The Photoshop Productivity Series: Customizing Photoshop

Brushes

Just about anything can be turned into a Photoshop brush, and that brush shape can then be used by any tool that uses the brush picker (Brush, Healing, Clone Stamp, etc.) Just using the Brush tool alone, tons of interesting possibilities arise from make custom brushes out of textures, old text, water splashes, paint, or just about anything else you can imagine.

Photoshop can create a brush out of anything you can select, but the first thing that’s important to know is that the brush can only paint in one color. In other words, you could create a brush from a photograph, but it will be a grayscale brush that uses the current foreground color.

When defining a brush, the shade of gray is equivalent to opacity—that is, black is 100% opaque, ...