kjust play until it feels right. If it doesn¡¦t feel right you have to play some more!!
Now we are going to save these as our brush tips but I have to back up a little as I learned this from experience! Go to your My Documents/My PSP Files/Brushes and create a New Folder in there with your name on it.
Go back into PSP, File Menu>Preferences>File Locations, on the left you will see a list of file types that PSP uses, find the Brushes and on the left make sure that you have your My Documents/My PSP Files/Brushes in the main window, if it is not you have to add the path to that folder. Now on the bottom it has Save to: click the little drop down menu arrow on the right and scroll until you see C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\My PSP Files\Brushes\yourname click that one. Now, any new brush that you make will be saved to that folder and not get mixed up with all the other ones. Remember to change this back later if you import brushes from other sites, as this will save those to your folder also!
Click on the image you want to make as your new brush so that it is active, go to your Selections Menu>Select All, now you have selected your whole image, click on your brush tool and then your brush preview window (#1) then create brush tip from selection (#2) click the Save Variance box (#3) Name your brush, add your name and any other information you would like to fill in. (#4) is another way to change your File Locations/ File Preferences for saving your brushes to a certain folder.
I always name everything I make with my initials tr_brushname this will it a lot easier to find your stuff back later!
Now create a new image (background white for now until you see how this works) whatever size you scrap with, choose your brush tool and again click on your preview window. At the top there is a Category drop down menu, use that and click the folder name that you created earlier. Inside there you should see your new custom brush. Double click it to select, turn your brush size to 500, step 1, Opacity 100 and blend mode Normal and then choose your color. Create a new layer in your layers palette on this layer is where you will click one time to make one impression in the middle like this. To make your brush darker, click twice without moving your mouse.
It is very important to place your brush marks on their own layer or you will NOT be able to deform them individually!!
Here I stamped all the brushes I made, the square on the left is the original 500x500 brush the colored ones are the four that I made from it. You can see both the little brush marks and how I was able to resize/deform them larger to fit my 10x10 image. I also added other brush strokes on some of them to show you quickly how you can grunge them up even further.
There are so many different styles of brushes, large brush work is called overlays, in PSP you will need to apply your brushes onto a your 12x12 layout, start with a background layer create a (New Layer) for every brush stamp, (unless you know that you want to make multiple strokes and then deform them all at one time). Since in PSP we are limited to the 500 brush size, we need to create larger size images and save them as .png file types to retain the transparency as would happen if we could create a brush to perform at any pixel size. I have also noticed in PS that if the brushes created for that program are not made with a high ppi resolution, when they increase the size to 2500x2500 that brush stroke is pixilated also.
This is my background paper layer that I started with¡K
When you have it how you like it. Click the (eye icon) to turn the paper layer off. Save Copy as a .png will merge all your layers but will not include your paper layer because it was turned off in the layer palette.
This is what the brushwork looks like without the background layer visible. This is how it will look if you save it as a .png or a .pspimage file.
If you want to keep your brush layers intact so you can change them later save your image as a .pspimage file.
This is what it looked like when I got done with it¡K.
This image had fourteen layers of brushwork on it, with most of the layer having different blend modes applied, some layers opacity has turned down. I included this exact paper in the freebies from me. It is still in .psp format so you can really get a good look at how it works. Feel free to play with it and change it to your hearts content!!
One thing that helps also is, after you use deform on a brush stroke and enlarged it. You can copy that layer and paste as a new layer. That will hold the size of your brush stroke at the larger size and then just move it where you want to. Also remember to use your flip, mirror and rotate to alter the stroke marks. Example if you can see my Raster 1 and Raster 5 layers in my image, I copied layer 5 and flipped it so that is went to my left side of my image.
You will really have to just play, if I wrote down everything I do while making a brush it would be a book just to cover everyway there is to do this! Just trust in yourself and hopefully I have covered enough of the basis to get you started! It seriously is just a mental block and that we have been told time and again how bad it is that we have small brushes. I am here to say that if you start with a 300ppi image for your brush, you can take this image and increase it to cover your 12x12 image without any problem. Bigger file size is the only issue, but then almost everything in digital scrapbooking includes large files!!
**First published in TidBytes March 2006***
© Copyright by Scrapbook-Bytes.com
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