This Photoshop tutorial by SweetBeat will show you how to design and use your own background brush
Making the brush
-Make a new document 60×37cm and make sure that the foreground and background colours are set to black and white.
- Create three new layers by clicking 3 times on the new layer icon underneath the layers palette.
One frustration of mine is finding a great resource and then having your hands tied by some overly exhaustive guideline provided by the creating artist. Sometimes I believe that people get too carried away with the rules and restrictions they apply to their resources. Especially when they might be searching for some resources and become frustrated by restrictive guides as well. A recent rant of mine talks about people uploading photos to a FREE stock photo site, yet requiring the user to contact them, etc. I digress. I want to avoid all of that with my textures, which is why I am encouraging the outright abuse of these textures. Well, you get what I mean. So these textures are for your use and abuse.
One of the great new features in Lightroom 2 is the graduated filter tool. Though simple, It can have a very powerful effect on one’s photos, as we’ll see. From darkening a washed out sky, to emphasising the billowing clouds of stormy sky, the graduated filter tool in Lightroom 2 is incredibly customizable.
The concept behind this tutorial is simple. To use this technique, you must manually adjust the various “zones” of an image to your liking. For example, if the ground is too dark, you brighten the ground. If the sky is too bright, you darken the areas that need editing. This is much preferable to something like High Dynamic Range plugins or software that use “Tone Mapping”, which don’t allow you to adjust the individual areas.
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