Design A Grunge Brush for PS

This tutorial will teach you how to turn an everyday photo into a piece of grunge that can be used over and over again as a grunge brush! Grunge Presets are excellent tools for all Photoshop users.

1. Open up any picture you want in Photoshop. You can use household pictures, pictures of textures, pictures of almost anything will turn out well. I have loaded up a picture of my friends cat:

2. Now we want to Desaturate the image. We can do this by clicking Image > Adjustments > Desaturate.

3. Now lets play with the levels settings. Go to Image > Adjustments > Levels:

4. Play around with he three input settings until you make your photo very white with black/grey textures. Some pictures will turn out better than others.

5. Here are the results for the photo:

And here are a few other photos I did as examples:

6. You may be thinking that these are not to impressive, but you would be surprised what a little cutting and pasting can do for us. Bring out your Lasso selection tool, and start drawing around areas that would make good grunge borders and fillers:

7. Copy paste each of these selections you find into new images. For each image you now have, we are going to make a grunge brush out of it. We are going to do this by going to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Once in the Brush Preset box, name your grunge brush for if you need to find it in the future:

8. And that's all there is to it! Just do this with all of your other selections, and you will have your very own set of grunge brushes in no time! Here is a little piece I managed to make with all of my brushes:

To make your brushes more original, go take pictures of objects and scenery. Then go back and play with the level adjustments, until you find a setting you think will produce a good grunge brush!