Creating Your own Grunge Brushes

I’ll show you a fairly simple yet very effective method of making good grunge brushes in this tutorial. Enjoy.

1. New Document

First of all, as usual, create a new document in Photoshop. This is up to you, do you want a very large brush that you can size down every time you want to use it? Or do you want a brush around 200 pixels in size so that it’s ready for use whenever you want to use it in a small document. It’s probably best to use a very large document size for this tutorial, but I’ll just use a small size for the sake of learning.

2. Initial Brushing

Get out one of the standard soft brushes that come with Photoshop. Size it up to whatever size you would like it, then brush a few blobs onto the background.
These are the settings I’ve got:

This is what my random brushing looks like:

Now merge all of your layers together, so that you only have one layer.

3. Apply Texture

The next thing we need to do is apply some sort of texture to the brush. Start by finding a good texture on the internet. For this tutorial I’ve used this dirt texture that I took a few months ago.
Open up your texture and save it as a PSD file onto your desktop.
Now back to your brushing document. Be sure your layers are merged together, then go to Filter > Distort > Displace, using the settings shown below, or similar.

After you press OK (shown in the top right of the above screenshot) you’ll be asked to choose a PSD file, this is used to displace the current document. Choose the PSD that you earlier saved to your desktop.

Looks pretty decent in my opinion, but be sure you mess around with different settings and textures.

4. Finishing Off

To finish this off, get another grunge brush either you made or someone else, and brush a little bit over the edges with white as your foreground color.

You may also want to apply Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen to your brush layer, to give it a little more detail. Remember to get creative, remember to try different textures, filters, layer modes, etc.
After you’re finished with making the brush, select the canvas (ctrl+a) then in your Photoshop menus, go to Edit > Define Brush, then it will show up in your brushes. This is a grungy image I came up with using the brushes that I made using this tutorial:

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Evening Eye Make Up Effect in Photoshop

Today I will show you how to imitate evening eye make up in Photoshop CS3. This lesson will be very useful to those who process the photos for fashion magazines.
So, let’s start by finding some appropriate picture of girl’s face. You can also use your own photos to experiment with, if you’re girl of course Go to Google Images and find needed photo or feel free to use mine also. Open up the photo and start to work with it.

I think it will be better to start with adding eye shadows to eyelids. Get out the Polygonal Lasso Tool and create selection similar to mine on the picture below:

Then holding Shift button and when the plus sign near cursor will appear just add second eye area selection. After that fill selected area with color of # 806475 on the new layer.

Remove selection with Ctrl+D and apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with next presets:

Change layer mode to Overlay:

To correct eye shadows borders we can apply Smudge Tool (Brush: 50 px, Mode: Normal : Strenght: 70%).

Then create a new layer and start with creating eyeliner effect. Use the Polygonal Lasso Tool again and create one more selection as on my picture below, then fill it with color of #282a37 on the new layer.

Deselect chosen area with Select > Deselect and apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with similar settings to these:

The result should be next:

After that apply Smudge Tool for this layer again.

Time to add white shining under the eyebrows. Create new layer, then select the Brush Tool and a soft round brush about 35px to color some area under eyebrows with white color.

After that apply Filter > Noise > Add Noise with similar settings to these:

Then change layer mode to Soft Light:

After that apply Blur Tool a little bit.

Ok, now make some clean work with Eraser Tool to bring shining realistic view.

Tome to color eyebrows. Create new layer, then select the Polygonal Lasso Tool again and create selected areas similar to mine and fill it with black color.

Remove selection with Ctrl+D and apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur to blur current layer content about 1,5px, then reduce opacity to 40% for this layer.

And the last one thing that I would like to add is eyelashes. I’m gonna show you one interesting method how we can add it by using Pen Tool. Before we start making it, just get out the Brush Tool before and set up with the following settings for it:

Then set foreground color as black. After that select the Pen Tool (you need to make sure that you’re working with Paths instead of Shape Layers). Draw out the line using paths:

Then right-click and select Stroke Path.

A little dialog box will appear as in the screenshot. Choose Brush and make sure there is a tick next to Simulate Pressure. This is important as it will give your curve tapered ends which will make it rock!

You should get result similar to mine:

Next right click again and select Delete Path. Create more eyelashes on the same way.

Looks cool, isn’t it? Hope, you got the same good results as me, if not, just keep on training and you will good the best results! Good luck!

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Separating Complex Objects from Background

You can find a lot of tutorials how to separate complex objects from the background. But I would like to invite your attention to another one unique simple tutorial how to achieve the desired effect in just a few steps. I got this method by experimenting.

In the beginning you should find some appropriate picture to work with. You can use Google Images or also feel free to use mine picture. Open up the picture and start with tutorial.

Apply Filter > Extract with similar settings to these:

This is where we start to extract the image first of all zoom into the image with Zoom Tool so you can clearly see the outline and set the brush size to a suitable size and then simply draw around the outline of the woman’s hairstyle with Edge Highlighter Tool. If you made wrong line, you can remove it with Eraser Tool. Now fill in the area which you want extracting to do this select the Fill Tool on the left hand toolbar and simply click inside of the drawn outline.

Now press OK in the top right of the window and you should go back to the normal Photoshop window, and if you did the last steps correctly you will have an image without a background, if all done correct the edges will look fine, if not then you may find some discrepancies which can simply be erased.

After that create a new layer under and fill it with color of #aed2da.

Now we can see that we have some defects on woman’s hair. It is not a big problem, just get out the Eraser Tool and select one of standard brushes from Photoshop palette:

Reduce brush size to 25 pixels and process areas where you can see visible defects.

Now, move to the next step. After processing problem areas with Eraser Tool we may have not so clear image parts, for example like we have from the left and right parts. For removing this problem select the Smudge Tool (Brush: 2 px, Mode: Darken, Stregth: 95%) and add a few strokes as shown on the picture below:

Then increase the sharpness for these areas with Sharpen Tool (Brush: 60 px, Mode: Normal, Stregth: 30%).

We are done on this step. Isolated picture looks nice and all parts of hear looks realistic. If you don’t have the same good results, just try to experiment to get the best results!

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How to create bullets in Photoshop

In this easy tutorial I’m going to show you how to create bullets in Photoshop. You can see my result image below, which you’re going to be making something very similar to!

Step 1

First thing’s first, create a new document with a size of about 500 x 300 pixels with a black background.

Step 2

In a new layer draw a eclipse using eclipse tool. Color used on eclipse tool is #907D44. Right-click the eclipse layer and select option Rasterize Layer (CS5).

Cut half of the eclipse as seen on the picture guide below:

Step 3

Right-click the layer and go into the Blending Options and apply Inner Shadow, Inner Glow and Gradient Overlay layer styles to this layer.

Step 4

Apply Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen More and duplicate layer from step two.
On new layer select entire bullet and go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

Right-click on duplicated layer and go into the Blending Options and apply Color Burn and Opacity level at 44%.


Merge both layers into one and after that duplicate it several times. That´s it.

Final Image

If you need help with the tutorial, you can leave a comment using the link just below. If you would like to receive updates from PhotoshopStar, please consider subscribing today.

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